Teens lost in tennis to team with black players - then took 'highly offensive' photo, official says

Members of a tennis team from Telfair County High School will be disciplined for taking a "highly offensive" photo after losing a championship match against a rival team, Telfair County Schools Superintendent Lendard Harrelson told WGXA.

The photo, which WMAZ reported was first shared on Snapchat before being copied to Twitter and Facebook, shows eight people posing in the back of a bus with white bags placed over their heads and eye-holes cut out of the front, recalling Ku Klux Klan imagery.

Telfair County is southeast of Macon in Georgia.

The team had just lost a state championship match 3-0 to their rival Irwin County in Rome, Ga., the Tifton Gazette reported. The Irwin County team had black players competing on its roster, WMAZ reported.

"The School District does not approve of this highly offensive behavior. An investigation was initiated and the students have received punishments accordingly," he told WGXA. He told the station he could not discuss what the actual punishments were.

"I was like, 'What the world?' " one student told WMAZ, though she added that she knew the tennis players and called them "really cool people" who "never did nothing to me that was racist." Others anonymously told the station they believed the photo was racist.

Copies of the photo were shared on Twitter and Facebook, where many commenters wrote that they found the photo offensive.

Others thought people were overreacting.

The superintendent was consulting an attorney to determine if more information could be released, WMAZ reported. The Irwin County High principal declined to comment to Deadspin.

This story was originally published May 18, 2018 at 11:48 AM with the headline "Teens lost in tennis to team with black players - then took 'highly offensive' photo, official says."