MORE HAZING: WHY CAN’T WE STOP THIS BARBARIC PRACTICE?

As you may recall, on last week’s show, we talked about a serious hazing incident with the Wall Township (NJ) HS football program, which is now being investigated by the Monmouth County Police Department. The football team’s schedule was shut down, coaches were suspended, students had their lives disrupted, and on and on. Just a terrible cascading of negative consequences simply because a handful of selfish, short-sighted, and cruel kids on the football team didn’t think about the consequences of their actions on one of their younger teammates.

As noted last Sunday, it’s just so frustrating that these hazing incidents continue to occur at the HS level…and we continue to struggle to find a way to stop and prevent them. Even worse, hazing continues to happen not just around here, but all over the country.

Case in point. Perhaps the most powerful HS football team in the country – the legendary Mater Dei HS program out in Southern California  -- made headlines this past week for all the wrong reasons.

If you haven’t heard about this, let me share some of the details with you.

This case – at least the way I understand it – presents a new kind of twist on HS hazing. And it explains in part why the school defends itself by saying it’s taking the accusations seriously….but no one from the football team is being held accountable. At least not yet.

In short, there’s a kind of accepted and understood practice of the younger football players asking to take on some of the larger and stronger upperclassmen on the team by challenging to a physical game of what’s known as “Bodies” or “Slapping.”

This is where the two football players line up and face each other – they are not in pads – and trade hard body blows to each other’s torso, until one of them finally gives up from the beating. Invariably, it’s the younger and smaller player who surrenders. But only after he’s “proven” to the older player that the younger player is worthy of enduring all sorts of punches and hits to their torso. Again, these are not mere taps or passing shots. These are real, solid, punches to each other.

And in this particular case, where a younger player was seriously injured, according to numerous major media accounts, none of other football players who witnessed this beating did anything to step in and stop this barbaric activity. That’s what I find so extraordinary. What they did do was video record the assault.

The entire episode has a kind of “well, boys will be boys” kind of feel to it, and from what I can tell from the media accounts, no one has faced any kind of disciplinary action.

No names are being revealed since the boys are all minors, but a younger player – who weighs 175 pounds – basically endured a Bodies session with an older football player who outweighed him by more than 50 pounds.

There was the usual beating and trading of punches. But then the younger boy began to get hit numerous times in the fact, suffering a broken nose, a couple of deep lacerations around his eyes, and even worse, there are reports of traumatic brain injury from the pummeling to his head.

According to the kid’s lawyer, there’s ongoing pain, slurred speech, and cognitive dysfunction. The boy has since transferred out of Mater Dei and his family has filed a lawsuit against the school.

The lawsuit complaint adds that legendary Mater Dei head football coach Bruce Rollinson is well aware of the hazing rituals that goes on in his program.

Rollinson is alleged to have told the victim’s father that the head coach was in an untenable position as far as disciplining the attacker was concerned. That’s because, according to the lawsuit, the attacker’s father was an assistant football coach at Mater Dei. In addition, “If I had a hundred dollars for every time these kids played Bodies or Slappies, I’d be a millionaire,” Rollinson told the victim’s father, the lawsuit claims.

Now, that, of course, sounds more than a bit odd.

All I can assume is that, at this  school, there’s an unwritten expectation that all new football players need to undergo a barbaric rite of passage called Bodies…that part of their culture is that it’s expected that the younger players need to go through this beating in order to gain the respect of their older teammates.

As a result, because the kid in effect “volunteered” for this confrontation, the local police didn’t file any charges. In effect, he brought the injuries onto himself.

Now, bear in mind that Mater Dei is one of the country’s most powerful high school football programs. Over the years it has produced two Heisman Trophy winners and many NFL players and dozens of top college players. In fact, this season, Mater Dei is the country’s top-rated HS football team, according to rankings by USA Today and the high school sports website MaxPreps. They just finished their season going 11=0 and pretty much steamrolling their opponents.

 So the question remains: How could this practice be allowed? What were the coaches thinking? How is this possible?

Again, Is it allowed because it’s become expected of the younger players to step up and ask for this treatment? That their football program culture not only condones this nonsense, but basically puts it on the younger players to ASK for it? Does that somehow make this violent behavior acceptable?

I don’t get it….and the bigger question is: does this kind of mentality exist in other HS programs around here and around the country? Take a listen to this AM’s Sports Edge: The Sports Edge with Rick Wolff