For the remainder of its games in October, the Wayland High School football team will wear purple socks in order to raise awareness for domestic violence. The Warriors also wore the socks last Friday night in their victory over Bedford.

Along with being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, October is officially Domestic Violence Awareness Month. You may notice many sports teams, including NFL franchises, include pink to their uniforms in honor of breast cancer, but you may not see many wearing purple accessories. This is exactly what the Wayland football team is doing.

According to head coach Scott Parseghian, the team’s captains Jimmy Lampert, Michael Connell, Ben Jones and Josh Brito had the idea to add purple to the team’s uniforms.

“At first, [the captains] wanted to wear purple ribbons on their jerseys, but that wasn’t going to work; you can’t put a safety pin on a uniform because if it comes off during a game, it can be dangerous,” Parseghian said. “The next thing they came up with was socks because so many teams wear pink socks for breast cancer. They decided it was best if our team wore purple socks during our games.”

Parseghian also added that in no way does the team want to take away from breast cancer awareness by supporting domestic violence.

“It’s great that the football coaches, captains and team are all behind this domestic violence movement, and while most teams are celebrating breast cancer, we don’t want to take anything away from that,” Parseghian said. “Obviously that’s a very important cause as well, but we decided to recognize a different cause.”

Parseghian loves that his team is rallying around raising awareness for domestic violence, something he has been working on for over 10 years as Wayland’s K-12 wellness director.

“I’ve been working with REACH over the course of those years and have developed a great relationship with them. It’s been great that we were able to get the four captains involved this year, and from there, they kind of just ran with it,” Parseghian said. “It’s great to see their leadership on a matter they really care about.”