Lacrosse hazing. The Dark Side of Lacrosse: Exposing Hazing Practices in College Teams

How prevalent is hazing in college lacrosse programs. What are the long-term consequences of hazing on student-athletes. Why do coaches and administrators often turn a blind eye to hazing rituals. How can universities effectively combat hazing culture in sports teams.

The Pervasive Nature of Hazing in College Lacrosse

Hazing has long been an insidious part of college sports culture, and lacrosse is no exception. Despite efforts to curb these dangerous practices, many teams still engage in rituals that put young athletes at risk. The story shared above highlights just how extreme and potentially life-threatening these hazing incidents can become.

Studies have shown that up to 80% of college athletes experience some form of hazing. In lacrosse specifically, the numbers are equally troubling. A survey by Alfred University found that 65% of respondents involved in collegiate club sports (which includes many lacrosse programs) reported being subjected to humiliating or potentially illegal hazing activities.

Common Hazing Practices in Lacrosse

• Forced alcohol consumption
• Sleep deprivation
• Physical challenges or beatings
• Sexually explicit or humiliating acts
• Destruction or theft of personal property

Is forced alcohol consumption the most common form of hazing in lacrosse? While not exclusive to the sport, binge drinking rituals like the one described in the article are indeed prevalent. The combination of peer pressure, team bonding, and a culture that often glorifies alcohol can create a perfect storm for dangerous drinking behaviors.

The Psychology Behind Lacrosse Hazing Rituals

Understanding why hazing persists requires examining the psychological factors at play. For many athletes, enduring these rituals is seen as a rite of passage – a way to prove their dedication and earn their place on the team. This mentality is often reinforced by older players who justify the practice by saying, “We went through it, so should they.”

Psychologists point to several factors that contribute to the continuation of hazing:

1. Social identity theory: Hazing can create a sense of shared experience and in-group bonding.
2. Cognitive dissonance: Athletes may rationalize their own hazing experiences to avoid feeling victimized.
3. Power dynamics: Hazing allows upperclassmen to assert dominance over new team members.
4. Tradition and nostalgia: Long-standing practices can be difficult to break, even when recognized as harmful.

Can hazing actually improve team cohesion? Despite claims that these rituals bring teams closer together, research overwhelmingly shows that hazing is detrimental to team dynamics. Positive team-building activities that don’t involve humiliation or risk are far more effective at fostering genuine bonds between teammates.

The Role of Coaches and Administrators in Perpetuating Hazing Culture

One of the most troubling aspects of the story shared is the presence of coaches during the hazing incident. This raises serious questions about the complicity of authority figures in allowing these dangerous practices to continue. While some coaches may actively participate or encourage hazing, others turn a blind eye or claim ignorance.

Reasons coaches and administrators may fail to address hazing:

• Fear of disrupting team dynamics or traditions
• Lack of awareness or proper training on hazing prevention
• Belief that hazing builds character or toughness
• Concern over potential negative publicity for the program
• Personal experiences with hazing normalizing the behavior

Do universities bear responsibility for hazing incidents that occur off-campus? Absolutely. Schools have a duty of care to their student-athletes, regardless of where team activities take place. Many institutions are now implementing stricter policies that hold teams and coaches accountable for off-campus behavior.

The Long-Term Impact of Hazing on Student-Athletes

While the immediate physical dangers of hazing are evident, the long-term psychological effects can be equally devastating. Many athletes who experience severe hazing carry emotional scars long after their college careers end.

Potential long-term consequences of hazing include:

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Depression and anxiety
• Substance abuse issues
• Difficulty trusting others or forming close relationships
• Feelings of shame, guilt, or anger
• Academic struggles or dropping out of school

How does hazing impact an athlete’s performance on the field? Beyond the psychological toll, hazing can have direct negative effects on athletic performance. Sleep deprivation, injuries from physical hazing, and the stress of anticipating future incidents can all contribute to decreased focus and diminished physical capabilities.

Legal Ramifications and Liability in Hazing Cases

As awareness of hazing’s dangers grows, so too does the legal scrutiny surrounding these incidents. Many states have enacted specific anti-hazing laws, and universities face increasing liability for failing to prevent or properly address hazing within their athletic programs.

Recent legal developments in hazing cases:

• Increased criminal charges for individuals involved in hazing incidents
• Civil lawsuits against universities, coaches, and team leaders
• Stricter reporting requirements for schools and athletic departments
• Enhanced penalties for hazing resulting in serious injury or death

Can athletes sue their university for hazing-related trauma? Yes, and many have done so successfully. Courts have found schools liable for failing to protect students from foreseeable harm, especially when there’s evidence that officials knew about or should have been aware of ongoing hazing practices.

Effective Strategies for Combating Hazing in Lacrosse Programs

Eliminating hazing culture requires a multi-faceted approach involving players, coaches, administrators, and governing bodies. Some strategies that have shown promise include:

1. Comprehensive education programs for all team members
2. Anonymous reporting systems for hazing incidents
3. Clear, consistently enforced anti-hazing policies
4. Promotion of positive team-building alternatives
5. Increased oversight and accountability for coaches
6. Partnerships with anti-hazing organizations and experts

Are there examples of lacrosse programs that have successfully eliminated hazing? Yes, several universities have implemented strong anti-hazing initiatives with positive results. These programs often combine education, policy changes, and a shift in team culture led by both coaches and student leaders.

The Role of Governing Bodies in Addressing Lacrosse Hazing

Organizations like the NCAA, US Lacrosse, and various collegiate athletic conferences play a crucial role in setting standards and enforcing consequences for hazing violations. In recent years, these governing bodies have taken stronger stances against hazing, implementing new policies and educational initiatives.

Actions taken by lacrosse governing bodies:

• Mandatory hazing prevention training for coaches and athletes
• Increased penalties for programs found to engage in hazing
• Development of best practices and resources for member institutions
• Collaboration with anti-hazing advocacy groups
• Funding for research on effective hazing prevention strategies

How effective are NCAA sanctions in deterring hazing behavior? While sanctions can serve as a deterrent, their effectiveness varies. Some argue that harsher penalties are needed, while others emphasize the importance of cultural change within individual programs. A combination of strong enforcement and proactive prevention efforts is likely the most effective approach.

Changing the Culture: Promoting Positive Team-Building in Lacrosse

Ultimately, eliminating hazing requires a fundamental shift in how teams approach bonding and tradition. Many programs are now focusing on positive alternatives that foster team unity without putting athletes at risk.

Examples of healthy team-building activities:

• Team retreats focused on communication and trust-building exercises
• Community service projects that bring players together for a common cause
• Structured mentorship programs pairing upperclassmen with new team members
• Team-wide goal-setting and leadership development workshops
• Inclusive social events that don’t involve alcohol or humiliation

How can team captains and senior players lead the charge against hazing? Peer leadership is crucial in changing team culture. When respected upperclassmen take a stand against hazing and actively promote positive alternatives, younger players are more likely to embrace a healthier team dynamic.

The story shared at the beginning of this article serves as a stark reminder of the very real dangers posed by hazing in college lacrosse. While progress has been made in recent years, there is still much work to be done to ensure the safety and well-being of all student-athletes. By understanding the root causes of hazing, implementing effective prevention strategies, and promoting a culture of respect and inclusion, the lacrosse community can work towards eliminating these harmful practices once and for all.

As we continue to address this issue, it’s crucial to remember that the responsibility for change lies with everyone involved in the sport – from players and coaches to administrators and governing bodies. Only through a collective effort can we create a lacrosse culture that truly values the dignity and safety of all its participants.

Crosse Clicks: Hazing in College Lacrosse

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ince as far back as I can remember, hazing has always been a controversial topic in university settings. From sports teams to greek life, hazing is commonly accepted by students as a right of passage. After all, if your leaders got hazed, shouldn’t you?

When I was in college, I was hazed and it was terrible.

I knew it was going to happen. All of us did. There had been stories about the previous years floating around freshmen cliques since the first day of tryouts. To be honest, it didn’t sound that bad. I was open to the reality that I was probably going to be peer pressured to get wasted at least once when the team was on the road.

Fast forward a few months and we’re on our annual spring break excursion across the country to compete against the best programs in the MCLA. Our team was going through a wacky transformation process. The year before I arrived on campus, the team had won our conference title and received an automatic bid to the MCLA national tournament in Minnesota. We had eight freshmen on the team at the time – plus eleven sophomores and thirteen upperclassmen.

So there we were over 2,000 miles away from campus. It was a Saturday night after a week of games against the toughest competition I’d ever had the pleasure of playing against. Heck, I was just a freshman and my main sport in high school was not lacrosse. Anyone watching probably thought to themselves, “that kid looks more like a lineman than a d-pole.” Thank god, too, because I’ve always been convinced that extra weight I was carrying is what helped keep me out of the hospital on Easter Sunday, 2005.

We’d finished our last game pretty late into the evening, and my dad had traveled all the way there to watch me play. It’d been a while since we’d seen each other, and my dad and I have always been close, so I ducked out of the team dinner and headed out for a steak dinner with him. By that time, I knew what was coming, and if I recall correctly, I think I mentioned it to him.

At this point, I wasn’t really worried. I loved our senior class. I had landed in an upper level video production class my second semester, and one of the seniors was in it too. We teamed up on some projects for class, and I got the feeling that if things got worse than expected, he’d have my back.

After dinner, it had to have been almost 11PM. My dad dropped me off at our hotel and we agreed we’d meet for breakfast before our planes left. I was to invite a few friends.

I walked into the lobby of the hotel and it was quiet, then I made my way upstairs. My room was empty so I figured all the guys had gone out. Then came a knock on the door – a few sophomores looking for me.

Turns out the whole team was waiting, piled into a single hotel room. I walked into this room to cheers and laughter, noticing one of our leading scorers had is arm in a make-shift sling (made out of athletic tape) positioning his hand permanently above his head. Apparently while they were waiting, his hand gotten caught and slammed in the bathroom’s door jam. I’m not sure why I remember that detail, but one thing’s for certain… it was one of my last memories of the night.

What came next was me joining the rest of the freshmen sitting in a circle around the beds. Everyone else was standing, drinking forties and cheap beer. Then someone brought out the paper bags full of ten dollar vodka. Three half gallons, if I remember right.

[quote]Take a few gulps and pass it around! Let’s see if you guys can beat last year’s record![/quote]

We were forced to chug them down as fast as we could. Straight vodka – are you kidding me? It was terrifying. Not at all what I had expected. And did I mention our coaches were there?

Thankfully for all of us, we had a couple cool seniors (and maybe a coach or two) step in to help us out. That dude I’d banked on to have my back? He was the first one to jump in.

It didn’t really matter though. From what I was told, the night turned into a complete sh*t show. I remember hearing something about one of our freshman middies passing out in front of the lobby desk without the receptionist knowing. Apparently it was hilarious.

So what happened to me? I booked it to my hotel room bathroom as soon as the bottles were empty. It was just down the hall, but that didn’t really matter. It only took a minute or two for major drunkenness to kick in. The very last thing I remember is closing the bathroom door, locking it, and putting up the toilet seat. I put my hand on the towel rack next to the toilet, assuming it would hold my weight.

Five and a half hours later I woke up on the bathroom floor staring at the towel rack next to me.

Needless to say, the next day absolutely sucked. I felt violated and embarrassed I let something like that happen to myself. By 7:30AM my dad was calling, saying he was downstairs ready to go grab some breakfast. Nobody joined us as they were all still fast asleep.

Somehow I stomached breakfast and held back the full story from my dad. He dropped me back off at the hotel, we said our goodbyes, and when I got back upstairs most of the guys were still asleep. Twenty minutes later and everyone was scrambling to pack up and get to airport.

Our team barely caught its flight.

As a freshman in college I was completely terrified by the position I had put myself in by joining the team. Suddenly these teammates of mine weren’t the type of guys I ever wanted to be around.

Our team moved on to win out the rest of the regular season and travel to Minnesota for nationals again. I didn’t go. It wasn’t worth it to me to ask my family to fork over the cash necessary to travel there. Remember, this was the Men’s Collegiate Lacrosse Association, a league in which players pay their hard earned money (or more commonly that of their parents, that is) to play the sport they love.

From what I was told, Easter weekend 2005 wasn’t the last of freshman hazing, but what was left to do was much more “fun.” Players were forced to wear their lacrosse helmets through the Mall of America, including on the roller coaster ride.

I’ve never regretted not going to nationals though. Being a part of that team just wasn’t something I ever wanted to let define me.

That’s why I don’t really have any pity for the Bucknell men’s lacrosse program, its new two year probationary period, their head coach Frank Fedorjaka’s likely fear of being fired, or the fact that players from the senior class will be forced to serve a “one-game suspension for failure to meet leadership expectations.”

They’re all getting off easy, no matter the details of what they actually did.

