Yale’s men’s heavyweight crew has made the headlines.  This is not the first case of a program being disciplined for a drinking-related incident, but the identity of this program has caused it special attention - Yale’s men’s heavyweight crew is the first collegiate rowing program in the U.S.: indeed the first collegiate sports team of any type in the U.S.

Most folks overseas who have read the news are probably astonished, which makes for good discussion.  Of course, given the soap-opera of an election we just had in the U.S., I guess not much will astonish foreigners about the U.S. any more.  But here’s the basic story, for those who missed it:  the Yale men’s heavyweight crew held its annual “bowling night” - a chance for the freshmen to mix with varsity rowers socially.  Drinking was somehow involved.  Two freshmen drank too much and were taken to Yale’s infirmary.  The incident was reported.  The team was suspended pending an investigation into hazing and under-aged drinking.

I should start by qualifying the statements I will be making this month: I have no knowledge of what went on at Yale last week besides what has been in the press.  Likewise, in any other incidents I refer to below, I have a similarly scant knowledge.  The facts are not important in these cases (at least for the purposes of my arguments), only the context.  What is going on at Yale is none of my business, and I have no inside sources.

As I said, I know that Europeans think Americans are crazy and a bunch of hypocrites.  I am personally getting sick of our ongoing election saga, just as I am getting sick of trying to explain it to folks over here.  Something else I have trouble explaining is the inability of Americans to understand what to do with alcohol.

We supposedly have a free society.  To have these freedoms, however, requires that we, in turn, take on some personal responsibility.  It amazes me just how little personal responsibility Americans seem capable of taking on.  If we want to be free, then we can act free.  If we want Big Brother to take care of us, then we can live in Europe (or Cuba, or North Korea, or Iraq...).  I feel like I am caught in a contradiction, however.  I cherish the freedom of the United States and find European statism stifling and oppressive.  But, on the other hand, I find that America, for all its rugged individualism, lacks culture and can be overly moralizing.  There is no accident that political correctness began in America.

What does this have to do with drinking and rowing?  And what have drinking and rowing to do with each other?  Drinking and rowing do not have much to do with each other per se, beyond the fact that both are inherently social activities.  I have already written at length that to craft a strong rowing program requires a lighter side to things off the water.  While I certainly do not advocate drinking binges as part of any sensible training program, I see nothing wrong with social drinking within the right context.  I think the nature of rowing - that it is such a team, and therefore social, sport - makes social activities, including social activities with alcohol, more prevalent.  Hence, the reputation rowers have for being big drinkers.

Now, I do not encourage rowers (of any age) to drink.  Drinking too much makes for slower crews, to be sure.  I certainly remember, as an undergraduate, how we curtailed our drinking shortly after the beginning of the second semester (there was usually a big rowing party the night after the CRASH-B Sprints World Indoor Rowing Championship, and that marked the last hurrah until the end of the season, by which time a single beer was enough to make us buzzed).  Drinking was not mandatory, obviously; it was just a social thing to do.

I do encourage social activity.  Just because drinking is social does not make it good, but I can promise that in all of my years as a coach I have lost more rowers to injuries sustained playing basketball with their teammates than I have to drinking-related activities.  Nothing in this world is perfectly safe, but we live nevertheless - until we all end up dying.  So if rowers drink - and they do - and it is a social outlet, then so long as they do not show up for practice drunk (or miss practice because they got drunk), then I don’t care.  And if they are in danger of becoming alcoholics, I will encourage them to seek help before it becomes a problem.

When I coached collegiately, I made a point of saying that if anyone had a problem or thought that someone else on the team had a problem, then they should contact a coach.  Whatever the team members tell a coach in these circumstances should be entirely confidential.  It is important that the problem be addressed and that the person in question get help.  The coaches do not want to be policemen - they should be treated as friends who, because of their authority, are in a position to help.  Confidentiality is key.

One transition I found odd when I went from coaching in Britain to coaching in America was in how I had to avoid drinking with the students.  In Britain, it was common for teams to invite the coaches to social events which involved alcohol.  It was also common to stop at the pub for a pint on the way home from an evening practice.  Meetings where teams would plan out their week’s practice schedules were more often than not held in college bars.  In the non-student world, most boathouses had upstairs bars.

In America, I had to be very careful not to see my students drinking.  I was able to reconcile this issue by simply noting that it was illegal for most of them to drink, and as a responsible figure I could not witness my athletes taking part in an illegal activity.  It was not that I needed to drink with the students, but it was sometimes odd after having done the bulk of my coaching in England.  But, I told the students, the coaches do not want to be policemen - so please don’t let us see anything.  And at official team activities, there could be no alcohol even for the over-21s.

