Hazing and bullying are white-hot topics right now, given the way the Miami Dolphins' season has imploded.
In case you've been vacationing under a rock out in Montara the last few weeks, Dolphin offensive lineman Jonathan Martin has left the team because he said teammates such as fellow O-lineman Richie Incognito were bullying and mistreating him. Incognito has been suspended by the Dolphins for conduct detrimental to the team.
Hazing is not new in the National Football League. Many of us remember the movie "Brian's Song" where Chicago Bears players like the late Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers were made to sing their college fight songs, which they dutifully delivered off-key to their bemused, chuckling teammates.
More often now hazing takes the form of rookies having to buy veterans donuts in the morning or the new players getting taped to goal posts or -- in the case of the Dolphins -- buying the vets jet skis (allegedly) or footing the bill for lavish nights out.
If you're afraid such activities which range from fairly innocent to egregious will filter down to the high school level, well, they already have. There are entire websites devoted to eliminating hazing such as hazingprevention.org and stophazing.org.
Some facts on high school hazing from insidehazing.com:
--Ninety-one percent of high school students belong to at least one group and about half of them (48 percent) have been subjected to hazing.
--Forty-three percent were subjected to humiliating activities and 30 percent performed potentially illegal acts as part of their initiation.
--1.5 million high school students are hazed each year.
--Twenty-four percent of the students involved in church groups are hazed.
--Twenty-five percent were hazed before the age of 13.
Serra High of San Mateo football coach Patrick Walsh said hazing is not allowed in his program.
"We don't tolerate that at all," Walsh said. "It's not that we're impervious to it. But we talk a lot about respect and brotherhood and taking care of one another. Those things are central to who we are as a team and as a school. Mutual respect creates brotherhood."
Serra has a chapel service before games that promotes such togetherness. But still, boys will be boys.
"When you get 60 adolescents in a locker room it's a different environment, unlike the street or the mall," Walsh said. "Fortunately a lot of our kids are best friends. We're not perfect, but the intrinsic values of the school promote a no hazing, no bullying environment."
Matt Kiesle has been the Piedmont Hills coach for 16 years and has been in the Pirates' program for 28. He recently won his 100th game. Kiesle also discourages bullying and hazing.
"Hazing has been a long-accepted NFL tradition," Kiesle said. "Lately there's been a lot of national attention on it because of what happened (with the Dolphins). "We try to jump on it. In high school a lot of it happens between the varsity and the jayvee or frosh-soph team. So you try to squelch it inside the locker room and police it. Otherwise kids get angry and it spills over onto the practice field."
At Piedmont Hills there's a varsity team room, and Kiesle dictates the doors to the room remain open.
At this writer's previous journalistic post in Southern California, I found myself several years ago at a tense meeting of parents and school officials in the Miller High of Fontana auditorium. The school was forced to discipline more than 10 players for verbal and physical harassment of younger players. Players were suspended, parents were angry and coaches and the beleaguered school principal were red-faced.
But that was small potatoes compared to what happened years earlier in the barren desert outpost of Yucca Valley in San Bernardino County.
After a much-publicized investigation, one Yucca Valley High football player was found not guilty by the courts, but five others settled for a lesser sexual battery charge by admitting involvement in an incident in which a younger player was penetrated by an object.
That's ridiculous. Heinous. And unfortunately, not all that uncommon.
At Maine West High in the Chicago area last year a soccer coach wound up in hot water after he was accused of sanctioning sexual hazing among student athletes, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. He is charged with three counts of battery, one count of hazing and four counts of failure to report abuse among student athletes.
Prosecutors allege the coach forced freshmen students to submit to sexual hazing from older players if they failed to meet expectations during soccer drills.
That's just beautiful, isn't it? Some real deep thinking going on there.
The problem is, too many potential hazers can't seem to distinguish between making a rookie pick up a box of Krispy Kreme donuts before a meeting and making him foot the bill for expensive jet skis (allegedly). And too many can't distinguish between taping a player to a goal post -- as mindless and unoriginal as that is -- and sexually assaulting him.
When it comes to hazing, there just isn't much of an upside, which is something the late San Francisco 49ers' coach Bill Walsh recognized years ago.
Said former 49ers running back Roger Craig of hazing in Dan Brown's book "101 Things 49ers Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die": "We pushed all of the young bucks in our camp, but we didn't believe in rookie hazing. That was something Bill Walsh didn't like. He said, "Why are you going to haze these guys when you might need them?"
Exactly.
At Serra High decades ago, there was a tradition of issuing "WART" badges to freshmen. The connotation being that ninth-graders were useless, an annoyance, excess baggage. The first football rally of the year was known as the "WART" rally and the 250 to 300 freshmen were paraded into the gym as the other 700 or so students chanted "WARTS, WARTS, WARTS."
That tradition has gone the way of the Sony Walkman at Serra, Patrick Walsh said.
"There's a certain culture where people are mean to others to make them feel miserable to get something out of them," Walsh said. "That's an antiquated culture. Being menacing or ridiculing or demeaning to get something out of someone, those days are over -- or should be."