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The Glencoe high school boys lacrosse team out of Western Oregon has produced back-to-back-to-back undefeated conference records the past few season. Think the players are feeling any pressure this year? Time to shoot for that State title! (OregonLive.com)

New coach, new team… the Arcadia University student newspaper takes a look at the new men’s lacrosse team led by former Rutgers and Denver Outlaws coach Jim Stagnitta. (The Tower)

It’s never too early to start thinking about summer lacrosse, but instead of thinking about what camp, tourney, or event you’ll attend, why not consider a service trip? Fields of Growth Int’l recently released information about service opportunities in Jamaica and Uganda. Check them out if you feel like doing some good for the game! (FOG)

Is your team prepared enough to beat a zone defense? (LAS)

The Stevenson men’s lacrosse team got a big win last week, beating No. 3 Tufts 15-9. That’s 12 goals below Tufts’ average! (Baltimore Sun)

Christian Swezey over at IL wrote a nice piece on the High Point men’s lacrosse team’s progression as a new NCAA Division I program. It’s all about motivating your players! (IL)

“One of the biggest mistakes newer officials make is to assume that once the play is over, their job is done.” (Atlanta Lacrosse Official)

With nearly a 60% save percentage, Cornell men’s lacrosse goalie Christian Knight – a freshman! – is “just trying to go out and have fun and do [his] best.” Sounds like he’s also got a great support system! (Baltimore Sun)

Shack Stanwick, the youngest of the 8 children, has his heart set on a State title in his final season at Boys’ Latin. No pressure or anything. (Baltimore Sun)

Lacrosse companies and NCAA violations… every person in the industry should read this piece by Connor Wilson. (LAS)

Box lacrosse is taking off in England! (LAS)

Looking for a team fundraising idea? Why not try dodgeball? Yes, dodgeball. (The Beacon News)

A Lynn University men’s lacrosse player saved the day in Boca Raton, Florida, by helping nab a hit-and-run suspect for the police. Nice work, Brandon Rothstein! (CBS Miami)

Apparently the 2014 North Carolina defense is fo’ real! (Daily Tarheel)

One answer to solving competitive imbalance in high school lacrosse conferences: competitive imbalance is to split a conference into divisions. But many league officials and coaches fail to realize that’s only one of the many solutions available. Just as the Southern Maryland Athletic Conference. (SoMdNews)

Syracuse long pole freshman Scott Firman is getting quite a bit of unexpected, yet totally welcomed playing time this season. His brother still calls him “space cadet,” though. (Syracuse.com)

Youth players in the small town of Rupert, Idaho, are falling for the sport of lacrosse. Props to the Idaho Lacrosse Association for helping grow the game in Magic Valley! (MagicValley.com)

“Parents, you are great people but according to the standards that most of you raise your kids by today, it is amazing that you survived high school athletics without severe mental trauma. You guys grew up in the same era I did. But do you remember it?” (LaxPlaybook.com)

“Meet Jordy Taylor, a senior at Converse College with a passion for sharks and lacrosse.” (HuffingtonPost.com)

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Got something you want us to include in next week’s edition of Crosse Clicks? Drop us a line.

Air Force Academy busts dozens of athletes for hazing — now some of them may not graduate

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. ― An investigation found roughly 30 players on the Air Force Academy’s lacrosse team were involved in hazing of freshmen cadets to varying degrees, the academy said in an email Wednesday.

And in a June 2 interview at the Colorado Springs-based academy, Superintendent Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria said that a separate hazing investigation of the men’s swim team also “found enough evidence … that we’re going to take action against some swimmers.”

“It’s so important that … we expect [cadets] treat each other with respect and dignity,” Silveria said.

Both investigations, conducted by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, are now complete. The legal review of the lacrosse investigation is now complete, and recommended punishments and other actions were forwarded to the cadets’ commanders.

The swim team investigation is still undergoing a legal review.

Officials would not discuss the nature of the hazing or provide Air Force Times with copies of the investigations.

The academy last October announced coaches and players on the lacrosse team had been suspended as part of an investigation into unidentified misconduct.

In February, the school said it had removed 11 cadets from the men’s swim team, also due to misconduct.

Academy spokeswoman Lt. Col. Tracy Bunko said that the roughly 30 lacrosse players’ involvement ranged from simply being there while hazing took place, to encouraging hazing, to actively participating in hazing freshmen.

There are 52 players listed on the lacrosse team’s roster, including 17 freshmen and 35 sophomores, juniors and seniors, meaning that nearly all of the non-freshmen athletes on the team were at least there for the hazing.

Lacrosse “team rituals had crossed the line into hazing, in our minds,” Silveria said.

Silveria said that several of the cadets had been disciplined as a result. Some have been placed on probation, and some have been kicked off the team.

A few seniors on probation were not allowed to graduate with the rest of the class of 2018, Silveria said, while the academy evaluates whether they should be allowed to receive their commissions as officers in the Air Force.

“The probation periods allow USAFA leadership to closely evaluate each of these individuals and assess their character to determine whether they are prepared to lead in our Air Force,” Bunko said. “Because of the ongoing probation, those seniors were not allowed to graduate on time and will not graduate unless and until they complete their terms of probation.”

The Air Force Academy announced in February that it had removed 11 cadets from the men’s swim team due to misconduct. (Staff Sgt. Carlin Leslie/Air Force) (Staff Sgt. Carlin Leslie)

Bunko said that other members of the team were reinstated after “appropriate administrative actions, including probation and a period of suspension from the team.”

“Any allegation of misconduct is taken seriously, investigated, and those found to have taken part in hazing or allowed it to happen as a leader are held accountable,” Bunko said. “In both of these cases, we learned enough through the process of the investigations to remove some cadets from competition before the investigations were completed. Though this is separate from the discipline process, it reminds them that competing for the academy is a privilege.”

Bunko said that for privacy reasons, the academy could not discuss the terms of the cadets’ probation, or reveal how many did not graduate.

Bunko also said the academy could not discuss what actions were taken against lacrosse coaches for privacy reasons. The Colorado Springs Gazette reported in April that the academy had disciplined coaches.

As for the swim team, Silveria said the swim team investigation has just finished and is now being reviewed by Commandant of Cadets Brig. Gen. Kristin Goodwin. Goodwin will decide what actions to take, Silveria said, or will push other decisions up to his level in the case of more severe punishments.

Bunko said that, like some seniors on the lacrosse team, seniors on the swim team who allegedly hazed younger cadets also were not allowed to graduate on time.

The academy’s legal staff and chain of command will review their cases, she said, and decide if they will be allowed to graduate and receive their commissions as second lieutenants.

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Silveria said that he took swift action to stop swimmers from representing the academy when the investigation was launched.

“I actually stopped some of those swimmers in the middle of a swim meet, and took them away from the swim meet, because that’s what our values represent,” Silveria said. “It’s a privilege to wear Air Force on your jersey or your swim cap.”

As a result of this investigation, Silveria has banned an unofficial men’s swim team organization called Phi-K-S, which he said was part of the misconduct that took place.

“As we got through this investigation, it became clear to me that that was part of this, that was part of the conduct of the swim team, that they were somehow using that as a reason for how, why they were conducting themselves [in that way],” Silveria said. “And so I banned that here at the academy, banned it from the swim team.”

Witnesses interviewed as part of a separate swim team investigation into alleged misconduct, conducted in 2016, called Phi-K-S a “pseudo-fraternity. ”

Witnesses told investigators then that some male swimmers got tattoos of the organization’s letters, which stood for “pull, kick, swim.”

Air Force Times obtained materials on that investigation last year via the Freedom of Information Act, but did not report on it because the allegations of misconduct were not substantiated.

The academy has had serious problems with its athletic department in recent years.

A 2014 investigation by the Colorado Springs Gazette found evidence of drug use, sexual assault, and other misconduct in the athletic department in 2010 and 2011.

In 2016, the Pentagon inspector general found the academy didn’t adequately investigate allegations of sexual assault and other misconduct by football players.

And a commander-directed investigation, also obtained by Air Force Times via FOIA last year, found a rash of hazing and other juvenile behavior on the men’s gymnastics team that led to punishments for the coach and some cadets in 2014.

In response to the most recent misconduct investigations, the academy in March said it would hire an outside firm to review its athletic teams and their practices.

Silveria said the academy is close to selecting which company will review the athletic department’s culture and climate. The academy wants to choose a firm that has done similar reviews in other athletic and academic institutions, and that is familiar with NCAA rules.

“I didn’t want to use a normal tool such as a [commander-directed investigation] or the [inspector general],” Silveria said. “I wanted to use someone with expertise in an athletic department. I don’t know if there is a broader problem of a culture within the athletic department, but I’m gonna find out from a third party” if there is.

When asked if he was afraid there is something rotten with the athletic culture in the school, Silveria said that he is prepared to act if the review finds more problems.

“I’m not afraid, because whatever we find, I’m ready to take action,” Silveria said.

Stephen Losey covers Air Force leadership and personnel issues as the senior reporter for Air Force Times.

USC frats, sports clubs cited for hazing, alcohol violations

FILE: Thirteen of USC’s fraternities have been suspended from recruiting activities after they were reported for violating policies involving alcohol.

Tracy Glantz

[email protected]

Five student organizations at the University of South Carolina were cited for hazing or alcohol violations in the fall semester, university records show.

The most egregious violation was the Women’s Club lacrosse team, which was suspended until November 2022 for hazing, “rapid alcohol consumption” and “inappropriate activities for new members,” according to university documents.

The other four organizations — one club sport and three fraternities — were also cited for hazing, but were placed on probation in lieu of suspension. According to university documents:

• The Kappa Alpha Order was placed on probation until Dec. 31, 2018, for requiring new members to engage in “personal servitude.”
• Delta Kappa Epsilon will be on probation until April 16, 2019, for “personal servitude and inappropriate activities in the new member education experience.”
• USC’s Club Ice Hockey team will be on probation until May 10, 2019, for forcing new members to “participate in public embarrassing acts.”
• Sigma Alpha Epsilon will be on probation until May 20, 2020, for hazing and for a fight that took place near the chapter house.

“Hazing allegations are taken very seriously and we began publicizing organizational conduct information in 2012-13, before it was required by law,” USC spokesman Jeff Stensland said in an email. “We require that all student organizations be held to the same high standards and level of accountability, not just fraternities and sororities. ”

All South Carolina colleges and universities, with the exception of technical schools, are required to disclose all student conduct violations by fraternities and sororities, according to The Tucker Hipps Transparency Act. The act — named after a 19-year-old Clemson University student who died after his parents say he was forced to walk on a narrow bridge railing during a hazing ritual — passed the Legislature with overwhelming support but is set to expire at the end of the year.

A bill, which has bipartisan support in the House, would make the law permanent.

Fall 2018 semester is the first time club sports teams have appeared on the list of university violations, Stensland said. However, the Women’s Club Lacrosse team is not the first all-female group to be cited for hazing violations. In 2018, Gamma Phi Beta sorority was placed on probation for forced alcohol consumption, university records show.

Overall, USC student organizations received 9 violations, which places them on track to stay well below 2016-2017 academic year, when USC fraternities and sororities racked up a record 28 violations in a year, according to a previous article from The State.

USC encourages anyone who experiences or is aware of hazing to report it by calling the school’s hazing hotline at 803-777-5800.

Lucas Daprile has been covering the University of South Carolina and higher education since March 2018. Before working for The State, he graduated from Ohio University and worked as an investigative reporter at TCPalm in Stuart, FL. Lucas received several awards from the S.C. Press Association, including for education beat reporting, series of articles and enterprise reporting.
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Cornell Releases Hazing Report Detailing Men’s Lacrosse Incidents

Cornell University released Sunday its report on incidents that led to the suspension of the men’s lacrosse team from fall events. The report reveals what it calls a “presence of a culture within this group of treating new members as less than equals.”

The report, found on the university’s website dedicated to the reporting of hazing incidents, says that freshmen on the team were expected to do menial tasks and chores, and it also details an incident in which the freshmen were challenged by teammates in a “keg race,” as well as another alcohol-related incident that resulted in multiple members vomiting.

On Friday, Inside Lacrosse sources said the allegations of hazing stem from a team event during orientation in August. At the event there was underage drinking, but no forced consumption of alcohol, the sources said.

The lacrosse team has been suspended from all fall events, including the Capital Lacrosse Classic, which is in memory of former Cornell player George Boiardi. Syracuse is replacing Cornell in a scrimmage against the Iroquois.

Here is the full report:

Description: On September 12, 2013, the Department of Athletics and Physical Education received information informing them that the new members of the men’s varsity lacrosse team were being hazed by the upperclass members of the team. The investigation revealed the presence of a culture within this group of treating new members as less than equals. The freshmen were expected to perform menial tasks, including chores and other duties that went above and beyond those expected of the general membership. Additionally, they were expected to spend a large amount of time with the other members in both lacrosse-related and social situations planned by upperclass members of the team. At one such social gathering, upperclass team members organized a “keg race” in which underage freshmen members, aided by seniors, were challenged to drink a large amount of alcohol (beer) in a competition against other team members. The freshmen were told to stand in a circle and were tied together with string that was passed through their belt loops. They consumed a large quantity of alcohol to the point at which multiple members vomited.

Outcome: On September 13, the Cornell men’s varsity lacrosse team was placed on temporary suspension, pending the outcome of the investigation. Immediately following the conclusion of the investigation and determination of the hazing infractions, the team was notified that all Fall 2013 competitions had been canceled. The team will participate in anti-hazing education programs and workshops and those members negatively affected by the hazing incidents will be provided support.

The university has taken a hard-line approach to hazing. In 2011, a student died during an alcohol-related fraternity ritual. The university has its hazing website to report incidents and educate students.

“Under President David Skorton, Cornell University has been a strong voice against hazing and the dangerous rituals that some think are merely rites of passage,” Susan Murphy, vice president for Student and Academic Services, wrote earlier this week in regard to the lacrosse team. 

Andy Noel, the director of Athletics at Cornell, said in a statement this week: “Hazing practices are harmful and antithetical to our values as a university and our commitment to student-athletes. They have no place in Cornell University athletics. I am particularly concerned with coercive traditions that abuse the power differential between new students and upperclassman. Team bonding is important, and there are many ways to achieve it that don’t involve hazing. The health and safety of students is our foremost priority,” he wrote.

Kent Island hazing leads to DJS referrals

Five players from the Kent Island High School Junior Varsity Boys’ Lacrosse team will be referred to the Department of Juvenile Services by the Queen Anne’s County Sheriff after an investigation into an April hazing incident.

A video from April 13, shared with WMAR, seems to depict a group of players holding down another player in a locker room, rubbing their buttocks and possibly genitals on the detained player’s face. After the video was shared, the Office of the Sheriff began an investigation into the incident. On April 20, the school forfeited the remainder of the junior varsity team’s season. 

On May 22, the Sheriff referred five members of the team to DJS for the offenses of false imprisonment and second degree assault. The juveniles will be screened by DJS, who will then determine the required “guidance, treatment and rehabilitation pursuant to the standard protocol of the department,” according to a release issued by the Office of the State’s Attorney of Queen Anne’s County.  

“We did want to react in haste before we thoroughly investigated the matter,” Lance Richardson, the State’s Attorney for Queen Anne’s County, said in a release. “It is the best practice to ensure proper identifications are made and evidence is thoroughly reviewed before charging whenever possible.”

DJS protocol is partially based on if the juveniles had any prior contact with the juvenile justice system, the nature of the allegations they face, and other factors. 

Kent Island High School opened its own investigation into the incident as well, and the Office of the State’s Attorney subpoenaed the school for the materials from that investigation after the school refused to turn over those documents for fear of federal privacy rights constraints. 