In America, the drinking age is 21 for no apparently good reason.  People can do most things legally by 18, so the drinking age is an inexplicable anomaly.  21 also falls in the middle of college, which means that roughly one quarter of the campus can legally drink and the other three quarters cannot.  Of course, that does not stop the under-21s from drinking illegally.  And because it is illegal, it carries an extra degree of cool-ness (Americans being inherently mistrustful of government), but it is also not properly supervised.  Europeans drink more, but they drink more responsibly on the whole because drinking is not as big a deal as they grow up and because when they do drink there is much more adult supervision.

Because Americans do not know how to drink, the government sees the need to regulate drinking.  Actually, I think it can be successfully argued that the relationship is the other way around: because the government regulates something usually means that people do not learn how to be responsible for themselves, resulting in a downwards spiral.  But whatever the cause-and-effect relationship between governmental regulation and personal responsibility is, one thing is clear: the government does put enormous pressure on universities to conform to what the nanny-state thinks is best.  So, when it comes to drinking, if Big Brother says that people should not consume alcohol before they are 21, then Big Brother has to make sure this is enforced.  For example, when I was an undergraduate, the Federal Government announced it would consider withholding all government research funding to institutions which did not have an acceptable alcohol policy.  For big research universities which rely on government funding for some project or other, this meant a big scramble.  The result was, in my observation, not that drinking ceased - or even that "underaged" drinking ceased - but that drinking and underaged drinking in particular became more and more hidden and less and less supervised.  Given the problems Americans have in knowing how to drink responsibly, the new enforcement procedures actually made the drinking problem worse.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the Yale incident is this: if the newspaper reports are true, the kids at Yale were caught because they brought the two students who needed medical attention to the infirmary.  They were then reported to the authorities by the infirmary staff.  What message does this send?  It sends the message that if someone has had too much to drink, then it is better to hide them somewhere than to bring them in for medical attention.  An incident at Harvard a few years back - in which three drunken rowers were apprehended by police for public disorder - was one issue.  But here we have students who - even if they did not have the sense to cut the drunken freshmen off before they became too drunk - still had enough sense to realize that these freshmen needed medical attention and had the presence of mind to make sure that they got medical attention.  They even had a designated driver, according to the newspapers.  And for that demonstration of responsibility, they are punished.

It also appears they were punished because they were athletes.  This is part of the NCAA-mentality, which never has the interests of students in mind.  In the world of the NCAA, athletes are guilty until proven innocent.  So if a university does not take appropriate sanctions, then the NCAA takes action against the university.  It seems odd, however, that in revenue sports (like football) the NCAA will tolerate thieves, rapists, and murderers.  But when it comes to drinking by non-revenue athletes (like rowers), this "crime" is considered beyond serious.

The incident at Yale may have involved team members, but it was not an official team activity (i.e. - mandatory, coach-sponsored).  If a bunch of writers for the Yale Daily News or singers in the Yale Glee Club had an annual bowling night and two freshmen ended up with alcohol poisoning, it is very unlikely that those organizations would have been shut down.  But if a bunch of athletes does this, the entire team is sanctioned.

If this were an official activity, then OK.  When members of the Yale JV lightweights got drunk at an away race a few years back, the Yale JV lights were scratched from Eastern Sprints in punishment.  That (which is all I know about the incident) seems fair.

Contrast that with the current incident at Yale, which happened independently of the team’s official activities.  Or, in a different way, the incident at Harvard in 1998 (three students in the varsity heavyweight crew got drunk, climbed onto a rooftop, and hurled rocks into the street below causing public disorder but minimal damage) - in which the disciplinary sanctions were carried out in such a way as to maximize the damage to the team.

To provide an idea of how the NCAA encourages this sort of idiocy, here’s a story from another university (which I will not identify here).  At that particular university, dorm life is designed around fraternities.  Now, my opposition to fraternities is probably also well-known: I don’t see the point.  If someone wants a social outlet, let them do something productive (a club or a sport or something) - frats are basically just places where students pay money to buy themselves friends so they can drink and feel cool.  But, that said, this particular university has made the policy decision to encourage fraternity membership, and the frat houses are actually university-controlled student dormitories.  In this case, one frat continually violated university policies over a period of time, leading to the university deciding to disband it and close its frat house.  Of course, not all of the students in the frat were guilty - they basically just lived there because it was campus housing.  Even so, the university kicked everyone out of their rooms.  One coach (not a rowing coach in this case) happened to have a few students who suddenly found themselves with no place to live and the winter approaching (the season for this sport).  So he started asking around to see if anyone knew of affordable student housing somewhere for his students.  It was the sort of thing that any concerned friend and mentor would do.  However, the director of athletics found out, and informed all coaches at the university that he considered this a violation of NCAA rules which forbid giving special treatment to athletes - specifically, this coach would not be helping any old students, he was only helping these students because they were his athletes.  But if the glee club director had helped his singers who were kicked out of their dorm, or if a professor helped students in his class who were kicked out - and by “helped,” I do not mean offered housing at less than market rate, I simply mean asked around to see if anyone knew of something available - there would be no problem.  By contrast, it seems that if a rapist who plays football needs special housing because of his criminal record, that can be arranged.  The NCAA and its stooges in university athletic departments need to get their collective heads examined.

