The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- September 13, 1999

Dangerous games

Athletics initiation: Team bonding, rite of passage or hazing?

BY KAY HAWES
STAFF WRITER

It's not called hazing, and they aren't called pledges. It's called initiation, and they are called rookies.

That doesn't change the fact that the willing 18-year-olds are placed in a room and expected to drink all the alcohol provided until all have thrown up, are unconscious or the bottles are empty -- an unlikely scenario since they have been given far more alcohol than the small group could ever consume.

But they are competitive. They are risk-takers who are used to challenging their limits and overcoming obstacles. They also want desperately to be a part of the team.

They will drink. They will get sick. They may pass out or even suffer from what medical personnel would call alcohol poisoning, but no doctor will know it. They are sent home with upperclassmen whose job it is to watch over them all night, to be sure no one stays unconscious or chokes on vomit. No one will take them to the hospital for medical treatment unless they stop breathing. If the secret gets out, everyone will be in trouble.

On Monday, the coach gives the freshmen a break at practice. He knows Saturday was the "Rookie Party," but he doesn't care to know too much. He just knows that his team has a tight bond, and they all look after each other. No one on his team would do anything stupid. He has no idea how close several of the rookies came to life-threatening alcohol poisoning, and he has no idea how close he came to having his name in the papers -- associated with the death of an 18-year-old student-athlete.

The athletics director has a vague idea that there are "traditions" associated with the end of the preseason, but again, he has no idea that 18-year-olds in his program spent Saturday night drinking huge quantities of hard liquor purchased by the team captain, an excellent student who barely drinks at all.

"I felt pressured to participate, even though I knew it was wrong," says the now former student-athlete and team captain, who asked that even his sport remain a secret. "Somebody could have died on my watch, but I didn't think about what could have happened (at the time). We've always done it. I did it when I was a freshman. It's just accepted."

Alfred University commissioned a study entitled "Initiation Rites and Athletics: A National Survey of NCAA Sports Teams" after an incident last fall in which several Alfred freshmen football players were hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.

The study, released August 30, found that 79 percent of student-athletes have participated in initiations that crossed the line into hazing.

Based on that study, as well as what a number of current and recently graduated student-athletes have told The NCAA News, similar alcohol-laden scenarios -- with a variety of names, traditions and accompanying drinking games -- will occur on innumerable campuses all over the country this fall.

Few freshmen will have to be locked in a room to drink, although a handful of teams will do that. Most will gladly step up to the bar.

The student-athlete who refuses to drink at all will be left alone at some schools. At others, he or she will be forced to drink nasty homemade concoctions while the other rookies chug beer or hard liquor.

While some teams will have cook-outs, do community-service projects together or have a night of silly skits to help form team bonds, initiation generally means alcohol. Initiation can mean other things, too -- practices that may surprise university presidents and legal counsels who may be more focused on the rituals of Greek organizations.

On some campuses, student-athletes will choose to get their heads shaved. They will be pressured into getting a tattoo. They will wear their clothes inside out and parade through the campus library in full gear. They will drink Tabasco sauce concoctions and run with cookies wedged in their buttocks. They will be tied to benches in the locker room --sometimes naked, sometimes clothed -- and they will have their athletic supporters or sports bras coated in Cramer's Icy Hot. They will stand on chairs in restaurants and sing their alma mater on command, and they will run a mile or play a game of soccer in the nude.

Still others will be kidnapped, tied to a teammate, blindfolded and forced to find their way across campus. They will be forced to urinate on each other. In the worst cases, a few will be sodomized with brooms wrapped in athletic tape, with frozen bananas or with hot dogs. Others will be spanked, paddled, beaten or even branded.

Whether the initiation is a drinking game, wearing silly clothes or enduring a beating, no one is likely to object. Almost certainly, no one will refuse to do it. And no one will report it. If an incident is discovered, everyone involved -- from the rookies to the captains -- will say that no one was forced to do anything against his or her will.

On campuses across the country, the pattern is the same, even if the incidents vary.

It's a tradition

Ironically, hazing may have its roots in a positive element of college athletics: tradition.

