By Jacqueline Sudano
A suburban Indiana school district has been rocked recently by a high school hazing scandal that involved its boys’ varsity basketball team. The Carmel Clay school district has about 15,000 students who all feed into one high school: Carmel High School. Formerly ranked number 10 nationally as one of Sports Illustrated’s Top 25 High School Athletic Programs (2005), Carmel High School has 62 teams, 98 coaches, and over 1,100 student-athletes.
Carmel High School’s athletic program and community were shaken by rumors that two alleged separate accounts of hazing occurred involving the boys’ varsity basketball team in January 2010. The first offense was alleged to have occurred in the boys’ locker room on January 8, involving one senior and a 17-year-old on the team. Police reports are heavily redacted and provide little to no information on what was alleged to have happened. One student-athlete was suspended for his involvement in the incident.
The second alleged incident involved three senior team members hazing two younger students during a bus ride back from a game in Terre Haute, Ind., on January 22, about 100 miles away from Carmel. There, the three seniors allegedly assaulted the younger teammates on two occasions for approximately 10 minutes each, while three coaches were present on the bus at the time. The case will be prosecuted in Hendricks County (not Hamilton County, where Carmel is located), since the offense allegedly occurred there while the bus was in transit. Charges against the three seniors may include criminal deviate conduct (which will place them on the registered sex offenders list for life, if convicted) and criminal confinement. While the case is pending, the three seniors in question were forced to sit out their Senior Night game. As of February 27, four seniors were kicked off the team. It is rumored that charges will be filed against the seniors as soon as next month.
Carmel Principal John Williams told the Carmel Star that, “As new information has come up, we have shared that with the police. We have adjusted our feeling about what is appropriate discipline and consequences.”
While the investigation is ongoing, it is difficult to ascertain what will happen to these student-athletes for sure. However, the gravity of the offenses alleged and the heavy involvement of both the police and the district in the investigation indicate that the district is taking the claims very seriously.
In Crystal Lake, Ill., five high school wrestlers have been charged for a hazing incident at Prairie Ridge High School. There, an anonymous letter was sent to officials at the school on January 28, claiming that a student wrestler was restrained by teammates and repeatedly slapped in the stomach.
Police said the resulting investigation involved interviews with over 60 students, as well as the team’s wrestling coaches, which revealed allegations that several student-athletes on the team participated in hazing activities, including slapping and groping teammates through their clothes while they were unable to move.
Dan Hoffman, an attorney for one of the arrested student-athletes, told the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Ill.: “Any parent should be very worried if they have a child engaged in sports at Prairie Ridge High School,” he said. “They should be afraid that innocent adolescent horseplay will result in criminal charges.”
In February, prosecutors in Franklinville, NY charged a 19-year-old Franklinville Central High School student with second-degree harassment and a 16-year-old (as a juvenile) with forcible touching and harassment for an incident in which a wrestling teammate was bound with a belt. Also suspended were the school’s head wrestling coach and two assistants. However, the parents of a suspended (but not charged) student-athlete spoke out. Brian and Kelly Childs told the Olean Times-Herald they accept their son’s punishment, but “[i]t wasn’t an act of viciousness. It was boys being boys. They were goofing off,” Kelly Childs said. “The boys weren’t doing anything to be mean.”
Not all student-athletes who are alleged to have participated in hazing are charged with any crimes. On February 24 in Grand Rapids, Mich., Kent County prosecutor William Forsyth announced he won’t file any criminal charges against nearly a dozen members of the West Catholic High School boys’ cross country team for hazing, conduct which got the school to disband the varsity team in the first place, reducing the team from varsity to club status.
In a statement, Forsyth said that while the activity “was inappropriate, offensive and admittedly criminal in nature, given the age of the offenders, their lack of criminal record and the isolated nature of the behavior [i.e. in the context of their participation on the cross country team], any punishment is best left to the administration of West Catholic High School.”
