He had ‘facial hair and arm tattoos’: Grown man plays with youth football team

It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase: “A man among boys.”

A Rhode Island youth football team, comprised of 13- and 14-year-old children, will not play for the rest of the season, and its coach has been fired after the team tried to sneak an adult man onto the playing field, according to media reports.

The Capital City Buccaneers entered halftime trailing in their game this weekend. When they came back out for the second half, a man wearing jersey number 84 caught the eye of the referees and parents watching.

“You know most 13-year-olds are starting to get facial hair. This gentleman had facial hair and had arm tattoos,” one parent, who was recording the game, told ABC 6. “"I could zoom right in and see the facial hair.”

The referees removed the man from the game after only a few plays, but it was enough for parents to express their concern, and for the league to suspend the team for the rest of the year.

“Think about the kids, if he would have paralyzed one of our kids, or something worse,” said one parent.

It is unclear how old the man who attempted to play was. Media outlets have said he is believed to be 18 years or a little older.

The Buccaneers founder, Alexandra Diaz, told NBC 10 she was “furious” about the incident and that the man was the older brother of a player on the team. She said the idea to slip him into the game came from the team’s coach, who told her his ego got the better of him and he just “wasn’t thinking,” according to NESN.

“If I was there, that would never ever happen because safety of these kids is more important to me than anything. That's not how I run my program,” Diaz said to NBC 10. “It hurts me, it hurts the community, (and) it hurts the children because a lot has been ripped from them.”

All of the Buccaneers teams have been suspended from league play as a result, league vice president Nelson Pedro told NBC 10.

“It's a safety issue obviously. It's pretty serious,” Pedro said. “It's basically a grown man going up against seventh and eighth graders — 13 and 14 years old. We're certainly extremely concerned when a child could have easily gotten hurt if we hadn't recognized it pretty quickly.”

This story was originally published October 28, 2016 at 8:12 PM with the headline "He had ‘facial hair and arm tattoos’: Grown man plays with youth football team."