A Houlton radio station fired two announcers for derogatory comments they made about the weight of girls’ basketball players during the station’s livestream.
WHOU-FM owner Fred Grant said he fired Jim Carter and Steve Shaw on Thursday night after they completed their broadcast of a high school basketball game in Caribou. Grant said he began seeing complaints almost immediately after the announcers made their comments. Shaw, a former athletic director, and Carter, a former coach, had broadcast games for WHOU for about a month, Grant said.
Shaw worked as athletic director at Easton High School until his retirement in 2019, and in August was inducted into the Maine Basketball Hall of Fame in the Legends of the Game category. Carter is a retired teacher and coach at Caribou High School, and has written three books about high school basketball in Aroostook County.
The broadcasters, who didn’t realize their microphones were on, made the derogatory remarks about players in a girls’ game between Central Aroostook and Easton that they were watching on a monitor while they prepared for their game at Caribou.
In a 40-second video posted to Twitter, the two are heard making derogatory comments about the weight of some players. One of the broadcasters was heard to say, “two girls out here extremely overweight. Awful.” Other derogatory comments were followed by laughter.
“I started getting phone calls immediately,” Grant said by phone Friday morning
Reaction to the comments on social media was swift and universally outraged.
“I gotta say I’ve never heard anything so unprofessional as what Jim Carter and Steve Shaw said about a couple of the … players tonight, You should both be ashamed of yourselves and remove yourselves from high school basketball,” one commenter posted to WHOU’s Facebook page.
Reached by phone Friday afternoon, Carter declined to go into details about the incident, but expressed remorse. He said he apologized to the superintendent of the school that has the players he disparaged.
“I don’t even know what to say,” Carter said. “Hopefully everybody can get through this and be OK.”
Attempts to reach Shaw for an interview were not successful Friday
