Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, July 14, 1995                   TAG: 9507140060
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NOKESVILLE                                LENGTH: Short

TEAM'S LUCK SYMBOL WAS KLAN LOGO

``It's kind of racist,'' said Lee Galloway, who graduated from Brentsville District High School in June. ``It's just something we do. It's complicated.''

The Prince William County School District said it would investigate the team's use of the symbol and what coaches knew of the practice, which was revealed by the Potomac News of Woodbridge.

``The members of this baseball team are good kids from good families,'' Principal George Clark said Thursday. ``They've made poor decisions and poor judgment."

Not all players may have known about the symbol's racist origins. The head coach said he was unaware of what the symbol meant, but his assistant said he had learned of the racist connotations last year.

All 16 of this year's Brentsville baseball players and both coaches are white, and only a few of the school's approximately 900 students are black. In the 1990 Census, 505 of the 14,295 residents of the Brentsville Magisterial District were black.

Head coach Dave Przybocki promised to end the tradition of drawing the symbol near the on-deck circle for good luck.``The fact that it happened, I apologize to anyone that was offended,'' he said.

The baseball players call the symbol ``The Well.'' It is a circle separated into quarters by an X, and each quarter has two dots near its peak. The symbol resembles the Cross Wheel, a sign of the Ku Klux Klan.