The county state’s attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office collaborated to review both investigations and determine the appropriate consequences, leading to the DJS referrals. Any further sanctions for the Queen Anne’s County School System will be independent of Tuesday’s referrals.

Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses: Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy

Long before Andrew Lohse became a pariah at Dartmouth College, he was just another scarily accomplished teenager with lofty ambitions. Five feet 10 with large blue eyes and the kind of sweet-faced demeanor that always earned him a pass, he grew up in the not-quite-rural, not-quite-suburban, decidedly middle-class town of Branchburg, New Jersey, and attended a public school where he made mostly A’s, scored 2190 on his SATs and compiled an exhaustive list of extracurricular activities that included varsity lacrosse, model U.N. (he was president), National Honor Society, band, orchestra, Spanish club, debate and – on weekends – a special pre-college program at the Manhattan School of Music, where he received a degree in jazz bass. He also wrote songs; gigged semiprofessionally at restaurants throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut; played drums for a rock band; chased, and conquered, numerous girls; and by his high school graduation, in 2008, had reached the pinnacle of adolescent cool by dating “this really hot skanky cheerleader,” as he puts it.

That fall, he enrolled at Dartmouth, where he had wanted to go for as long as he could remember. His late grandfather, Austin Lohse, had played football and lacrosse for Big Green, and both Andrew and his older brother, Jon, a Dartmouth junior, idolized him as the embodiment of the high-achieving, hard-drinking, fraternal ethos of the Dartmouth Man, or what Lohse calls a “true bro.” A Dartmouth Man is a specific type of creature, and when I ask Lohse what constitutes true bro-ness, he provides an idealized portrait of white-male privilege: “good-looking, preppy, charismatic, excellent at cocktail parties, masculine, intelligent, wealthy (or soon to become so), a little bit rough around the edges” – not, in other words, a “douchey, superpolished Yalie.”

A true bro, Lohse adds, can also drink inhuman amounts of beer, vomit profusely and keep on going, and perform a number of other hard-partying feats – Dartmouth provided the real-life inspiration for Animal House – that most people, including virtually all of Lohse’s high school friends, would find astounding. This, like the high salaries that Dartmouth graduates command – the sixth-highest in the country, according to the most recent estimates – is a point of pride. “We win,” is how one of Lohse’s former buddies puts it.

On January 25th, Andrew Lohse took a major detour from the winning streak he’d been on for most of his life when, breaking with the Dartmouth code of omertà, he detailed some of the choicest bits of his college experience in an op-ed for the student paper The Dartmouth. “I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks… among other abuses,” he wrote. He accused Dartmouth’s storied Greek system – 17 fraternities, 11 sororities and three coed houses, to which roughly half of the student body belongs – of perpetuating a culture of “pervasive hazing, substance abuse and sexual assault,” as well as an “intoxicating nihilism” that dominates campus social life. “One of the things I’ve learned at Dartmouth – one thing that sets a psychological precedent for many Dartmouth men – is that good people can do awful things to one another for absolutely no reason,” he said. “Fraternity life is at the core of the college’s human and cultural dysfunctions.” Lohse concluded by recommending that Dartmouth overhaul its Greek system, and perhaps get rid of fraternities entirely.

This did not go over well. At a college where two-thirds of the upperclassmen are members of Greek houses, fraternities essentially control the social life on campus. To criticize Dartmouth’s frats, which date back more than 150 years, is tantamount to criticizing Dartmouth itself, the smallest and most insular school in the Ivy League. Nestled on a picturesque campus in tiny Hanover, New Hampshire, the college has produced a long list of celebrated alumni – among them two Treasury secretaries (Timothy Geithner, ’83, and Henry Paulson Jr., ’68), a Labor secretary (Robert Reich, ’68) and a hefty sampling of the one percent (including the CEOs of GE, eBay and Freddie Mac, and the former chairman of the Carlyle Group). Many of these titans of industry are products of the fraternity culture: Billionaire hedge-fund manager Stephen Mandel, who chairs Dartmouth’s board of trustees, was a brother in Psi Upsilon, the oldest fraternity on campus. Jeffery Immelt, the CEO of GE, was a Phi Delt, as were a number of other prominent trustees, among them Morgan Stanley senior adviser R. Bradford Evans, billionaire oilman Trevor Rees-Jones and venture capitalist William W. Helman IV. Hank Paulson belonged to Lohse’s fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, or SAE.

In response to Lohse’s op-ed, the Dartmouth community let loose a torrent of vitriol against him on The Dartmouth‘s website. Lohse, it was decided, was “disgruntled” and a “criminal.” His “blanket and bitter portrayal of the Greek system” was not only false, complained one alumnus, “but offensive to tens of thousands of Dartmouth alumni who cherished the memories of their fraternities.” Another alumnus put it this way in a mock letter to a human-resources manager: “Dear Hiring Manager, do yourself a favor: Don’t hire Andrew Lohse… He will bring disgrace to your institution, just as he did when he embarrassed Dartmouth and SAE. ” The consensus, as another alum put it: “If you don’t want to be initiated, don’t pledge.”

Though two of Lohse’s SAE brothers have confirmed his allegations are generally on the mark, the fraternity has turned on Lohse, portraying him as a calculating fabulist who bought into the Greek system wholeheartedly and then turned against it out of sheer vindictiveness. In a letter to Rolling Stone, SAE’s lawyer, Harvey Silverglate, labeled some of Lohse’s most extreme allegations “demonstrably untrue” and compared Lohse to the stripper who falsely accused a number of Duke lacrosse players of raping her in 2006. “Lohse is… a seemingly unstable individual,” Silverglate wrote, “with a very poor reputation for truth-telling and a very big axe to grind.”

This is not the first time that SAE has come under fire for hazing abuses, or the first time the house has closed ranks against an attack: In 2009, a member of the Dartmouth faculty accused the fraternity of making pledges chug milk and vinegar until they threw up. According to Lohse and two other SAE alums, the brothers agreed to deny the charges, and discussed in detail how to respond when questioned by college officials. This “culture of silence,” as some on campus describe it, is both a product of the Greek system’s ethos and the shield that enables it to operate with impunity.

“The fraternities here have a tremendous sense of entitlement – a different entitlement than you find at Harvard or other Ivy League schools,” says Michael Bronski, a Dartmouth professor of women’s and gender studies. “Their members are secure that they have bright futures, and they just don’t care. I actually see the culture as being predicated on hazing. There’s a level of violence at the heart of it that would be completely unacceptable anywhere else, but here, it’s just the way things are.”

Not so long ago, hazing was viewed at many universities as nothing but pranks, which deans might have privately deplored but nonetheless tolerated. Today, hazing is illegal in 44 states, including New Hampshire – and many colleges have aggressively cracked down on fraternity abuses. Those that failed to do so have increasingly found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Last spring, Yale became the subject of a federal Title IX investigation after a group of 16 current and former students accused the school of creating a “hostile environment” for women, citing a prank in which the pledges of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the same fraternity that boasted both Bush presidents as members, paraded outside the Yale campus chanting, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” Only a few months earlier, in February 2011, a 19-year-old Cornell sophomore died of alcohol poisoning after taking part in an SAE hazing ritual. In response, the boy’s mother filed a $25 million lawsuit against SAE, Cornell shuttered its chapter, and the president of the university directed the college’s Greek organizations to end the pledging process, effective fall 2012.

Alarmed by the skyrocketing rate of binge drinking, which studies show is nearly twice as high among fraternity residents, a growing number of colleges have opted to kick frats off campus or do away with them altogether. Williams College was the first to shutter its fraternities, in the 1960s, and many others have since followed suit, including Amherst, Bowdoin, Colby and Middlebury. But Dartmouth, whose unofficial motto is “Lest the Old Traditions Fail,” has resisted that transformation, just as it has stood fast against many other movements for social and political progress. Dartmouth was one of the last of the Ivies to admit women, in 1972, and only in the face of fierce resistance from alumni. In 1986, conservative students armed with sledgehammers attacked a village of symbolic shanties erected on campus to protest South African apartheid. More recently, students assailed members of an Occupy vigil at Dartmouth, heckling them with cries of “Faggots! Occupy my asshole!”

“Dartmouth is a very appearance-oriented place,” sophomore Becca Rothfeld tells me when I visit the campus in February. “As long as everything is all right superficially, no one is willing to inquire as to the reality of the situation. Everyone knows that hazing goes on, but no one wants to discuss it – just like they don’t want to talk about racism, sexism, homophobia, classism.” She shrugs, apparently resigned to the situation. “People don’t really talk about things at Dartmouth, let alone argue or get outraged about them.”

This winter, in the wake of Lohse’s op-ed, 105 Dartmouth professors, concerned about this entrenched mindset of avoidance, signed a letter condemning hazing as “moral thuggery” and urged the college to overhaul the Greek system. It was the faculty’s third concerted effort to reform the system since the 1990s. Dissent, a signature part of the undergraduate experience at many liberal-arts colleges, is, at Dartmouth, common only to the faculty. “No matter what your actual ‘Dartmouth Experience’ is, everyone usually falls in line and says, ‘Yes, we all love Dartmouth,’” laments English professor Ivy Schweitzer, who has taught at the college for 29 years. “It’s really a very corporate way of thinking. ”

Within the Ivy League, Dartmouth is considered the most “corporate” of the schools, with a reputation for sending graduates to Wall Street and the upper echelons of the corporate world. Statistics show that roughly a quarter of each graduating class find jobs in finance and business – a figure many students consider low, given Dartmouth’s prominent ties to its Wall Street alumni, who often come back to campus to recruit. “I’ve been at our house when a senior partner from a financial-services firm and a chief recruiter from someplace like Bain are standing around drinking with us as we haze our pledges,” says senior Nathan Gusdorf. (In the kind of irony rife at Dartmouth, Gusdorf is an organizer of Dartmouth’s Occupy movement as well as a brother in Zeta Psi, a house that was “de-recognized” by the college for 10 years after it circulated a newsletter in which some of the brothers promised to reveal “patented date-rape techniques.”) “Presumably, you would find a lot of drinking and plenty of frat boys at any university,” says Gusdorf, “but here, drunk frat boys are handed so much power right off the bat. People do incredibly bad things to one another here, because they know they’re going to get away with it.”

That attitude of inherent entitlement often carries over after graduation. “One of the few dependable ways into the one percent is via these elite feeder systems, like Dartmouth,” says David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Power Inc., which examines the influence wielded by multinational corporations in the global era. “These schools are about their role as networked conduits to the top as much as they are about education.”

Or, as one of Lohse’s SAE brothers puts it: “Having a 3.7 and being the president of a hard-guy frat is far more valuable than having a 4.0 and being independent when it comes to going to a place like Goldman Sachs. And that corporate milieu mirrors the fraternity culture.”

On a warm February afternoon, I visit Andrew Lohse at his mother’s house in Brattleboro, Vermont. Almost 22, he is a handsome kid with tousled brown hair and a polite, almost self-effacing manner. The aggressively preppy look he once favored – ratty Oxford shirts and Nantucket Reds, a style one of Lohse’s former friends refers to as “go-fuck-yourself” fashion – has been significantly toned down. In the dining room, his Macbook sits on a table surrounded by legal pads, newspapers and books by Noam Chomsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jay McInerney. He’s writing a memoir: a “generational tale” that he hopes will be part Bright Lights, Big City, part The Sun Also Rises and part This Side of Paradise, and describes as “a one-way ticket to the secret violence at the heart of the baptismal rites of the new elite.” At which point he stops himself. “I bet that sounds incredibly douchey and brash and stupid.”

Lohse is a highly self-aware young man who nonetheless came to Dartmouth filled with what he now sees as stupid ideas. His goal, he says, was to raise his station in life as much as his grandfather, a man of humble stock who became a wealthy banker, had done by forging powerful connections. “I read a lot of Fitzgerald before I came to college,” Lohse says, “and I guess I wanted to be like that, like a character. I took the idea of creating an identity really seriously. But it wasn’t really me. I’m just a regular kid from Nowhere, New Jersey.”

In some ways, Dartmouth’s own history centers on the concept of identity. Founded in 1769 by a Congregational minister, Eleazar Wheelock, its initial mission was to educate the local Abenaki Indians, a dream that was never realized. Instead, Dartmouth became a college for wealthy white boys who adopted the Indian as their mascot and “Wah-hoo-wah!” as their war cry. They also drank heavily: One cherished facet of the Wheelock myth is that he “tamed” the Indians with New England rum. “It’s all a false sense of history,” says Lohse. “But it’s also very tied into this idea that by going to Dartmouth you’re being ‘tamed’ and civilized and ultimately made into a member of the upper class.”

Like most Dartmouth students, Lohse began his journey into this exclusive society just prior to the start of his freshman year, with a five-day wilderness orientation called Trips. This is a Dartmouth tradition, where students hike, kayak, mountain bike or otherwise explore the White Mountains for a few days, winding up at the Dartmouth-owned Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, or the “lodj,” where they gather for a communal dinner, followed by song-and-dance routines, and they are even asked to sit on the floor and listen to ghost stories. “Hazed into happiness” is how Gusdorf puts it.

Lohse found the experience both exhilarating and disconcerting. “There is a very specific message you get on Trips,” he says, “which is ‘We’re all your friends, you’re part of this awesome new world of Dartmouth, and if you’re not having the absolute best time of your life, then there’s something really wrong with you.’ You are immediately assimilated into this homogeneous way of thinking, where you can’t see any of it as uncomfortable or weird, even though it is.” One facet of the Trips experience is being served green eggs and ham in the “lodj” and reading Dr. Seuss (a Dartmouth alum, whose real name was Theodor Geisel). “It’s like they reduce you to a child in order to remake you,” says Lohse. “And then you’re in on the joke. You go to one of the best schools in America and you sit on the floor and eat green eggs and ham… and you’re going to run the world really soon.”

Lohse understood that to enter this privileged class requires one to make the appropriate connections, and he immediately set about trying to forge them. As a freshman, he contributed to The Dartmouth Review, the college’s staunchly conservative newspaper, founded by a group of young neocons in 1980. He also began to develop his “rush strategy” to prepare for joining a fraternity. “Deciding which fraternity to pledge is the most important political decision a Dartmouth man will make,” says Lohse.

