Dangerous new trend: Swim teams and alcohol-related hazing

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Excerpt

This has to be said. College swimmers: stop hazing and initiation drinking events for new members of your teams. Or you’re not going to have a team much longer.

The issue is almost reaching epidemic levels in the sport of swimming over the past few years. This summer/fall alone, three Division I programs were in the news for hazing-related issues.

Dartmouth canceled its entire fall meet schedule and its winter training trip in response to a 2016 event in which the first-year team members were required to create a “sexualized PowerPoint” for their teammates. (Is there a dumber reason to give up half a college swim season than a sexualized PowerPoint? That’s the hill you want to die on?).

East Carolina’s teams went under investigation over alleged hazing activities just last week, and though the teams themselves have been cleared, the school said it could still dole out punishments for specific athletes.

Just this week, Bucknell put it teams back on probation after an initiation event supplied underage team members with alcohol. (Bucknell’s teams were just about to wrap up a previous two-year stint on academic probation for similar reasons, proving that alcohol-based initiation is apparently so important that team members didn’t have the self-control to survive two whole years without it).

And these teams got off relatively easy compared to what we’ve seen.

In 2014, five Virginia swimmers were suspended on allegations of hazing, and later all five were slapped with a lawsuitby a former teammate who says they hazed and threatened him. Drury’s head coach was forced to step back from coaching the team this past winter in response to a former swimmer who says he was hazed so severely it left him unable to swim while suffering from PTSD and Conversion Disorder.

And in 2015, Western Kentucky suspended its entire program for five years, terminating the positions of its entire coaching staff after a Title IX investigation into hazing concerns.

SWIMMING IN A PRECARIOUS POSITION

That Western Kentucky program isn’t coming back, folks.

At least, that’s the sentiment among a number of onlookers. By 2020, the school will have a choice. Option 1: a lengthy search process to hire up to 6 new coaches, who will then start completely over with an entirely blank roster, hoping to recruit enough swimmers just to fill a lineup in year 1 and with at least three or four years before having any sort of competitive chances. Option 2: electing not to resurrect the program and saving a few million dollars in the process.

Swimming is in a horrifically dangerous position at the college level, and would-be hazers need to realize it. College swimming programs across the nation are dropping like flies.