Traditions are important. There are traditional colors, songs, cheers, rituals and chants. The color of the helmet, the signs in the locker room, the uniforms of the band -- all are dictated by tradition. So, too, however, is the initiation onto the team, which may be grounded in drinking, humiliation or physical abuse.

"The word 'tradition' is big with student-athletes," said Bridget Belgiovine, NCAA assistant chief of staff for Division III and a former athletics director. "The word and its meaning are important. If the tradition there is doing a ropes course or something positive, it will generally be repeated. If the tradition is a drinking night or something else, that will be repeated, too."

The "something else" may be light-hearted but humiliating, such as being thrown in a campus fountain in the nude. Or it may be something the freshmen are said to look forward to, such as a campus-wide scavenger hunt in full hockey gear.

Other traditions are not so benign. Drunken skinny-dipping in the campus natatorium may easily result in a near-drowning or even a death. A school may have a tradition of paddling that one year -- perhaps because of a few enthusiastic and drunken sophomores -- becomes sexual assault.

Such extremes aside, it is difficult for most student-athletes to view anything that is a tradition as a bad thing.

"Students look at hazing as tradition," said Kathy Brawn, women's soccer coach at Colgate University. "They're looking at it as tradition, and that makes it very different in their eyes. And sometimes, as a coach, you're dealing with something that has gone on for decades, possibly. That's difficult to turn around. Not impossible, but difficult."

And what passes for tradition one year may not be funny enough or dangerous enough the next year.

"Hazing is competitive," Belgiovine said, noting that student-athletes often try to top what happened to them. "Student-athletes are risk-takers. They push the envelope. (The traits that perpetuate hazing) are the same kinds of behaviors that put student-athletes at risk for gambling activities. What you see are similar traits."

Is it really hazing?

While it's clear that sodomy with a broom and holding someone down to brand them -- both reported to have happened on athletics teams -- are worst-case hazing by most people's definition, most hazing is not so easy to identify. Is it hazing if you're told to walk across campus in a Speedo and flippers? Is the party afterward, in which the underage freshmen compete in a drinking game against the underage sophomores and juniors, hazing?

Student-athletes seem to identify the activity as hazing only if a person is physically forced to participate.

"I think there's a gray area between what administrators consider hazing and what student-athletes consider hazing," said Cris Pellegrino, a former student-athlete at Tufts University and a member of the Division III Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. "I think most student-athletes think, 'If I'm willing to do it, it's not hazing.' To me, hazing is when someone does something against my will."

Frank N. Elliott, retired president of Rider University, agreed that defining hazing can be problematic.

"Some would say the freshmen carrying the balls is hazing," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, that's perfectly acceptable. However, I would get violently opposed to anything that involved paddling, mental torment, physical abuse, that sort of thing. Is binge drinking hazing? I don't know."

The Alfred study defined hazing as "any activity expected of someone joining a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses or endangers, regardless of that person's willingness to participate. This does not include activities such as rookies carrying the balls, team parties with community games, or going out with your teammates, unless an atmosphere of humiliation, degradation, abuse or danger arises."

The Alfred study found that, even with that definition, younger student-athletes did not identify even the most severe forms of initiation as hazing.

"If you're being beaten, tied up or whipped (as part of the initiation), how can you not identify that as hazing?" asked Nadine Hoover, the Alfred study's principal investigator and a private consultant who specializes in issues of education, community and non-violence. "But many didn't."

Hoover noted that only 12 percent of the student-athletes surveyed reported that they had been hazed (while still reporting a variety of initiation behaviors, from forced drinking to sexual assault). She initially tried to link that perception with particular behaviors, thinking that student-athletes might perceive some behaviors, but not others, as hazing. She found no such statistical connection. Only the student-athlete's year in school was related to the identification of behaviors as hazing.

"Seniors were significantly more apt to perceive themselves as being hazed, freshmen not at all," she said. "Yet, it wasn't that the seniors had participated in these behaviors and the freshmen hadn't. It was that their perception of the behavior changed as they got further from the incident."

