Hazing in hockey is back in the headlines this week after an incident in late September involving seven rookie members of the Manitoba Jr A Neepawa Natives resulted in one of the players lodging a complaint against the team.
The MJHL launched an investigation of the incident, and upon the conclusion of the investigation the league suspended 16 players on the team (basically every member of the team except for the victimized players) for between 1 to 5 games apiece, fined the team $5,000 and suspended the head coach for 2 games (though he was apparently unaware the hazing was going on) and an assistant coach (who was in the room) for 5 games.
More details of exactly what transpired can be found in this CBC article, and this Winnipeg Free Press piece.
It's not pretty.
Hazing has long been a "dirty little secret" associated with team sports at all kinds of levels - the kind of thing that happened behind closed doors and was seldom spoken about. Once again though, we're forced to confront this kind of depravity that sometimes goes on.
I think most folks would agree that some level of harmless, light-hearted fun is a good thing in building team cohesion. But there is a line across which it's no longer harmless and light-hearted; I think intuitively we all know where that line is. NHL teams frequently hold "rookie dinners" where the team goes to a restaurant for an extravagant meal, which the team's rookies get stuck with the bill for. Some Major League Baseball teams have a tradition of having their rookies wear some kind of silly costume during a travel day. These are probably good examples of harmless and light-hearted. The kind of degradation, complete with homoerotic undertones, that we see in the Neepawa incident is not. And this is 2011, not 1951 - everyone involved in that incident knew it was unacceptable behavior but did it anyway. And this needs to be punished appropriately - to drive home the point, yet again, that this is unacceptable.
So is the MJHL's punishment severe enough? What do you think?
3 comments:
Absolutely NOT! The assistant coach should be relieved of his duties and some of the players should be suspended indefinitely. All I will say is two words: GRAHAM JAMES!!! Good on these parents for coming forward with this and its to bad that by them coming forward they essentially squash their son's hockey. Shame on that community for allowing these parents and player to feel like they are responsible for what happened.
In my opinion, the punishment is not even CLOSE to being enough. Especially when you know that the kid who is in the center of this, has already been not playing for longer than the suspensions that the rest of these boys got. Neepawa needs to do the right thing and not only get this boy to another team, but probably another league....soon.
I had only ever heard rumours of things that were done in that dressing room done. I played in the WHL and AJHL and never once were things that bad done to rookies. There were scavenger hunts where we had to do dumb things like sing in front of a packed food court, which are of course embarrassing, but hardly hurtful. On another team when I was a veteran in the AJHL, we made the rookies perform silly skits. How far they wanted to take it was entirely up to them. The sickening part too is that these vets who made the rookies do this most likely had to do the same thing years ago. And this is only a team that was caught. I guarantee there are many more.
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