It is also, for many, a social necessity. For a college town, Hanover is a fairly boring place to spend four years. Its one main street is lined with cute cafes and high-end shops, but offers virtually no student diversions beyond a movie theater. This leaves the fraternities, whose parties are open to all. Fraternities (unlike sororities, most of which are dry) also happen to be the only campus entities that serve alcohol to minors, which about 70 percent of Dartmouth undergrads happen to be. And the beer is free: Brothers pay for it out of their social dues, with houses sometimes blowing $25,000 per term on beer and other forms of entertainment. Roughly half of Dartmouth’s 4,200 students may be affiliated with a Greek organization, but the other half takes part in the system by default.

In high school, Lohse had never been much of a partier. “I never drank before coming to Dartmouth,” he says. “I mean, I cut school to go to a John McCain rally.” But he knew he’d have to master his aversion to alcohol to gain any kind of traction. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the conventional definition of a “binge” is five drinks in a two-hour period for men. Dartmouth frat boys pride themselves on being able to drink six cups of beer in less than 30 seconds – it’s called a “quick six,” and requires a person to literally open their gullet and pour the liquid down. There is a YouTube video in which a Dartmouth student does this in less than 10 seconds, but even this feat may not be a record.

All of this binge boozing leads inevitably to binge vomiting. Puking and then continuing to drink – the term is “boot and rally” – is an indelible part of Dartmouth social culture, heralded by successive classes of students. “You’re horrified at first, but then you get used to it,” says Lohse. “There’s a certain way of doing things at Dartmouth, and if you want to succeed, you just have to do it that way.”

Lohse had been introduced to the Dartmouth frat culture in high school, while visiting his brother, Jon, a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon. It was in Sig Ep’s basement where Andrew, then 16, first encountered pong, Dartmouth’s signature drinking game, played with sawed-off paddles and “about five times as much beer as you play with at other colleges.” Fraternity basements, legendary for their grottiness, are elevated to a whole new level at Dartmouth. Their precise pungency is hard to describe: urine, vomit, stale beer and sour food, all combined in layers of caked sludge, which emits a noxious odor that can linger on your skin for days. Lohse was grossed out. “I was standing under this dripping pipe, looking at people drinking this watery Keystone Light beer, and I felt cheated,” he says.

But Lohse still desperately wanted to pledge. Since Dartmouth students can’t formally join a fraternity until their sophomore year, he and his friends cruised a number of frats as freshmen, trying to decide which house to rush. Alpha Delta, the infamous Animal House frat, was pretty much out of the question, as were the other elite or “A side” houses on campus, since they recruited jocks and prep-school types who “would have seen right through me,” says Lohse. In a way, he was relieved. Rumors about hazing abounded. One fraternity reportedly beat their pledges; another was said to place them in dog crates while the brothers vomited on them. Another frat ordered its new members to crawl between the legs of a line of naked brothers, “with, you know, their ball sacks flapping on their heads.” A fourth was rumored to require its pledges to have sex with a frozen turkey.

That left SAE. it had a reputation as a somewhat louche, not particularly athletic fraternity for rich boys, who often wound up “tapped” to join one of Dartmouth’s elite senior societies – frats within frats that offer a special inroad to the country’s future movers and shakers. Lohse made SAE his first choice.

He wasn’t a shoo-in, by any means. “Andrew was a polarizing figure from day one,” says a brother. The more conservative members of the house were strongly opposed to Lohse, who had quit The Dartmouth Review midway through his freshman year and had gone to write for its rival, the liberal Dartmouth Free Press. This was heresy in the eyes of his Review colleagues, some of whom were also in SAE. “They came very close to ding­ing him,” recalls an SAE brother. Lohse only received a “bid,” or offer to pledge the frat, after several brothers came to his defense, citing his popularity with women. A friend recalls walking into Lohse’s room one night to find a girl in his bed, alone, while Lohse was in bed with another girl down the hall.

One night in October 2009, early in his sophomore year, Lohse was studying in his dorm room when he heard someone pounding on his door. A senior stood at the threshold. “You and you,” he said, pointing to Lohse and one of his roommates. “Blindfolds. Follow me. Be silent.” The boys dutifully did as they were told, grabbing ties to wrap around their eyes and following the older brother down the stairs and into a waiting car. “Shut the fuck up right now!” a brother in the front seat barked, shoving a bottle into Lohse’s hands and ordering him to drink. It was MD 20/20, known as Mad Dog, the toxic beverage whose high alcohol content – 13 percent – and cheapness has made it popular with homeless men and hard-partying college boys everywhere. Lohse chugged. The stuff tasted like Lysol.

The pledges were driven to a remote spot across the Vermont border, where they were marched up a wooded trail and into a clearing. A group of SAE brothers stood before them, lit by a tiki torch. “Who among you most deserves a bid and why?” they asked. Lohse looked around as 10 sophomores scribbled down on paper why they deserved to be chosen. Then a brother handed each of them a bottle of Boone’s Farm Blue Hawaiian – a Windex-colored cohort of Mad Dog – and told them that whoever drank it the fastest got to remain. You go to Dartmouth, Lohse told himself as he pounded the Boone’s. You don’t lose.

Later that night, Lohse, now very drunk, faced a Review brother who had wanted to blackball him. The brother held Lohse’s embossed bid card in one hand and a lighter in the other. Ten cups of beer sat on a table. “Do a quick six in the time it takes for this to burn,” he told Lohse, setting the bid card on fire. “Go!” Lohse chugged, but was only up to his third cup when time ran out. Seeing his future go up in flames, Lohse vomited all over himself – at which point the brothers told him they were just kidding.

Lohse was given the pledge name “Regina,” after the character in Mean Girls, in honor of his aggressive social climbing. During his seven-week pledge term, he and his fellow SAE pledges, known as “whale shits,” were on call to cater to the whims of the brothers. Most of the formal “hazing” was reserved for meetings and challenges: Pledges would be required to perform endless “quick sixes,” recite SAE’s creed, “The True Gentleman,” while lying in a kiddie pool full of ice, or take shots of mystery alcohol while being quizzed on arcane fraternity lore. (This same ritual, with the addition of tying the pledge’s hands and feet with zip ties, led to the death of Cornell sophomore George Desdunes, the SAE pledge who died last February.) There were also “milk meetings,” where pledges were asked to chug a gallon of milk in 20 minutes, which always resulted in plentiful booting. “You get points for how many times you booted on other people,” says Lohse, who adds that the pledge trainers kept count while they sat on large throne-like chairs in a basement room. One brother recalls the night some of the pledges were served a scramble of vomit and eggs, known as a “vomlet.”

“Andrew kicked ass at pledge term, did everything required of him and then some,” one SAE brother says. But Lohse also began to complain, quietly at first, to a few sympathetic older SAEs. Why did smart, decent people who were supposed to be “brothers” have to do this to one another? Why did he need to debase himself like this just to belong to a group? Lohse, recalls one brother, “implored some of the guys to tone it down a bit. No one listened to him.”

“Sink Night,” when new initiates affirm, or “sink,” their commitment to a fraternity, was particularly brutal. Lohse recalls the evening in hazy images: lit candles, blacked-out windows, a relentless pounding on the walls of the elegant pool room of the SAE house, where the pledges­ spent more than an hour standing in a circle around the pool table in total silence, as brothers burst in and out of the room, forcing them to down bottles of Mad Dog. Lohse remembers the intimidating feel of shirtless male bodies standing around him as he was interrogated in a brother’s room, where he was ordered to drink three shots and recite SAE’s three cardinal rules: What happens in the house stays in the house. Trust the brotherhood. Always protect your pledge brothers.

At last, he and the other whale shits were escorted to the basement, where they were formally baptized as SAE pledges in a kiddie pool filled with a noxious sludge. “By that point you are really, really drunk – which is the point, because if you weren’t, you’d never get in it,” says Lohse, who was later told that brothers had peed, defecated, vomited and ejaculated into the pool. His account of the kiddie pool has been almost universally contested by others who took part; according to an SAE brother, the pool was actually filled with food products like water, bread, vinegar, soy sauce, salsa and hot dogs. “When you mix all that stuff together, it smells really gross,” the ex-brother says. “And when you’re in it, you don’t know what it is. We let the pledges’ imaginations get the best of them.” Lohse, for his part, hasn’t backed down. “I know this because I watched them make the batch for the 2011 term,” he says. “We were told they needed a few more guys to piss and boot in it.”

Such rituals were not restricted to SAE. One student tells me that during his pledge term, the brothers in his house set up a tarp in the fraternity basement, covered it in vomit, and made the pledges do a “slip and slide.” He loved it. “Everyone peed on it and threw in their chaw,” he says. “I thought it was great. I did it 10 times. But I was getting kind of cut up, so the pledge trainer told me I really should stop so I wouldn’t get too many infections.”

Ritualized vomiting was simply part of brotherly life. SAE has a “boot room,” which is essentially a bathroom where brothers in the midst of a rigorous game of pong can stick their finger down their throat – the term is “pulling the trigger” – and then resume the game. At some houses, pledges are not allowed to pull their own triggers, but must get a friend to do it for them. “It’s all about the challenge,” says one of Lohse’s SAE brothers. A game that is played at nearly every Dartmouth fraternity is called Thunderdome, or Dome. The entire goal of the two-man contest is to make the other person drink until he vomits – at which point the winner “claims his right” by throwing up on the loser.

“You don’t learn about Doming until you become a brother,” says Lohse. “When you realize you’re going to have to do this, it’s really shocking.” SAE, he adds, was never as strict about the “boot on his head” thing as other houses, though it did take place sometimes – “I’ve been booted on and booted on others,” he says. (Another SAE brother confirmed, “Everyone in the house was encouraged to vomit on each other, but the act of actually vomiting on another individual happened only rarely.”)

So internalized did these rituals become that even long-graduated brothers reflect on Dome, and other games, with fondness. “Seeing two friends pulling each other’s trigger was one of the most glorious things I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Snowden Wright, an SAE brother who graduated in 2004. “It was like two kittens licking each other clean. Pure friendship.” I assume Wright is kidding; he assures me he isn’t.

By the end of his pledge term, Andrew Lohse had vomited so much that the enamel on his teeth had largely burned away. But he was now a full-fledged brother, and he threw himself into fraternity culture, adopting an attitude that one former friend calls “the frat star who didn’t give a fuck.”

Throughout his sophomore year, Lohse lived up to every facet of debauchery he could conjure, from hooking up with multiple women to making sure he was the last to leave the basement at 3 or 4 a.m. “There was a nihilistic quality to Andrew,” says Aimee Le, a senior who befriended Lohse in his sophomore year. “The difference between Andrew and his fraternity brothers was that most of the other brothers would try to justify their actions to themselves. Andrew wouldn’t even bother.”

Hazing left its mark on some of Lohse’s brothers; one confided to Lohse that he had sought counseling, haunted by traumas like vomlet. Yet that same brother later hazed the next class of pledges. “It’s a vicious cycle, but it’s how hazing works,” says Lohse. “You accepted this was the culture at Dartmouth, and if you wanted to advance in the culture, you got with the program.”

Brothers aren’t the only ones injured by this unspoken pact around fraternity life. Sexual assault is rampant at Dartmouth; some female students say they circulate the names of men considered “dangerous” and fraternity houses viewed as “unsafe.” Between 2008 and 2010, according to the college’s official statistics, Dartmouth averaged about 15 reports of sexual assault each year among its 6,000 students. Brown, a school with 8,500 students, averaged eight assaults; Harvard, with 21,000 students, had 21. And those numbers are likely just a fraction of the actual count: One study showed that 95 percent of all sexual assaults among college students are never reported. In 2006, Dartmouth’s Sexual Abuse Awareness Program estimated that there were actually 109 incidents on campus.

“It’s depressing coming of age here,” says Deanna Portero, a senior from New York. While Dartmouth has an equal ratio of men to women, she says, it often feels as though nothing has changed since the 1970s. Today, a girl who wants to play pong at a frat party can do so only if she plays with a brother. Not to play is prudish; to be someone’s pong partner, though, “generally means you’re going to hook up with him afterwards,” says Portero. “And if you don’t like it, ‘Fuck you – don’t drink our beer.’”

Nearly every woman I speak to on campus complains of the predatory nature of the fraternities and the dangers that go beyond drinking. “There are always a few guys in every house who are known to use date-rape drugs,” says Stewart Towle, a member of Sigma Nu, who de-pledged in 2011 because of a number of practices he considered dehumanizing. He says some fraternities would remove an intoxicated person from their house before making a “Good Sam” call to campus security to inform them that the person may have alcohol poisoning. Dartmouth’s policy states that there will be no repercussions on either the students who made the call, or the student for whom the call was being made. However, whoever gave that student alcohol could still get in trouble with the police – and in the case of a fraternity, this might result in a fine of up to $100,000. As a result, many fraternities tend to make sure the drunken person is well outside the house before calling security.

One senior, who I’ll call Lisa, was “curbed” in this manner the second night of her freshman year. She’d been invited to a fraternity by one of its members. Thinking it an honor, Lisa enthusiastically accepted, and once she got there, she had two drinks. The next thing she remembers is waking up in the hospital with an IV in her arm. “Apparently, security found me in front of the house. That was my introduction to the frats: passing out from drinking, waking up in the hospital and not having any idea what happened.” What she did notice were bruises that looked like bites on her chest that hadn’t been there before. “To be very honest,” she says, “I didn’t really want to know what actually happened.”

Dani Levin is the president of the Sigma Delta sorority, and a peer sexual-assault counselor. “I get calls almost every weekend,” she says. During the few days I was in Hanover, she received several, including one from a woman who said she’d been assaulted, and then threatened by her assailant’s fraternity brothers not to tell anyone.

Incidents like this are not lost on Dartmouth administrators. Last spring, college president Jim Yong Kim, an anthropologist, medical doctor and the co-founder of the international NGO Partners in Health, established an intercollegiate collaborative known as the National College Health Improvement Project to study high-risk drinking in the same way that Kim approached communicable diseases in Rwanda and Peru. The group is slated to report its findings next year. “We don’t expect to have solutions,” says Dartmouth spokesman Justin Anderson, “but what we will have is a ton of data and ways to measure the results. ”

For many in the Dartmouth community, this data-driven approach falls short. “I just don’t see that working at all,” says Joe Asch, a former Bain consultant and Dartmouth alum who is the lead writer for Dartblog, a site that covers Dartmouth politics. “It all makes for great PR, but this is about a group of college administrators who’ve all tried different approaches to a serious problem on their campuses, none of which have made a dent.” Even more crucially, such initiatives are not directed at fraternity culture itself, which many see as the heart of the problem.

