Coach Benches Kid For Having Long Hair — That He’s Growing To Help Kids With Cancer [VIDEO]

A coach has found himself in the middle of a huge controversy after he benched one of his players for growing out his hair. The coach had a rule that if the players were going to play, they had to keep their hair cut.

Seems like a reasonable rule. Until you hear that the kid that he benched was growing his hair out to help kids with cancer.

The player's name is Liam Nazarek, and he was growing his hair out so that he could donate it to make wigs for kids with cancer. It's an incredibly noble cause and should be applauded. But his mom is saying that because of it, he's being punished.

His coach, Bryan Mackenzie, has had a long-standing rule on his Canadian youth league baseball team that players needed to keep their hair cut short to play. When he made the decision to bench Nazarek, the exchange was caught on camera and then posted to Facebook.

I don't think that this is as black and white as many people suggest.

There are a lot of teams that have rules that go past the field. They often carry into the player's personal lives.

When I played football in high school and we had to travel to other schools to play, we had to dress up. We wore a shirt and tie and looked like we meant business when we showed up to play. That was our coach's rule, and we followed it. If we didn't, we didn't play. It was simple as that. It was the rule.

The way we dress didn't have anything to do with our playing ability, but it was something that we all did as a team. What one player on the team did would certainly affect the rest of the team. So we all followed the rules. That's part of learning how to grow up.

As a coach, you have to set rules for your team, and every member has to follow those rules. If you bend the rules for one player, you need to bend the rules for all players, and chances are, you lose the ability to be a leader on that team. Your team is then in control.

Good for the coach for sticking to his guns.

Sure, some rules are made to be broken. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't consequences to breaking them. This player knew the rules and chose to break them. He did it for a great cause. He is sacrificing his playing time for other kids. That is a very grown-up decision to make, and again, I applaud him for doing it.

In life, you have to make decisions every day. I'm glad that the player stuck to his guns too. If he would have decided to cut his hair, this would have never made the news. It's a sacrifice worth making.