What precisely occurred on the Brunswick Excessive soccer staff’s in a single day retreat in August at Thomas Level Seashore has not been defined publicly.
What is thought is that the college superintendent has taken significantly the allegations that older gamers hazed youthful gamers. Each the college division and the Brunswick Police Division have performed investigations. Coaches have been positioned on go away. College students have been booted from the staff.
However whereas the college division’s investigation has been accomplished and a few disciplinary motion has been taken, the complete results of the alleged hazing may not be recognized for years.
“There’s all the time ripple results,” mentioned Elizabeth Allan, a College of Maine professor and founding father of the analysis group StopHazing. “You’re coping with the people concerned, each the individuals who really feel they had been on the receiving ends and people who deliberate the actions, their households and associates.
“Then there’s the staff itself, the way it impacts the belief throughout the staff, and it has ripple results past that as a result of, after all, all the opposite college students are watching and studying,” Allan added. “It may be a chance to actually shift the norms. And that relies on how the parents in management roles select to reply.”
Hazing in American faculties is frequent. At its worst it may be extraordinarily harmful, even deadly. Different occasions it is perhaps barely acknowledged. However in each type, hazing boils all the way down to these holding energy in a gaggle requiring somebody becoming a member of or collaborating in a gaggle to interact in an exercise that humiliates, degrades, abuses or endangers them, no matter an individual’s willingness to take part.
Most states, together with Maine, have academic requirements that require faculties to have insurance policies that forbid hazing. Nonetheless, 47 p.c of faculty freshmen report they had been hazed in highschool, in response to Allan’s 2009 analysis, which continues to be thought of the definitive research on highschool hazing.
Elliot Hopkins is the director of sports activities sanctioning and pupil providers on the Nationwide Federation of State Excessive Faculty Associations, the nationwide governing physique of highschool sports activities. Over the previous 28 years he has delivered over 300 public displays aimed toward getting college communities to find out about hazing, its results, and methods to counteract it. He mentioned he has been concerned as an expert useful resource in about 1,000 hazing-related lawsuits – a sobering statistic in itself – and appeared as an professional witness in 20 trials.
Hopkins mentioned as soon as the preliminary investigation is performed and penalties are laid out, there may be usually a quiet grace interval.
“This can die down for a few 12 months after which what occurs, legal professionals begin lining up,” he mentioned.
‘ZERO-TOLERANCE’ POLICY
Phil Potenziano, the Brunswick faculties superintendent, mentioned he grew to become conscious of doable hazing, bullying or assault on the retreat round Sept. 8 and commenced an inside investigation. He notified soccer mother and father on Sept. 16 and made it clear Brunswick had a “zero-tolerance” coverage when it got here to acts of hazing, bullying or assault.
Every week later, Potenziano canceled the staff’s homecoming sport and positioned head coach Dan Cooper and assistant coach Greg Nadeau on nondisciplinary administrative go away from their teaching duties.
The Brunswick Excessive soccer staff was allowed to renew practices final week, however with out two coaches positioned on go away and a few gamers kicked off the staff for the remainder of the season. Ben McCanna/Employees Photographer
Whereas the staff was allowed to renew practices on Tuesday and play a sport at Skowhegan on Friday night time, Cooper and Nadeau stay on go away, and an unspecified variety of gamers have been faraway from the staff for the rest of the season. Taking part in with out a number of of their standard starters, Brunswick misplaced 61-14.
Potenziano mentioned Friday night in an electronic mail to the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram that he had obtained the investigation report from the college division’s authorized counsel, and would want time to overview it completely. He added that he had not made any choice relating to the longer term standing of the 2 coaches.
Brunswick has been some of the profitable highschool soccer applications within the state over the previous decade. Cooper, now in his seventeenth 12 months as head coach, earned his one centesimal profession win within the 2019 season en path to the Dragons capturing the Class B North championship for a second straight season and the fifth time in six years, together with an undefeated state championship run in 2016.
This was presupposed to be a season of celebration for Cooper and his household. His sons Dalton and Wes are each seniors and starters on the staff. Cooper was additionally trying ahead to Oct. 15, when Brunswick is scheduled to host perennial Class An influence Bonny Eagle, coached by his cousin Kevin Cooper.
Dan Cooper mentioned he was not keen to remark concerning the state of affairs but apart from to say, “It’s been a nightmare.”
‘IT’S ABOMINABLE’
On a quiet Thursday afternoon, the shoppers at eating places, espresso retailers and boutiques on Brunswick’s downtown Maine Avenue had solely passing data of the alleged hazing incident. Some had been unaware of it altogether. However whether or not they had been Brunswick residents, buyers or workers from a close-by city or vacationers from Alabama, Kansas Metropolis and North Carolina, all agreed on one key level: any type of hazing is incorrect.