There is only one activity, as far as I am concerned, that warrants a team getting sanctioned for behavior in a non-official activity: hazing.  Hazing, by my definition, is forcing someone to do something that they do not want to do in the guise of it being a “mandatory” initiation ritual.  Even if it is not coach-sponsored, the pressure applied by the whole team makes it quasi-official.  The Yale heavyweight men have been acquitted of the charges of hazing which they originally faced, thank goodness, because the drunken freshmen convinced the university that they were not forced to drink and did so of their own free will.  I can think of several teams which have been penalized in recent years for hazing.  The penalties have ranged from kicking the ringleaders off the team but otherwise allowing the team to go on as before, to shutting the team down for the remainder of the season and kicking the ringleaders out of the university.

I make a distinction between initiation traditions/ceremonies and hazing.  The coaches are not involved either way.  But the line between what qualifies as innocent fun initiating the frosh and what is hazing is quite clear: no one should be forced to do anything they do not want to do.  It may seem as though someone has no sense of humor because they refuse to take part in some innocent ceremony everyone else is willing to do, but so be it.  If they refuse, they should not be forced or be told “if you don’t do this, you’re not on the team.”

In my undergraduate program, freshman initiation took place on the busride home from the first away race (which was either in Philadelphia or Ithaca, New York - both stupidly long busrides).  Each of the frosh had to get up in front of the varsity in turn and introduce themselves while the varsity guys got to make fun of them.  I was personally spared, because the varsity guys were convinced that I looked and sounded like their recently-graduated coxswain, so if I could imitate his race calls I could get off the hook (I complied).  The penalty for displeasing the varsity judges was a trip to the “penalty box” (the bus bathroom) for a minute or so, followed by more verbal abuse.  Even though the verbal abuse could sometimes be vicious, the whole activity was good-humored and tame.  No alcohol was involved (it was racing season, after all, so drinking was frowned upon by serious athletes - but on the official bus ride with a coach on board we would not have been so stupid to have alcohol).

At some places, the frosh initiation ceremony does include alcohol.  If the line is crossed to hazing, then the program is justifiably in trouble.  At one place a year ago - not a rowing program - the hazing also involved some sexually deviant activities.  There should be no tolerance for hazing.

As a collegiate coach in the U.S., I made my position clear - both to the varsity rowers who would lead any initiation, as well as to the frosh who might get initiated.  I was in favor of initiation of some sort.  But it had to remain good-humored and not mandatory.  But as soon as something illegal was involved (like “underaged” drinking) - I made myself scarce.  No matter my opinions about stupid laws, I could not take the risk.  I simply made sure the students knew to be responsible, not force anyone to drink, and do nothing in any official capacity, on a team road trip, or at any other team event.

Most of what students learn in college they learn outside the classroom.  They mature as human beings - or so we hope.  To do an activity such as rowing furthers this personal growth.  It is also the reason that a collegiate coach has a much greater burden than just a club coach - coaching collegiately is more than just teaching technique and race skills, it is about mentoring the students, helping them grow, and adding to their college educations.  I would hope that the students learn responsibility, respect for others, and discipline.  Drinking is not part of the official equation, but it would be silly for a coach to ignore what goes on away from the river.  What should be encouraged, though, is not that the students live in hermetically sealed bubbles, but that they interact with the world in a responsible manner.  A little drinking in the off-season hurts no one.  Deprived of exposure to alcohol by stupid laws, freshmen will be more inclined to overdo it.  At least if the upperclassmen at Yale did not see to stop the frosh in time, they did see to it that they got help as soon as possible.  Of course the underlying problem is not that the students drank, but that American society cannot handle alcohol.

 I do not advocate drinking. I do advocate responsibility. Students must learn to be responsible for themselves, as well as to their crew and to their team. There is such a thing as being responsible, rowing, studying, and drinking. The drinking bit is optional but by no means fatal to the others provided responsibility is there. Responsibility cannot be imposed, it must be learned. A coach can help. A Big Brother cannot.
 
 

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