Besides, say many at Dartmouth, the chances that the school will actually change its approach to fraternities seems slim. Kim, whose three-story mansion sits on Fraternity Row, is a strong supporter of the Greek system; he has suggested on several occasions that fraternity membership may have health benefits, citing studies that show that people with long-standing friendships suffer fewer heart attacks. In a strange abdication of authority, Kim even professes to have little influence over the fraternities. “I barely have any power,” he told The Dartmouth in a recent interview. “I’m a convener.”

In reality, Kim is one of the only officials in a position to regulate the fraternities. More than half of Dartmouth’s frats are “local” – houses that split off from their national organizations years ago, and are thus unaccountable to any standards other than those set by the college and their boards.

This autonomy, coupled with large endowments – SAE, which retains its ties to the national body, has, by one estimate, more than $1 million in a trust – makes the fraternities a potent power base. Kim’s predecessor, James Wright, was appointed Dartmouth’s 16th president in 1998 and embarked on a plan to end the Greek system “as we know it” by requiring fraternities to substantially go coed. In response, 1,000 irate students marched on Wright’s house and held protest rallies in which they accused the once-popular president, himself a Dartmouth alum, of treason. “Judas, Brutus, Arnold, Wright,” read a banner that hung from the window of one fraternity house. Wright declined to elaborate on the conflict, other than to tell me there was “push back” from both alumni and fraternities over his proposal; by July 1999, he had backed off. Instead, he implemented an infinitely softer set of reforms. “It was a whitewash,” says Professor Ivy Schweitzer.

Kim – who was recently nominated by the Obama administration to head the World Bank – was initially seen as a potential challenge to the status quo. But instead, he’s proven to be just the opposite. Not long after he took office, Kim met with Dartmouth alums and reassured them he had no intention of overhauling the fraternities. “One of the things you learn as an anthropologist,” he said, “you don’t come in and change the culture.”

Throughout his sophomore year, Lohse ran, desperately by his own admission, for a multitude of political offices available at SAE. Yet with the exception of a short stint as a “rush chair,” where he “sold the lie” to new pledges, hardly anyone voted for him. “He had a temper and a reputation of being kind of too big for his shoes,” says a former brother.

“I guess it started to dawn on me that most of the SAEs didn’t really like me,” Lohse says. “And then I realized that I had been forcing myself to like them.”

Lohse did become close with two popular seniors who openly flouted house rules by bringing cocaine into SAE, which they often snorted with Lohse in their spacious suite on the third floor. As with all fraternities, drugs were by no means uncommon at SAE, but coke had a particular cachet; one of the seniors most fond of the drug would promote it to his brothers as a sign of one’s elitism. “He used to say it was the ‘white-collar’ drug,” says Lohse, “where weed was ‘blue-collar.’”

Not all members approved of the drug use, though. In May 2010, toward the end of Lohse’s sophomore year, a straight-laced ROTC cadet named Phil Aubart caught Lohse and another brother snorting lines off a composite photo of SAE grads, in the house’s pool room. Aubart called Dartmouth security, who notified the police. Lohse was charged with cocaine possession and witness tampering – a charge that he incurred for pouring a cup of beer on Aubart’s door and allegedly spitting on him in retaliation. Other brothers, who considered Aubart a “snitch,” destroyed a table he had built, peed on his socks and sent him threatening e-mails. Aubart ultimately moved out of the fraternity, severing his ties with SAE.

Lohse, who was still a sophomore, pleaded no contest to the charges and received a $750 fine. While the brother busted with Lohse went on to graduate, Lohse was suspended from Dartmouth for a year. “The hypocrisy in that bothered me,” Lohse says. “We made bad choices, but I was doing drugs – I wasn’t harming other people. There are aspects of Dartmouth’s culture that do harm people, that are just corrupt to the core, and nothing happens.”

That November, living at home and angry over what he saw as the unfairness of his predicament, Lohse quietly visited the campus to report SAE for hazing. He had been encouraged to make the move by several friends and by his brother, Jon, who had quit his own fraternity during his senior year. Lohse met with Dartmouth’s associate dean for campus life, April Thompson, and David Spalding, Kim’s chief of staff, who was a brother at Alpha Delta of Animal House infamy. He told himself the move was in the fraternity’s – and Dartmouth’s – best interests. “I saw my role as a reformer,” he says. “I would argue that making these issues front and center is a very positive thing to do.”

Telling none of his friends or fraternity brothers that he was in Hanover, Lohse presented the school officials with a “dossier of fraternity-hazing and substance-abuse-related­ information.” For well over an hour, he detailed his experiences and even named names; at one point, he showed the administrators a photo of his pledge class standing in front of a table holding more than 550 cups of beer, explaining that evening’s mission: to consume all of it. Spalding, Lohse says, “was aghast.”

But Lohse “still clung to the idea that things could be different without me having to be truly public” – in part, he says, to protect himself from the kind of retaliation Aubart endured after informing on Lohse and the other SAEs. Both Thompson and Spalding assured Lohse that protecting his anonymity would be “a priority,” he says. “I thought I could reform SAE on the inside,” he says. “I never saw it as ‘narcing’ on them.”

Two weeks passed without word from anyone at Dartmouth. Just after Thanksgiving, Lohse e-mailed Thompson to follow up. He was told that, acting on the information he had provided about SAE’s upcoming “Hell Night,” the last and traditionally most intense night of the pledge term, the Hanover police were preparing to stage a sting operation in the hopes of catching the fraternity breaking the law. Lohse responded with a lengthy e-mail, arguing that focusing on one fraternity would do nothing to prompt a sweeping overhaul of the Greek system.

The sting, in fact, proved to be a failure: The cops had tried to bust the brothers in the act of hazing pledges in a public place, but all they saw that night was a bunch of drunken kids near a statue of Robert Frost, reciting the code of the True Gentleman. “We’re not idiots,” says an SAE brother. “The stuff we do outside can’t be seen as hazing.” Lohse believed the fraternity had been tipped off – and indeed, Spalding later told The Dartmouth that administrators had discussed plans for Hell Night with the president of SAE to ensure that the event would not violate the college’s hazing policy.

Counseled by his brother and his friends, Lohse decided to force the college’s hand by going to the media. On the advice of Professor Bronski, who had written for The Village Voice, Lohse even tried to set up meetings with reporters from The Boston Globe and The New York Times. But at the last minute, Lohse backed off. “I wasn’t ready,” he says. “A part of me still wanted to go back to Dartmouth and return to my fraternity and party. ” That winter he took off for Asia, where he spent a few months traveling with his brother and working for a small NGO in Nepal. He continued to e-mail Thompson, asking about the status of the investigation, but says she failed to respond. He also says he began getting his act together. “The longer I stayed away, the less I drank,” he says, “and the less I felt like the person I was at Dartmouth.”

Lohse returned to Hanover last summer, to prepare for his junior year. He also returned to SAE, where he was still a brother, even if one now tainted by a cocaine bust. “He told everyone he’d traveled the world and was a changed person,” says a former friend. “But he was still drinking and smoking weed, still actively pursuing all the things that had gotten him in trouble to begin with.” To some, Lohse still seemed furious by what had happened to him. “Andrew has the full weight of the law brought down upon him, gets suspended and gets angrier at something he had already been really angry about,” says an SAE brother.

Lohse channeled some of his rage by becoming a columnist for The Dartmouth, where he took on subjects like Dartmouth’s culture of corporate recruiting, describing it in one op-ed as having “siphoned off some of our great minds into a dead-end field that sanitizes the intellect, offers almost nothing to human society and conditions people to act in ways that are decidedly inhuman.” At the same time, he clung, albeit tepidly, to his identity as a “true bro.” Last October, right before fall rush, he wrote a column extolling the fraternal experience: “I must concede that, happily or tragically, many of my most poignant experiences here have dealt with fraternity life [and] I’ve been trying to come to terms with them all – and with how I let those experiences become too tightly entwined with my identity.” His advice to those who pledged was to support one another. “Don’t forget who you are and don’t be consumed by who you think you are becoming,” he wrote. “Trust me, the two will never be as distinct as you are led to believe.”

But Lohse himself was spiraling downward. After being out in the “real world” and traveling in Asia, which he describes as an “awakening,” he now had trouble taking Dartmouth seriously, with its petty fraternity politics and drinking culture. Feeling ostracized by his fellow students, he fell into a depression he calls a “toxic mixture of anxiety and alienation.” Some former friends recall Lohse himself as the polarizing force: He would show up drunk at people’s doors at 3 a.m., or spend half the night on a desperate search for drugs. “The problem with Andrew is he’s always the victim, he doesn’t take responsibility for what he does,” says one of his former buddies. “But you always want to give him the benefit of the doubt because he’s so charismatic. You get high with Andrew Lohse, and all of a sudden he’s on a 20-minute tangent about literature and liberal politics, and he’s fascinating and exciting to be around, and makes you believe that you can do great things, because he wants to do great things. But one by one, I think a lot of his friends just gave up.”

By homecoming weekend, Lohse had descended to the darkest place he’d ever known. “The harder I tried to believe in it all, the more I couldn’t, until I just cracked,” he says. “I might have drank myself to death there, I just hated it so much.”

The Thursday night of homecoming is SAE’s annual champagne formal, which Lohse attended, already drunk on red wine. He then proceeded to drink almost two bottles of champagne, followed by lots of bourbon and multiple beers. By 6 a.m., most of the SAE brothers had passed out, and Lohse and some of the pledges took off for breakfast.

In the story he tells of this incident, Lohse was walking across the college green, near a roped-off area where the annual homecoming bonfire would be held the next night. As he cut across the “restricted area,” a campus security guard ordered the boys to leave. What followed was, depending on one’s reading, a profound expression of drunken entitlement, or “an existential act of rebellion,” as Lohse maintains. “I can walk wherever I want to walk,” he told the guard. Then he picked up a plastic folding chair and tossed it in her direction.

Lohse was escorted to the college infirmary and given a Breathalyzer, which registered his blood-alcohol level at 0.24 – three times the legal limit. Arrested for disorderly conduct, he was handcuffed and taken to the county jail. Sitting on a bench, waiting for his mother, he considered what had become of the overachieving boy who followed his grandfather to the Ivy League. Whatever the true nature of the Dartmouth Man, he had consumed what remained of Andrew Lohse.

The week after his arrest, Lohse withdrew from Dartmouth on “medical leave,” an indeterminate timeout often taken by students with eating disorders or drug or alcohol problems. “The day I left, I said goodbye to a guy I thought was one of my best friends, and told him I had a problem,” Lohse recalls. “He told me with the way everyone drinks, he had no way to tell who had an alcohol problem.” Back at his mother’s house, Lohse enrolled in an outpatient rehab program. By Christmas, he’d recovered sufficiently to decide that he was ready to take the action his brother and friends had long advocated. “It didn’t feel right until I tried to close my eyes to everything I knew and realized it was impossible,” he says. “I just wasn’t afraid of the backlash any longer.”

The idea of an editorial came slowly; Lohse wrote between 15 and 20 drafts. Finally, one day in January, he sat down and “just crushed it out.” After submitting it to his editors, who fact-checked his allegations thoroughly, he phoned his three closest brothers at SAE. One never returned his call. The second was terrified about what his parents and future employer might think – he had just secured a job at a leading Wall Street firm. But the third turned on Lohse. “He launched into a tirade about how I was a traitor,” Lohse recalls.

Lohse tried to calm the brother down. “Do you think all the stuff the house did, like the vomlet, was good?” he asked. “Or beneficial?”

The brother became even more enraged. “I ate the vomlet!” he yelled. “I made other pledges eat it! That’s brotherhood!”

In the months since he wrote his article, Lohse has virtually lost all of his Dartmouth friends. “I felt like an idiot because I’d defended him,” says one brother in a rival fraternity, “and here he was, throwing it back in our face.” Even those most sympathetic to Lohse’s position wished it had been someone else who had come forward. “The problem is, it’s Andrew Lohse who said this,” says one Alpha Delta brother, a well-adjusted varsity athlete with a guilty conscience. “Some of the stuff we do is really disturbing and unnecessary, and we do need to put an end to it. But if a less-controversial figure had been the one to stand up and say something, maybe it could actually happen.”

But whistle-blowers are almost always complex, often compromised outliers. And while moral outrage surely plays a large part in a whistle-blower’s decision to come forward, so may a combination of anger, revenge, hurt feelings, opportunism or financial benefit. The question, ultimately, is whether their questionable motivations or checkered past make their words any less credible.

“One step toward redemption is making amends,” says Bill Sjogren, a 1967 graduate of Dartmouth. Now a financial manager, Sjogren played football and baseball at Dartmouth and was a brother at the now-defunct Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. He is also a recovering alcoholic who says he learned to drink at Dartmouth. Sjogren resides in the Hanover area, where, in his spare time, he counsels students with substance-abuse issues. “No one has physically died at Dartmouth, yet, but the system destroys the souls of hundreds of students every year,” he says. “It’s just beaten out of you. If you take your academics seriously, you’re not one of us. If you complain, you’re exiled – like Andrew Lohse. For a Dartmouth kid to do what he did, he had to have been broken and hit bottom before he could break the code of silence.”

On February 22nd, his 22nd birthday, Lohse received a call from Dartmouth’s office of judicial affairs, informing him that, based on information he’d provided the college, they were pursuing charges against him for hazing. The college has also charged 27 other members of SAE, stemming from events in the 2011 pledge term. While the other students all categorically deny doing anything illegal, the information that Lohse provided to Dartmouth officials may directly implicate him in hazing. As a result, Lohse – the only student to come forward voluntarily – may be the only student who is ultimately punished. Coupled with the chair-throwing incident, the charges could get him expelled from Dartmouth. “I told them the unabridged truth, and they got me to incriminate myself,” he says. “I understand that no one is above the rules, but none of this would have even been possible if I hadn’t spoken out in the first place.”

