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Hazing News

A Missouri school tries to resume football after mass arrests

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July 29, 2010

Correction to earlier story. Thanks to G for headsup.11:36 a.m.

If you’ll permit me to make one very minor programming note for your blog –
your headline on today’s story says “A Kansas School…” The Seneca High
School team is actually from Missouri. They traveled about 45 minutes
northwest to Pittsburg, Kan., for the football camp. That’s where the
incident occurred, and that’s why the boys face charges in Kansas.

Seneca coaches have first meeting with players

By Greg Grisolano Globe Staff Writer

Excerpt

SENECA, Mo. — The Seneca High School football coach said he hopes the team and the community can start healing, amid the fallout from a hazing incident last month that left as many as 17 players injured.

Eleven other players are facing criminal charges in Kansas.

“Our entire community has been affected in some way, especially the football team and their families who we deeply care about,” head coach Robert Townsend said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “My thoughts and prayers are steadfast for the Seneca School District and the whole community that a process of healing can begin.”

Townsend made his first public comments in the wake of a hazing incident in which the 17 players among those attending a football camp at Pittsburg (Kan.) State University were injured. Upperclassmen on the team are accused of injuring some of the underclassmen players on June 10 in a dorm at PSU. According to a police report, upperclassmen used plastic window blind rods to strike 17 underclassmen. Some team members also allegedly placed their genitals on the faces of younger players.

By Hank Nuwer

Journalist Hank Nuwer is the Alaska author of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives; Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, High School Hazing, Wrongs of Passage and The Hazing Reader. He has written articles or columns on hazing for the Sunday Times of India, Toronto Globe & Mail, Harper's Magazine, Orlando Sentinel, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. His current book is Hazing: Destroying Young Lives from Indiana University Press. He is married to Malgorzata Wroblewska Nuwer of Warsaw, Poland and Fairbanks, Alaska. Nuwer is a former columnist for the Greenville (Ohio)Early Bird and former managing editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Alaska.
Nuwer was named the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists columnist of the year in 2021 for his “After Darke” column in the Early Bird. He also won third place for the column in 2022 from the Indiana chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He and his wife Gosia, recently of Union City, Ind., have owned 20 acres in Alaska for many years. “The move is a sort-of coming home for us,” said Nuwer. As a journalist, he’s written about the Alaskan Iditarod sled-dog race and other Alaska topics. Read his musings in his blog at Real Alaska Daily--http://realalaskadaily.com and in his weekly column "Far from Randolph" in the Winchester Star-Gazette of Randolph County, Indiana.

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