"Of course athletes are going to say hazing isn't a problem," said one female student-athlete, now a senior. "If you don't see initiation as hazing, then there's no problem. I didn't think of it as hazing until recently."

Hoover said the best indication of whether an act is hazing is its intent. "Is the primary intent to humiliate? If so, then it's hazing. You don't have to humiliate to bond. There are better ways to bond, and people need to learn that."

Code of silence and denial

Those seeking answers after the incident at Alfred were amazed at the lack of information on hazing in intercollegiate athletics.

"I know the (Alfred) Presidents Commission was surprised to find no written materials anywhere," Hoover said. "There were no articles, no books, no theories, nothing. There was no public discourse of this at all."

Those involved in initiations are not surprised. After all, it's supposed to be a secret.

"That was actually the most important part to us," said one female former student-athlete. "If you ever told anyone or complained, you were off the team. I mean, you still wore the jersey and played and everything, but you were not a part of the team anymore. All you had to do was see it happen to someone else -- even on another team or at another school -- and you would never risk that."

Norm Pollard, director of the Counseling and Student Development Center at Alfred University, agreed. "The idea of secrecy is an integral piece to all of this," he said. "The students keep it a secret and the administration cooperates by not wanting to know."

Sixty percent of the student-athletes surveyed in the Alfred study said they would not report hazing. Coaches believed that more students would report such incidents, while student affairs officers expected that fewer students would report them.

"The (student-athlete's) perception is that if you report hazing, you risk being ostracized by the team," Belgiovine said. "You are breaking the code. There is a very strong code of silence on this issue."

Several student-athletes said they thought the code of silence surrounding initiation in athletics was more all-encompassing than in fraternities and sororities.

"I think there's a fundamental difference between sports and fraternities on this," said one student-athlete. "Many athletes choose to attend a particular college because of their sport. To drop out or be ostracized (in athletics) is very different. Your only way out of it is to transfer, and then you lose a season. You're really caught in this and you certainly don't want to feel like an outcast. (And) for many people, there's a scholarship involved. And, it's a much smaller group. You're not going to stand up to it and say no or tell someone else."

Athletics is a part of student-athletes' identity, and they are not going to endanger their entire identity by reporting hazing, Pollard said.

"Almost every college athlete was a high-school athlete, and that provided them with an identity in adolescence," Pollard said. "They choose their school based on athletics, even if it's a Division III school. (Participating in the hazing) is a desperate attempt to be a part of that team, which is critical to their identity. For them to break the code and walk away from all that would be literally giving away their identity."

Perhaps one of the results of such secrecy is that many athletics directors and coaches say they don't have any hazing on their campuses (see chart, page 16). But other coaches and administrators admit that there is a problem.

"Any college athletics administrator who says they don't have hazing going on on their campus has their head in the sand," said Lou Spiotti, athletics director at Rochester Institute of Technology.

"It goes on everywhere. And people should recognize it as a serious concern. My feeling is that we have to view ourselves as educators, and although we run the athletics programs on our college campuses, the bottom line is that we have to be taking the educational part seriously. This type of activity doesn't further anyone's education."

Brawn said that administrators have to acknowledge the problem.

"I think for people to think that nothing is going on on their campus is ridiculous," Brawn said. "It's turning a blind eye. You can't say it exists everywhere but here. And I think if you spoke to other groups on campus (besides the Greeks and the athletes) you'd find it there as well. That doesn't make it right, but the athletes aren't the only ones doing it, and it's important to realize that if you're going to try to change it."

Ending silence on the issue and raising awareness of hazing in athletics is part of the NCAA's role of protecting student-athlete welfare, said Ronald J. Stratten, NCAA vice-president for education services.

"The main point is that we not trivialize this issue but look at the preponderance of evidence that hazing is going on everywhere," he said. "And now, because of the Alfred University study, we all know that. Knowing means we can't turn our head when it happens on campus and say, 'I didn't know about that.' We know it happens. We know, chances are, it's happening right there in front of us. We can't say it's a non-issue on our campuses anymore."

The tip of the iceberg?