When I ask Dartmouth’s new dean of the college, Charlotte Johnson, about charging a whistle-blower with the crimes he exposed, she rejects the characterization. “That’s an inappropriate analogy,” she says. “Andrew does not have clean hands. When someone comes forward and admits wrongdoing, it’s not an automatic grant of immunity. We investigate, and the investigation goes where it goes. And the outcome will be what it is.”

Dartmouth has recently formed a new task force on hazing, the most recent addition to the multiple committees already addressing problems on campus. The question is, given how the school has treated Lohse, will anyone ever come forward and speak truthfully about the culture of abuse and degradation perpetrated by the fraternity system? Lohse doubts it. “The message this sends is, ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut.’ And that’s pathetic,” he says. “If someone dies in a hazing incident next year, my saying ‘I told you so’ is not going to bring that person back. It’s not inconceivable that it could happen – people get hurt all the time at Dartmouth. But no one will ever talk again.”

This story is from the April 12th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

Parents of alleged Ohio victim want hazing bans

The Stone Foltz investigation

Here’s what we know about the investigation of Stone Foltz’s death.

The Columbus Dispatch

The last time Shari Foltz talked to her son, Stone, was minutes before he walked into what she said was a fraternity hazing ritual that would ultimately kill him.

Stone had texted his mom the night of March 3 asking for Netflix recommendations. She joked that he should be studying instead but had her husband, Cory, send along their suggestions. During their conversation, Stone told Shari that he had a “drinking ritual” with his fraternity brothers the next night he had to attend. Stone didn’t want to go.

“If it’s stupid, don’t do it,” Shari told her son, a 20-year-old sophomore at Bowling Green State University.

Stone said he had to do it or he wouldn’t be allowed to join the fraternity he was pledging, Pi Kappa Alpha International, better known on campus as PIKE. Still, Shari told him he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to. She trusted him to make the right decision.

BGSU: Students remember Stone Foltz, call for president’s resignation, action on hazing

The next day, Shari texted Stone at 8:44 p.m. and jokingly asked if he was drunk yet. No, he replied, the ritual wasn’t set to start for another 15 minutes.

Shari said she would call him around 10 that night to see how he was doing, but Stone told her not to do that.

“I never called him,” she said. “Never in a million years would I have thought it was going to be this severe. Had I known, I wouldn’t have joked about it.”

Shari took the family’s dog out around midnight and saw she had new text messages from one of Stone’s friends saying something was wrong. When she dialed the number of a recent missed call, the Bowling Green sheriff picked up and asked if she was Stone Foltz’s mother.

“I immediately knew it was hazing,” Shari said.

A roommate had found Stone lying unconscious on the couch in their apartment just before 11 p.m. He was rushed to the hospital in dire condition and placed on life support, according to the family’s attorneys. Stone died four days later, after his family made sure his organs could be donated. 

In an interview with The Dispatch, Shari and Cory Foltz remembered their son’s life and demanded justice from those responsible, directly and indirectly, for his death. 

Stone Foltz “was a hero”

Stone was a tall, lean and stylish kid with a contagious laugh and bright blue eyes. He loved fashion and worked plenty of odd jobs to afford his obsession with Gucci and Nike sneakers.

He only ever let his grandmother cut his hair. He grew up with a full head of blonde hair, but started getting perms and dyed it black once at college. 

As the oldest of three, Shari called Stone “her mother hen” because he was always taking care of his younger siblings — 16-year-old brother AJ and 10-year-old sister Jersee. He was protective of them, and they were extremely close despite their age differences. Stone loved to make TikTok videos with his sister, who adored both him and his dance moves.

When Cory thinks of Stone, he remembers a hero.

Stone would let his younger brother crawl into bed with him at night when he got scared. He stuck up for the smaller kids on his basketball and lacrosse teams. He was a team player who always did what he was told.

After his best friend, Jake, died in a car crash their junior year at Buckeye Valley High School in Delaware, Stone still went over to Jake’s house every day to do his homework after school. Stone would even call Jake’s sister, Lexi, during his freshman year at BGSU to make sure she got home safe every night from her nursing classes in Downtown Columbus.

“It’s like he was filling that emotional void for himself and for Jake’s parents,” Cory said. “He filled in Jake’s place as an older brother.” 

Stone considered joining a fraternity his freshman year at Bowling Green, and he had even researched which groups he would want to rush, but decided to put it off at the advice of his parents and aunt, DJ Williams. So, when Stone announced suddenly at the beginning of February that he was planning to rush PIKE, Williams said it was too late to change his mind.

He knew some of the active members from back home, and he wanted the networking opportunities many fraternities offer.

“It seemed like he was already persuaded,” Cory said. “They made him feel like he belonged.”

Shari said she knew Stone had to perform a certain number of tasks for his fraternity brothers, such as cleaning their houses and acting as the designated driver on nights out. He had confided in her the days before his death that he was frustrated that some of the PIKE members were making fun of his TikTok videos.

If Stone felt teased for making dance videos with his sister, then how much more embarrassment and ridicule would he face for refusing to participate in the fraternity’s drinking ritual? Cory asked.

“These kids feel like they don’t have a choice,” Cory said.

“Big Brother Night” at BGSU

The investigation into Foltz’s death is just beginning and Bowling Green has hired former U.S. attorney David DeVillers to lead a comprehensive review aimed at holding all groups or individuals accountable.

But the Foltz family’s attorney Rex Elliott, of the Columbus-based Cooper-Elliott law firm, said they already have strong preliminary evidence showing Stone was a victim of severe hazing that led to his death. 

On the night of March 4, the PIKE fraternity at Bowling Green was holding its traditional “Big Brother Night.” The event, common in fraternities around the nation, is where pledges are introduced to the active fraternity member that will serve as their mentor or “big brother.” 

Elliott said Stone and seven other pledges, dressed in formal wear, were taken to an off-campus location. There, they were blind-folded with their own ties and walked into a basement and divided into separate rooms. There were dozens of active members of the fraternity and even some alumni present for the ritual, according to Elliott.  

What is hazing: Why does it exist on college campuses?

Stone and the other pledges then took off their ties and standing in front of them was their ‘big brother.’ They were holding bottles of alcohol of their choosing and then ordered the pledges to drink the entire bottle before leaving the room. 

Elliott isn’t sure of the exact amount or type of alcohol.  

If the pledges didn’t consume all of the alcohol, they were kicked out of the pledging process and couldn’t join the fraternity. The other active fraternity members cheered and yelled at the pledges to keep drinking during the hazing ritual, Elliott said. 

Stone drank whatever he was given and then was driven by his big brother to his apartment where he was left alone. 

About 30 minutes later Foltz’s roommate found him on the couch and called 911.  

The roommate attempted CPR but Foltz couldn’t be revived until after paramedics arrived. He was hospitalized for a short time in Bowling Green before being flown to a Toledo hospital. He died that Sunday, on March 7, when he was taken off life support.  

Elliott said Stone’s blood alcohol content was determined to be 0.394 but it was likely even higher immediately after the “Big Brother hazing ritual.” 

“It’s time for the universities across this country to shut down fraternities and sororities right now and never let them open again unless they can prove they can act in a manner beneficial to their communities,” said Elliott, who also represented the family of Collin Wiant, a hazing victim at Ohio University. “And then if there is a hazing incident no matter how small they are done forever. Until we do something like that this is never going to end. And more parents are going to feel the pain of the Foltzes and Wiants.” 

Broken Pledge: A story about fraternity hazing and the life and death of Collin Wiant

Bowling Green State University President Rodney K. Rogers said in a statement Friday that it is assisting local law enforcement to investigate Stone’s death and is conducting its own student code of conduct investigation. The president also will host roundtable discussions with students focusing on the university’s anti-hazing efforts. 

The university is also planning to partner with Dyad Strategies, a Florida-based higher education consulting firm, to conduct a review of fraternities, sororities and other student organization. 

“BGSU also recognizes that hazing may not be limited to this single incident or group,” Rogers said. “BGSU’s goal is to get a clearer understanding of student life culture, and this external group will provide their report, which will be shared with the community … BGSU believes hazing is absolutely intolerable.” 

Pi Kappa Alpha International said in a press release that it “joins Stone’s family and friends in their grief and extends its deepest and sincere sympathy to all of those affected by this senseless tragedy.” 

PIKE fraternity has “a zero-tolerance policy toward illegal activity, substance abuse, bullying, and hazing of any kind,” the release said.  

“Let us reiterate in the strongest terms: We refuse to defend or condone any behavior that creates dangerous environments or situations for our members or the larger campus community at any of our 200+ chapters in the United States and abroad,” the release said. 

Lawmakers push for anti-hazing legislation

Days following Foltz’s death, state and national lawmakers introduced anti-hazing legislation.

State Sens. Stephanie Kunze, a Hilliard Republican, and Theresa Gavarone, a Bowling Green Republican, introduced Senate Bill 126, also known as Collin’s Law, in the Ohio Senate on March 10. If passed, Collin’s Law will increase legal penalties for hazing, education for college students about hazing and transparency at the university level. 

The bill is named for Collin Wiant, who was a freshman at Ohio University from Dublin. He died after collapsing on the floor of an unofficial, off-campus fraternity house on Nov. 12, 2018. A coroner ruled that Wiant died of asphyxiation due to nitrous oxide ingestion after he inhaled a canister of the gas, also known as a whippit. Collin’s parents, Kathleen and Wade Wiant, have become anti-hazing advocates and worked closely with legislators on the bill.  

Hazing laws: So far, fraternity hazing deaths haven’t changed Ohio law. Will BGSU, Stone Foltz be different?

The Dispatch spent much of 2019 investigating hazing on college campuses and in other organizations. The newspaper then spent months investigating the death of Wiant.

Calls for tougher laws and reforms from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and others came after The Dispatch published a six-part series, Broken Pledge, that detailed the severe hazing, life and death of Wiant.  

Collin’s law had been gaining momentum in 2020 but legislators who sponsored the bill said they simply ran out of time by the end of the year before they could get it passed in both the Ohio House and Senate.  

Foltz’s death was acknowledged publicly by DeWine earlier this month.

“His death was both senseless and preventable, which makes it especially tragic,” DeWine said. “His death reminds us that, as a state, we still need to make changes in our laws to enhance the criminal penalties for those charged with these deaths. 

On the federal level U.S. Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, — along with Lucy McBath, D-Ga., and U.S. Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Bob Casey, D-Pa., — reintroduced the End All Hazing Act in the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month. This bill would require colleges and universities to post instances of hazing that took place on campus or within a student organization on their websites. 

“You killed him”

Shari and Cory Foltz said goodbye to their son about 10 days ago at his funeral.

Their agony is raw and their emotions flip back and forth between intense sadness and frustration and anger.  

They want the world to know that their son was the type of young man whose kindness lifted and even saved others. 

Cory read a message they received after Stone’s funeral from a Buckeye Valley student who said they considered taking their own life after being bullied. But Stone’s compassion and friendship helped the student recover.  

Stone also made the decision at age 16 to be an organ donor.  

Six of Stone’s organs will go to help save others and his parents, despite knowing they were losing their son, stayed an extra day in the hospital until Stone’s heart reached the condition where it could be donated. 

“We looked for little wins in those moments,” Cory said. “Like I said, our son was a hero to many.” 

But most of all Cory and Shari are putting themselves through what will be a string of media interviews because they want immediate action taken on the hazing front.  

They want justice for their son and for the men they say who forced him to drink and left him alone to be held responsible.

“To me, you killed him,” Shari said. “You killed him and you left him there to die.”

They want university presidents, national fraternity organizations, and state lawmakers to impose new laws, sanctions and policies that ban any form of hazing, no matter how small, so that more young people aren’t taken from their loved ones. 

“I don’t want any parent, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, cousin or any relative to feel what we are feeling,” said Shari. “They need to close these fraternities down until these organizations are truly held accountable.” 

[email protected]

@sheridan120

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@MikeWagner48

Blue Mountain State – gaz.wiki

Blue Mountain State is an American television sitcom that premiered on January 11, 2010 on Spike (now Paramount Network). The series was created by Chris Romano and Eric Falconer and produced by Lionsgate Television. The series follows the fictional Blue Mountain State University and its Mountain Goats football team. It depicts certain aspects of college life in America, including college football, sex, drinking, drugs, wild parties, and hazing.Over the years, thanks in large part to streaming on Netflix, the series has become a cult show.

In February 2012, it was reported that State Blue Mountain would not be renewed for a fourth season. ^[1] On April 8, 2014, BMS movie was announced, and on April 15, 2014 Kickstarter was launched. On May 11, 2014, the Kickstarter campaign hit its $ 1.5 million goal and the movie was released in February 2016.

• Alex Moran (Brooks): Junior Starting Defender and Acting Captain from Cheyenne, Wyoming.
• Sammy Cacciatore (Romano): Team mascot (Billy, mountain goat mascot) from Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Alex’s roommate, childhood friend and half-brother of Mary Jo.
• Kevin “Thad” Castle (Richson): Senior Midfielder / Team Captain from Connecticut.
• Martin “Marty” Daniels (Marinaro): Marty is a Blue Mountain State coach and former NFL player.
• Radon Randall (Kennedy) (Cast 2 seasons) : Radon was the new rookie starting quarterback from Detroit.
• Craig Shiloh (Jones) (Starring Season 1) : The Runner from Columbus, Ohio. National High School Player of the Year, Craig Shiloh was the team’s stellar freshman.
• Denise Roy (Dennis) (Starring Season 1) : Denise is Craig’s school friend Shiloh.
• Mary Jo Cacciator (The Shaw) (Starring Season 2, Recurring Season 3) : Mary Jo is Sammy’s little sister.
• Debra Simon (Richards) (recurring season 2; starring season 3) : Debra is Marty’s ex-wife and current girlfriend.