“It doesn’t matter if there isn’t any bodily hurt. It’s that it’s older youngsters doing it to youthful youngsters. It’s abominable,” mentioned Melissa Kimball, a resident of neighboring Topsham who works at one in every of Maine Avenue’s retail shops. “I’m asking myself, do they nonetheless try this within the twenty first century? And the place are the grown-ups? The place are the adults who’re presupposed to be managing these items?”
“My boys had a really constructive expertise with Brunswick soccer and I’m very unhappy to listen to that this occurred,” says Laura Lienert of Brunswick. Ben McCanna/Employees Photographer
Laura Lienert of Brunswick mentioned her two sons Augie and Mitchell Lienert each performed 4 years of highschool soccer at Brunswick, graduating in 2018 and 2020, respectively.
“I’ll say my boys had a really constructive expertise with Brunswick soccer and I’m very unhappy to listen to that this occurred,” she mentioned. “It’s by no means OK for anybody to really feel like one thing like that’s occurring to them, however with that being mentioned, my boys had an incredible expertise.”
Lienert emphasised that neither she nor her sons had been ever conscious of hazing exercise related to the soccer staff.
Katie Peacock, 21, additionally attended Brunswick Excessive Faculty and mentioned she was stunned by the hazing allegations. “That’s by no means occurred that I’ve heard of after I was there,” she mentioned.
Bau Graves of Harpswell: “I feel folks ought to deal with one another with decency and respect and hazing doesn’t qualify. Any kind of hazing.” Ben McCanna/Employees Photographer
Bau Graves, 69, of Harpswell mentioned he has little interest in highschool sports activities, or sports activities basically. However hazing, as an act, is all the time demeaning.
“I feel folks ought to deal with one another with decency and respect and hazing doesn’t qualify. Any kind of hazing,” Graves mentioned. “So long as I’ve been conscious of hazing, it has all the time appeared like a horrible factor to me.”
Stephen Beaulieu, 27, of Harpswell mentioned the idea {that a} hazing ritual will increase staff camaraderie is flawed. Hazers would possibly assume they’re pushing gamers to “get their finest video games and their finest efficiency,” he mentioned, “when in actuality it simply takes a toll on their psychological well being and it simply brings them down.”
PHYSICAL INJURIES, EVEN DEATHS
Throughout the nation, younger folks have suffered vital bodily accidents, been sexually assaulted and even died because of hazing.
Rumors have abounded about what happened throughout the alleged hazing incident involving the Brunswick soccer staff. And there may be video proof, in response to Brunswick Police Chief Scott Stewart, that means the incident could have unfold throughout the school-age group through social media.
Earlier than feedback had been scrubbed from the Brunswick Soccer Fb web page, which isn’t run by the college, a number of followers scoffed on the seriousness.
“I heard one factor and if that’s all that occurred then that is being blown WAY out of proportion,” mentioned one put up. One other put up famous that the homecoming soccer sport shouldn’t have been canceled due to the actions of “a couple of dangerous apples.” One commenter mentioned the entire staff discovered the incident humorous and when she heard what occurred, she agreed.
However simply because gamers could have laughed doesn’t imply the alleged hazing incident triggered no hurt, mentioned Hopkins of the Nationwide Federation of State Excessive Faculty Associations.
“It may appear innocent to you however the child who’s going by means of it’s petrified,” Hopkins mentioned. “We discuss three totally different teams in hazing. The perpetrator, the sufferer, and the bystander. And there’s two kinds of bystanders. The energetic bystander who’s (cheering them on) and the passive one who’s up in opposition to a wall and considering, ‘Thank God it’s not me once more, or not me this time.’ And that group will nearly actually chortle solely as a result of they’re simply glad it’s not them.”
Hank Nuwer, an impartial journalist and former faculty professor, has tracked hazing deaths. Based on Nuwer, there was at the very least one hazing loss of life related to a faculty, membership or group within the U.S. yearly from 1959 to 2019, with extra recorded in 2021. Since 2000, Nuwer has recorded 99 hazing deaths.
Allan, the UMaine professor, mentioned there is no such thing as a correct knowledge on what number of hazing incidents occur yearly as a result of schools and faculties should not required to report incidents.
“We all know what makes it to newspapers, and the universities and universities that I work with and people who select to be clear,” she mentioned, “however at this level it’s not constantly completed, so we don’t actually have the information.”
Hopkins mentioned in his expertise nearly all of hazing incidents which might be found reveal an institutional sample of hazing – an “underlying present,” as he put it.
Hopkins mentioned it usually begins with seemingly small actions that share a core idea of the older, established members of a gaggle forcing youthful members to do one thing to show they’re worthy of being a part of a staff.
“It may very well be freshmen have to wash all of the music devices in a band, or the women’ soccer freshmen have to hold the water bottles,” Hopkins mentioned. “Then it will get escalated.”
Hopkins means that any college that has had a hazing incident must do a radical overview of all of its groups and golf equipment. “If they’ve one group that does it, they’re going to speak to different youngsters. ‘That is what we do to our freshmen.’ They may have an underlying tradition there that they should nip within the bud.”
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