Another lesson to be learned from the Alfred study is that athletics administrators who see freshmen pass by their door in their underwear shouldn't dismiss it as simply preseason high jinks. One surprise in the study was that student-athletes who engaged in what the researchers called "questionable" behaviors (humiliating or degrading, but not dangerous or illegal) also were likely to participate in dangerous or illegal activities.

For example, 85 percent of those who said they had been forced to wear embarrassing clothing also were required to commit a dangerous or illegal act.

"(Administrators) should realize if they see a public humiliation, the odds are extremely high that the students are involved with alcohol or more dangerous behavior," Hoover said. "There is a relationship between humiliation and the more dangerous acts."

Hoover also found "clusters" of hazing behavior, determined by examining data on those who were engaged in numerous acts of hazing. (For 17 percent of the student-athletes who responded to the survey, initiation onto their team meant more than five behaviors defined by researchers as hazing.)

She found that those immersed in hazing seem to fall into certain behavior patterns, participating in certain types of activities but not others.

For example, one subset of student-athletes participates in drinking contests, consumes disgusting concoctions, is paddled, kidnapped, and tattooed, but does not engage in other dangerous activities. Another subset participates in drinking contests, engages in or simulates sexual acts and does other embarrassing acts but does not tattoo or undergo being tied up or confined in small spaces.

"We're not sure what the clusters mean at this point, but it's an area for further study," Hoover said. "For whatever reason, some groups do certain types of behaviors at a statistically significant level, while not doing other types of behaviors.

"That should tell an administrator that what they're seeing -- or hearing about, actually -- may not be all there is. It may be just the tip of the iceberg."

Creating rites of passage

Numerous student-athletes have indicated that they feel some kind of initiation or rite of passage is essential. Scholars agree with them, but note that initiation is different from hazing in some fundamental ways.

"Our society denies the strong need among people for initiation rituals," said Thomas V. Peterson, professor of religion at Alfred University. "By not discussing our need for ritual and seldom providing serious initiation rites, we deny a fundamental part of our human needs.

"In a world where initiation is seldom discussed, the line between appropriate initiation and its dark side, hazing, is blurred for many people.

"Initiations need to be real, serious and challenging. They need to help the person find an identity in a group of athletes and give them a sense of belonging. Without careful thought by their elders, the rites too often degenerate into hazing where they humiliate, degrade or endanger people."

Mick Miyamoto, assistant dean of students at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, noted that initiations do not have to be negative. "Initiations can be a positive experience," said Miyamoto, a former Division I, Division III and high-school football coach. "They can be dramatic and traditional and have powerful symbols. We can make them positive. The seniors can share a meal with the freshmen, there can be a tradition of community service.

"Someone has to take those kinds of steps and work to change the culture. Changing culture is a huge undertaking. There are no quick fixes; it's something that might take a generation."

Stratten noted that the elders' involvement makes a big difference. "The interesting thing about tribal rituals is that the adults are involved," he said. "With hazing, what we have is a rite of passage managed by children. We need to offer alternatives. There are a variety of team-building activities that we can offer teams. It can be supervised, safe and productive."

Pellegrino, the Division III SAAC member from Tufts, encouraged institutions to involve student-athletes and coaches in the creation of alternatives.

"The person that most student-athletes look to is the coach," he said. "He or she needs support from the top and an awareness that you just can't make it go away overnight. Provide assistance and support for events, and get the input of the student-athletes in developing a policy or code of conduct. Encourage positive initiations with involvement by the coach. If the coach is present, then there is that elder there to make people think about their actions."

Hoover also cautioned against simply setting a policy without offering alternatives.

"Initiation rites are something that teams need. You can't just say no to initiation rites," she said. "If people crack down and say all initiation is illegal, it's going to happen in more dangerous ways.

"People need to recognize the need for initiations and the need for elders in the process to guide it. We need to understand what a good initiation is and we need to understand what good, constructive team-building activities are. We can't get rid of initiations, but we can get rid of hazing."

Ideas for team-building and preventing hazing are online at the Alfred University Web site (www.alfred.edu/news/html/hazing_study.html).