• Harmon Tedesco (Cade): Harmon Tedesco is a drug-abusing soccer player. Harmon uses everything from smoking weed to sticking ice rods into his rectum. Harmon lives at the Goat House with Thad, Alex and Sammy.
• Donald “Donnie” Schrab (Ramsay): Donnie Schrab is the centerpiece of the Blue Mountain State football team. He is somewhat childish and very good-natured. Donnie lives in the Goat House. It was revealed in Blue Mountain State: The Rise of Thadland that Donnie is gay.
• Larry Summers (Newton): Larry lives in the Goat House, he is Thad’s best friend and can often be seen behind him. He has shown that he does everything to help his team, even diving a finger in Thad’s ass at the behest of Coach Daniels.
• John John Hendrix (Sungi): Coach John John is Coach Daniels’ best friend and deputy. He is very loyal to his boss
• Pauline (Chantal Quesnel) (seasons 1–2): Pauline is a perennial cougar in the Blue Mountain goat house. She loves it when people piss on her and it made her love Sammy as he pissed on her while she was drunk.She had sex with all the soccer players and Sammy. She lost her virginity years ago to a lacrosse team to negotiate a truce between footballers and lacrosse players. In the second season, she becomes pregnant and leaves a message at the House of the Goats. In the end, she decides to raise the child on her own until it is announced that Coach Daniels is the father.
• Keith (Heffern): Keith is the cheerleading captain. She showed great disdain for both Sammy and Mary Jo. In the second season, it is revealed that she is Thad’s personal cheerleader after she sprained her ankle and forced Mary Jo to replace her.
• Warren Simon (Ted Atherton) (season 2): Warren is Dean of Blue Mountain State. In his youth, he was a nerd and resentful of coach Daniels. He tried to humiliate Alex by hosting a banquet in his honor and delivering a speech on paper that he knows Alex did not write, and he convinces the nerds to include athletes. His plans were thwarted by a prank led by Sammy. Warren dated Debra, Daniels’ ex-wife, but she and Daniels eventually got back together.

• Bill Romanovski
• Bill Parcells
• Brian Bosworth
• Boomer Esiason
• Craig Cardboard
• Chuck Liddell
• Chad Johnson
• Clay Travis
• Dan Patrick
• Stacy Keibler

Based on four collected reviews, Metacritic gave 38 out of 100 streams. ^[2] Brian Lowry of Variety found that “ Blue Mountain embraces this (gruff-comedic) aspect of Spike’s powers above anything else – to put the bodily function / semi-naked cart in front of the sitcom horse.” ^[3] Lowry also stated, “[ Spike ] just turned that too blue Mountain into a comedic elephant fly.” ^[3] Mark A. Perigard of Boston Herald gave the series a positive review, saying, “ Blue is also often funny in the manner of obscene American Pie . This is a college comedy in which guys want to be fucked in no way, in any order. … “Joe Walljasper of Columbia Daily Tribune describes the show as appealing to those who watched the movie Porky and“ felt the jokes were too high. ” ^[4]

In its first season, the show averaged 949,000 viewers in its first six episodes, with a 165% improvement in timelapse among males aged 18-24. ^[5] In the second season, its premiere scored 1.34 points among men 18-34 years old, which is 34% more than the average for the first season, and took 2nd place in its time interval. Over the season, it showed a significant increase in ratings compared to season 1: the rating growth was + 33% for men 18–34 years old, + 50% for men 18–24 years old and + 14% for men 18–49 years old. ^[6] The third season of Blue Mountain started on September 21, 2011 on Spike. ^[7]

The show has amassed a small cult following after it was released on Netflix. ^{[8] [9]} Fans of the show often launch petitions and Facebook pages to force Spike to return to the show for season four. Many actors, notably Paige Kennedy, have hinted at a reunion project in the month leading up to the film’s announcement. Kennedy created Vines and tweeted with the show’s stars Darin Brooks, Alan Ritchson, Frankie Shaw, Chris Romano, and Sam Jones III.

Building
Herzberg on the John Abbott College campus, which appears as Blue Mountain State University on the show.

• Olympic Stadium, Montreal, Quebec
• John Abbott College, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec (practice) (Fraternity House Ext.)
• McGill University (McDonald Campus), Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec (dormitory, classroom)
• Lower Canada College (Chamandy Rink), Montreal, Quebec (Rink)
• Cunninghams Pub, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec (bar)
• Mel’s Studios (Brotherhood House Interiors)

The series premiered on Spike on January 11, 2010 in the United States. ^[10] The series will air on MTV Australia and MTV New Zealand, respectively, in Australia and New Zealand, starting April 22, 2010. ^{[ Quote Required ]} The series began airing in the UK on April 18, 2010 on MTV. ^{[ citation needed ]} MTV Germany and Viva (TV channel) also aired the series with great success in Germany and the Netherlands. MTV Brasil began airing the series on August 3, 2010. ^[11] The show also began airing on Canadian Canadian Channel The Score in October 2011.

Season 3 began airing on September 21, 2011 on Spike at 11:00 PM. ^[12]

In March 2013, Ed Marinaro stated in an interview with Class Act Sports that he was working on the film Blue Mountain. He kept hinting on Twitter that the film was being worked on behind the scenes. ^[13] In early March 2014, Paige Kennedy, along with Darin Brooks, Kelly Krueger, Alan Richson, Sam Jones III, Frankie Shaw and Romansky, began hinting at a Blue Mountain reunification project on Instagram, Vine and Twitter.

On April 8, 2014, Blue Mountain State: The Movie was officially announced. To help make the announcement, Alan Ritchson as Tad Castle filmed a fake video featuring Jimmy Kimmel (Kimmel footage taken from an interview with Kanye West in 2013).

On April 15, production launched a Kickstarter campaign very similar to Veronica Mars’s hugely successful campaign to turn a canceled show into a feature film. The goal of the project was to raise $ 1.5 million by May 15 to fund the film.There were rewards for campaign donations such as personalized tweets from actors ($ 10 donation), BMS logo glasses ($ 20), and film performance ($ 10,000 donation).

On May 11, 2014, the $ 1.5 million Kickstarter target was reached. On May 15, 2014, the Kickstarter campaign ended and the final fundraiser was $ 1,911,827 from 23,999 sponsors. ^[14]

In May 2014, it was announced that the film would be directed by Jay Chandrasekhar.
Mancuso, Vinnie (February 1, 2016). Alan Ritchson Talking About The Tadland Rise, Netflix, and Eating Goat Testicles. Observer. Retrieved May 29, 2017.

• Blue Mountain State on IMDb

gaz.wiki – gaz.wiki

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Ampleforth College Hotel (Ampleforth Sollege) (Secondary Education Abroad, UK): Reservations & Offers

[School Map]

• Address: Ampleforth College, York YO62 4ER
• Director: His Reverend Gabriel Everith Everitt) has been the principal of the school since 2004.He graduated from high school in Dundee (Dundee High School) and studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. Previously, he served as dormitory manager and head of the Christian Theology Department at Ampleforth.
• Year of foundation: 1802.
• School status: Blended learning.
• Age of study: 13-18 years old, full-time education / boarding house (from 13 years old).
• Organization Affiliations: Conference of Headmasters and Headmasters (HMC).
• Number of students: 626 students, of which 100 day students (61 boys, 39 girls), 526 live in the school residence (394 boys, 132 girls), in the last year of study (Upper sixth) 115 students.

Location of Ampleforth College.

The College is located in the vast and very scenic countryside of Yorkshire, near the city of York.

Ampleforth College.

Amplefort School was founded in the city of the same name.It adjoins the Benedictine monastery and the Abbey of St. Laurence. The monastic community founded a monastery in Lorraine in 1608. The director and part of the school staff are monks. The main goal is to educate Catholics about the faith and all areas of knowledge.

Amplefort was founded as a boys’ school, but today it is a blended college. Since 2000, girls have been admitted to the Sixth Form, and since 2004, they have also entered secondary school (from the age of 13).

Comfortable dormitories, significantly refurbished in recent years , are located throughout the college. Amplefort is affiliated with Gilling Castle Preparatory School, which is two miles from the college.

Education at Ampleforth College.

School enrollment: Basic admission ages are 13 and 16. To enter college, you must pass the Common Entrance, and your own entrance exam is also used.To enter the senior classes (Sixth Form), you need to pass 5 GCSE exams for grades of at least B. No special skills are required. About 35% of students come from their own preparatory school.

Curriculum: The Amplefort School offers GCSE and A-level programs.

A-level offers a choice of 29 subjects: Christian theology, Christian life, chemistry, physics, mathematics, higher mathematics, economics, business, biology, history, geography, computer technology, politics, classical civilization, physical education, music, musical technology, arts, design and technology, English literature, English as a foreign language, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek and Latin.

Professional area: there is an opportunity to gain work experience during the holidays.

Special Conditions: Training for disabled students and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes.

Languages: GCSE and A-level can be taken in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Classical Greek and Latin.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT): Taught as a separate subject, and as part of the curriculum in other subjects.Students have at their disposal 10 hours a day 100 computers that are connected to a local network and have access to e-mail and the Internet. Many students, mostly A-level students, use their own laptops.

Exam results: GCSE – in the 11th year of study, 99% of students received at least a C grade in 5 subjects.

A-level – 10% passed 4 subjects, 79% passed 3 subjects (on average 3.1 subjects).

After graduation: 95% of graduates go to universities (45% after a year), of which 10% go to universities in Oxford and Cambridge, the rest choose to study medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, engineering, law , arts, design and other subjects or are employed.

Arts at Ampleforth College.

Music: More than 30% of students play musical instruments. Instrumental exams can be passed. The school has many musical groups, including an orchestra, singing group, string and wind ensembles.

Drama: It is possible to pass GCSE in theater arts. Many students take part in school plays. Some former students play in renowned theaters such as the National Youth Theater, Bristol Old Vic School, Central School.

Art and Design: on average, 30% pass GCSE, 12% – A-level. You can also study sculpture and photography.

Sports at Ampleforth College.

Sports are compulsory.

Sports to choose from: rugby, hockey, netball, cricket, squash, swimming, tennis, badminton, golf, basketball, fencing, athletics, football, cross country running, lacrosse, horse riding. Students compete for the school nationally in rugby competition.

In addition to sports, students are optionally invited to participate in the program for the Duke of Edinburgh Prize (public works, sports, expeditions) and to engage in military sports training (CCF). It is possible to pass the Red Cross first aid exams.

There are over 35 clubs at Amplefort School, for example, science, karate, bridge, public speaking, chess, Red Cross, photography club, golf.

School life at Ampleforth College.

School Uniform: Not required, but dress code (all students wear jackets, boys wear ties, suits on Sundays).

Dormitories and Prefects: Various competitions are held between the dormitories. Heads and prefects are appointed by the director.

Confession: Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Liturgy is an integral part of school life. Students are mostly Catholic, but religious affiliation does not affect school enrollment.

Social life: The school hosts theatrical performances, choir performances and debates in conjunction with other schools. Foreign trips are organized, including to ski resorts. Also, student exchanges with France, Germany and Spain are regularly organized. The college cooperates with schools in France, Russia and Eastern Europe.

Students are allowed to use their own bicycles in the school. There is a school store and an Abbey shop on campus.

Accommodation at Ampleforth College.

All A-Level students live in single rooms. Pupils of 10-11 years of study in doubles. Schoolchildren of 9 years of study in dormitories for 4-6 people. Each hostel has approximately 65-70 people. Boys and girls live separately. Qualified medical staff live in the residence. A-level students in the hostel can prepare their own food and drinks. Some meals are held in a formal setting. Students are allowed to visit nearby towns.Weekends and holidays according to the schedule.

Discipline at Ampleforth College.

The College strives to develop self-discipline and social responsibility in students. Staff immediately respond to behavioral disturbances. The punishment depends on the circumstances. For minor violations of academic discipline, students will have to stay after classes or do additional academic work. To improve academic performance, students are individually supervised by teachers in each subject.

For other misconduct, punishment may be imposed in the form of minor physical labor, a fine or the revocation of any privileges. For more serious violations, suspension from classes is threatened. The school has a strict policy on bullying, drugs and alcohol. The task of the school is to teach students to take responsibility for themselves and for their relationship with society.

Russian translation, synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation, example sentences, transcription, meaning, collocations

Hamilton High School (Chandler, AZ) – Hamilton High School (Chandler, Arizona)

Chandler High School, AZ

Code

Hamilton High School is a public high school in Chandler, Arizona, USA. It is the largest high school in Arizona and the 64th largest in the country, with over 4,100 students.

History

The Hamilton Campus is located on land originally owned by the Hamilton family.Family patriarch John August Hamilton helped found the city of Chandler, which served as the sheriff for all of what is now the Southeastern Phoenix Metropolitan Area. According to the Chandler Museum and the Chandler Historical Society, Jerry Lauper Field marks the location of the Hamilton family store. The corner of Arizona Avenue / SR 87 and Ocotillo Boulevard has been called the “corner of Hamilton”.

As the Phoenix area became more populated, Chandler High School could not keep up with the growing educational needs.In 1996, voters pledged a $ 33 million bond to Chandler Unified School District (CUSD) for the purchase of 359,341 ft ² (3,338.3 m ² ) real estate and contracted Stantec to build the initial high school campus Hamilton. The school began operating in 1998 with Fred DePrez as director and 1,600 freshmen and elementary students.

Academicians

SAT 2019 Results

ACT results in 2019

Hamilton meets Arizona Department of Education standards and implements the State’s Education and Career Action Plan (ECAP) required for all students in grades 9-12 who must complete Arizona Public High School.CUSD high schools also implement an open admission policy, which means that students outside planned school boundaries can attend school without tuition fees or other fines.

Arizona requires all high school students to complete 6 credits courses during their first and junior years and be able to reduce the number of credits to 4 credits courses if they are ready to graduate. However, CUSD requires all students to obtain 22 credits, whereas the public university system, overseen by the Arizona Board of Trustees, requires only 16 credits in the following areas:

• English – 4 points
• Mathematics – 4 credits
• Science – 3 credits
• Social research.- 3 credits
• Career and technical educator / visual arts – 1 credit
• Physical Education – 1 credit
• Integrated health – ½ point
• Elective courses – 5 ½ credits

Cross-credit 90,780

In Hamilton and all CUSD high school students can swap three semesters (½ semester credit) Spiritline, from Beginning to Advance Dance, Drill Team, Color Guard, Marching Band, Winter Guard or AFJROTC, essentially waiving the required one physical education credit. required for graduation.

Students who choose applied sciences in fields such as applied biology or applied agricultural sciences receive equivalent scientific credits. Likewise, economic loans can be awarded in areas such as agricultural business management, business, business applications, marketing, economic applications, family and consumer sciences, and professional courses.

