A Montana high school soccer coach lost her job, and her cool, after vaulting a gym railing and launching a wild physical attack on a referee during a seventh-grade girls' travel basketball game.
Cassie Congdon, then the head girls soccer coach at Flathead High School in Kalispell, charged referee Shawn Wetzel during the Santa Slammer Tournament at Memorial Gym in Anaconda on Dec. 6, 2025.
Surveillance video recently released shows Congdon emerging from the bleachers while Wetzel was speaking to a parent in the stands. She took a swipe at him over the barrier, then leaped over the railing and put her hands on the 6-foot-8 official.
Wetzel, son of the late Montana basketball legend Don Wetzel, shoved her back and used his long arms to keep her at bay as she continued swinging, kicking, and eventually spitting on him.
“She hops the rail and swings at me, and so I just put my hand out and kind of just put it on her head to keep her at bay, and that’s when all hell broke loose. God, it was wild,” Wetzel later told local media.
He described her continuing the assault: “She just kept hitting, swinging, she took a few swings there. She tried kicking me a few times… when she spit on me… that was the worst part.”
Wetzel called the spit “the most ultimate sign of disrespect.” He wiped it off with his sleeve and finished officiating the game. Other parents and officials intervened to break it up. Congdon was ejected from the gymnasium and the game continued.
The incident occurred during a game involving a Kalispell team coached by Congdon’s husband. Wetzel has said he was trying to quiet a crowd of yelling parents and eventually told them to “shut the (expletive) up or get out.”
Congdon resigned as Flathead High’s girls soccer coach shortly afterward following an internal investigation by Kalispell Public Schools. Her team had gone 2-12-0 in her one season. She later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in Deer Lodge County Justice Court on Sept. 10, 2026.
Wetzel, a longtime volunteer assistant boys basketball coach at Butte High and a former Montana State-Northern player, was let go from his coaching role days after the incident. He has said he is no longer interested in coaching youth sports but continues to officiate.
“The reason we’re losing so many officials, so many coaches is because people just don’t know how to act anymore,” Wetzel said.
The footage, first obtained by Bill Foley and reported by NBC Montana, has sparked outrage online over parental behavior in youth sports and the growing shortage of officials willing to work kids’ games.
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