Community College Credits are available through a partnership with Chandler-Gilbert Community College (CGCC) and joint vocational course credits are provided by East Valley Institute of Technology (EVIT).Students must be admitted twice to Arizona Community College or the Arizona Public University System in order to earn degree credits. The CUSD Department of Transportation provides routes between Hamilton, EVIT, and CGCC with off-hour transportation designed for students participating in activities.

In addition to EVIT and CGCC, the University of Arizona has piloted university loans for students taking introductory engineering courses since 2014.

Praise

The Arizona Education Foundation awarded Hamilton an A + School of Excellence award in 2005, 2009 and 2013. In 2014, it was the 15th school to receive the highest scores on the Arizona State Measurement Instrument Test (AIMS), and the best school without the use of magnets, participating in the annual public school exam. The President’s Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science was presented to Deborah Nipar in 2019 for her work as an AP Chemistry and Honors Research Instructor, one of five recipients from Arizona.

Students have received numerous awards, including: National Awards, the Western Governors Association’s Annual Spirit Award, the Governor’s Innovation Award, and the ASU Gammage High School Musical Theater Awards.

Demographics of Hamilton High School Students in 2019

Statistics

US News reports that in 2019, 95% of graduates, 51% are fluent in reading, 51% are proficient in math, 35% have passed the AP exam, and 44% are trying to pass the AP exam with an overall rating of 90.78 / 100.According to the report, Hamilton ranked 15th in the Phoenix metropolitan area, 23rd in Arizona, and 1590th nationally. Starting with the 2019 Arizona Learning Readiness Measurement for Informing Teachers (AzMERIT), which replaced the Arizona Instrument for Measuring Standards (AIMS) testing showing that students were 88.6% ready.

The same report states that 22% of participants in the free lunch program, 3% in the reduced price lunch program, and 25% meet the criteria for an economically disadvantaged population.

Other events

Hamilton organized the Breaking Barriers for Excellence Equity Symposium 2019 to improve the relationship between students and teachers. The non-denominational Phoenix Church of Christ holds events on Wednesdays and Sundays in the hall.

athletics

Hamilton is a member school of the Arizona Interschool Association (AIA) that offers Title IX sports to boys and girls. Student Athletes can participate in varsity, junior varsity and freshman-only teams, as well as individual sports at the AIA 6A Conference.Hamilton Athletics consists of the following sports:

Baseball

90,015 385

Since Hamilton started playing, the team has played 7 Arizona State Championships in its first 20 years, becoming the third school after St. David (12) and Scottsdale Chaparral (10) since 1985.In 2020, the team moved up from the preseason rankings from 4th to 4th place. # 1 nationwide by MaxPreps Xcellent 25 with a record 8-0 before all public schools close indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The program has produced many student and professional players, most notably 2019 MLB National League’s Most Valuable Player of the Year, Cody Bellinger.

Basketball

90,015 276

The varsity women’s basketball team won the Arizona 6A State Championship in the 2015-16 and 2018-19 seasons.

High numbers of freshman football programmers resulted in Hamilton fielding two freshman-only teams playing exclusively at the 6A conference in Arizona against other freshman-only teams.

History

John Renn was the first employee recruited from Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmore, Illinois and began recruiting strong staff for this program.Hamilton began participating in the 5A conference in 1998 as a freelance team, and despite their 7-2 record, they were unable to compete in the state championship playoffs. The following year, the AIA placed Hamilton in the Fiesta region, where the team earned most of their region names. The program gained more attention when Terrell Suggs, a future Arizona State and NFL player, moved out of Chandler High School, setting high school and state records in end positions of early backing and defense.Local media recognized his success, anointing him as the best footballer produced exclusively from Arizona.

Hamilton’s dominance over the next 15 years will begin in 2001 with their first appearance in a 5A State Championship game, losing to Red Mountain 13-10. The first state championship will take place in 2003, after which he will win 7 state championships in large schools, appear in an additional 8 and win 11 regional titles. During this time, Hamilton’s football ranked several times in the national rankings and was ranked 4th in the USA Today Super25 poll when Desert Vista High School broke a state record of 53 wins in November 2011.

National and international game

Team has also traveled around the country and abroad, playing with some of the best teams. Beginning in September 2006, Hamilton traveled to Massillon, Ohio to play Washington High School at the McDonald’s Kirk Herbstreit Football Challenge, losing 35-26. The 2008 team traveled to Miami, Florida, playing at Booker T. Washington High School, winning 37–19. Hamilton will host Las Vegas ‘s # 11 Bishop Gorman High School at the University of Northern Arizona’ s Walkup Skydome in 2014 for a 24-17 victory in rank # 16 stats ahead of the game.Hamilton’s first out-of-state team was Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe Springs, California in the 2009 season, leaving their opponents 52–0 closed.

2012 season was invited to the Irish World Football Tournament organized by the University of Notre Dame and the United States Naval Academy. The tournament pitted Hamilton against the multi-year powerhouse of Notre Dame High School coming from Sherman Oaks, California, beating Hamilton 27–15 at Parnell Park in Dublin.The following season, Eastlake High School of Chula Vista, California, was admitted to San Diego, where the Husky won 28-17. Hamilton returned from the State of Play for a 2018 trip to Las Vegas’s Arbor View High School wins 23-17. Arbor View High School would visit Hamilton next year, losing 41–7.

During the first 20 years of college football against a non-Arizona team, Hamilton set a total of 5-5 records.

Hazing case

In 2017, an investigation into alleged bullying by members of Hamilton’s football team was made public.The investigation alleges that there have been several incidents since September 2015, including sexual assault, assault, aggravated assault, molestation, kidnapping and child abuse. Ultimately, three students were indicted, two as minors and one as an adult. In September 2017, the CUSD reassigned varsity football coach Steve Belles, sporting director and school principal, to district offices indefinitely.Investigators recommended child abuse and a refusal to report child abuse allegations as the case became entangled with video and audio evidence of witness falsification and victim intimidation. Maricopa County Attorney General Bill Montgomery later announced that his office would not press charges against the three administrators. The families of the five alleged victims have filed civil lawsuits against the Chandler and Hamilton Unified School District administrators who set an undisclosed amount in 2019.2018 hiring Mike Zbedski varsity head coach dismissive interim head coach Dick Banizewski and Belles retired from CUSD for Juan Diego Catholic High School in Draper, Utah as coach position. After 3 years of criminal proceedings, the only student charged as an adult in February 2020 agreed to a plea deal for one misdemeanor charge of aggravated assault, with the sentence counting as serving time.

Golf

Boys’ Team

The Boys’ Team won the national championship in 2011 and 2019 at the Antigua National High School Golf Invitational.They have also won 5 championships in a row, with a total of 7 championships in the boys’ state golf team championships.

Arizona State Championships: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2014 and 2019

Finalists: 2018

Third place: 2011 (draw), 2013, 2015 and 2017

Girls team

The girls ‘team won the 2010 AIA Girls’ State Golf Team Championship.

Arizona State Champions: 2010

Silver medalists: 2011, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019

Third place: 2018, 2019 and 2020

Football

Boys’ Team

Boys’ team won the AIA State Championship in 2012 and 2016.

Girls team

Hamilton’s only AIA State Championship took place in the 2011 season.

Softball

90,015 191

The varsity softball team won consecutive state titles in 2016 and 2017.

Volleyball

In Arizona, AIA plans for the boys ‘team to play in the fall semester and the girls’ team in the spring.

Boys’ Team

90,015 214

90 015 82

Girls team

Academic Competitions 90,780

In Arizona, the Association between Schools (AIA) allows member schools to participate in sports or other competitive activities that are not regulated by the AIA.These other competitions may have their own governing body and any violation does not apply to sports regulated by the AIA. Hamilton has never been sanctioned by any governing body outside the AIA.

Academic Decathlon

Academic Decathlon has amassed numerous team and individual awards including the IV Arizona State Championship and region titles during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 seasons. In the 2017–18 season, the team will win the runner-up trophy at the Arizona State Championships.During the 2018-19 season, they will compete with 73 schools in the US, China and the UK, finishing in 4th overall and 3rd in the Academic Decathlon Super Quiz.

Robotics

Hamilton High School Robotics Team, known as Microbots and registered as Team 698, built award-winning robots for the FIRST Robotics Competition. In its first year 2001, the team won a regional award at a Southern California event.Arizona regional organizations selected the team to receive the Judges’ Award in 2003 with the Industrial Safety and Entrepreneurship Award in 2014. Arizona West 2017 Regional Organization will present an award to the FIRST Dean’s List Finalist. Several technology companies in the city of Chandler sponsor and mentor students at all stages of the competition.

Rivalry

Significant rivalry has emerged between Chandler High School and Hamilton High School, which are separated by 4 miles (6.4 km) along Arizona Avenue / SR 87.Since then, local media have dubbed this high-profile competition “The Battle of Arizona Avenue.” The annual collegiate soccer game gets the most attention, where high-profile players are often recruited by college soccer coaches from across the country. Viewer turnout can exceed 10,000, including NFL players such as Anquan Boldin, Larry Fitzgerald, Matt Leinart, Hamilton alumnus Terrell Suggs. As an ongoing rivalry in the top 25, the High School Bowl Series has been instrumental in broadcasting the game nationally for ESPN, ESPNU and the NFHS Network.Each year, the game alternated with Austin Field Chandler at Jerry Looper Hamilton Stadium. Hamilton began the match with a 17-game winning streak until the 2013 regular season match gave Chandler his first 26-16 win. Chandler later fell in the 2013 Division I 5A State Semi-Final match with Hamilton 21-17 at an AIA-approved neutral field at Highland High School. Since 2014, Chandler has won 6 games in a row. As of 2020, Hamilton is leading the 18-8 series with a potential rematch during the 2020 Open Draw, featuring the top 8 teams.Together, these two schools account for 12 state high school football championships. Together, the two schools have 12 State High School Football Championships and 9 runners-up.

Annual game during the regular season replaces Austin Field Chandler at Jerry Looper Hamilton Stadium. Hamilton began the match with a 17-win streak until the 2013 regular season match gave Chandler his first 26-16 win. Chandler later fell in a 2013 Division I State Semi-Final match with Hamilton 21-17 at Highland High School, a neutral field endorsed by the Arizona Interschool Association.Since 2014, Chandler has won 6 games in a row. As of 2020, Hamilton tops the 18-9 streak with a number of rematch during the big school playoffs. As the rivalry expanded beyond football, both schools’ sports teams and other events became very competitive. Chandler City officials and other organizations helped facilitate and promote the rivalry. The most notable addition was the Chandler Rotary Club, which donated a trophy with the name and date of the winner written on a copper plate and a special street sign that reads “Arizona Ave Champions” on top.Lunch is also hosted by the Rotary Club with school staff, administrators and recruits to the Chandler Sports Hall of Fame.

As competition attracts so much attention, safety in stadiums and surrounding areas is an ongoing concern. CUSD draws on all school resource personnel as well as privately contracted security personnel throughout the school district, as well as additional resources from city, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.Additional officers, including SWAT teams and K-9 units, are integrated throughout the city. Digital surveillance is also used, from social media monitoring to temporary surveillance cameras.

Campus

Hamilton was built by Stantec on a $ 33 million bond issued for CUSD on a 359,341 ft ² (3,338.3 m ² ) site at the northwest corner of Arizona Avenue / SR 87 and Ocotillo Boulevard. The main building is a two-story building with an A-wing on the ground floor next to the main entrance.Students have the option to eat indoors or on a shaded patio, while catering services with ancillary facilities in (B wing) offer students 6 dining styles.

Traditional classrooms are located in three 2-story wings (C-wing, D-wing and E-wing) in a square shape with classrooms on either side of the corridors and one independent staircase to the wing. The main corridor has two staircases and an elevator for disabled or traumatized students. On the ground floor of the D-wing, there is a childcare service called the Lil ‘Express Learning Center that is open to teachers and students running the Arizona Department of Education’s early childhood education program.The learning center also has a walled and indoor playground on the north end of the campus. Also on the ground floor is a special classroom for retarded students with licensed speech, occupational and physical therapists adhering to Title I.

All performing arts such as concert orchestra, orchestra, gymnastics, dance and arts are located in the southeast part of the main building (H-wing) surrounding the 600-seat auditorium. Also, the gym (G-Wing) is surrounded by changing rooms and a small lift.In the north parking lot, there are double-width mobile classrooms (M-Wing) due to the large number of students.

In November 2015, a US $ 192 million bond was awarded to CUSD for construction and renovation in the area. Hamilton was allocated $ 4.5 million for a two-story building (N-wing) with 20 classrooms and additional office space of 27,530 feet ² (2557.6 m ² ), located on the site where the concrete open-air basketball courts.

Sports facilities

The largest sports facility in Hamilton is Jerry Loper Field, which hosts all football, soccer, lightweight and other events. The field’s namesake bears the name of the late Chandler High School football coach Jerry Lopera, who was killed by a weakened driver in 1996. Seats are available on the east and west side of the pitch with an initial capacity of 6,000 fans, however the CUSD has established temporary stands.for high-profile events such as “The Battle of Arizona Avenue”. There are two field homes within Jerry Loper Field, the first was built during the construction of the school and the second is a 9,585 ft ² weightlifting center (890.5 m ² ) built in 2019 for students exercising athletics. Concession stands, toilets and ticket facilities are also located within the gate.

The school’s Dale Hancock Gymnasium has the capacity to accommodate 3,000 fans with foldable stands on either side of the main basketball court, which drops several feet below.Namesake named by the late member of the CUSD Board of Education by Dale Hancock in 2011. The gym hosts several events including basketball, volleyball, badminton, invigorating rallies, the Hamilton Invitational Science and Engineering Fair (HISEF) and other events.

The CUSD Transportation Department closed its 2005 Hamilton Yard and laid new asphalt, providing a training ground for the Hamilton Marching Band for the fall season, as well as an auxiliary parking lot for major events.The rest of the original sports facilities are 4 baseball diamonds, 3 softball diamonds, 2 practice soccer fields, 10 tennis courts and water cages with added amenities such as bathrooms and ticket offices.

State institutions

The City of Chandler annexed the Chandler branch of the Public Library System and the Hamilton Aquatic Center are open for public use during the summer months.

Famous people

Faculty

90,779 Alumni 90,780

References

external references

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