Moroney: Missing the message in their bottles?
By Tom Moroney

Alcohol kept five varsity football players from suiting up for Hopkinton High on Thanksgiving Day. There were two, both valued contributors, off the Marlborough roster. Wayland was down two, and the Medway Mustangs were minus one.

And these are the suspensions I could confirm.

While nobody knows the precise number of players benched, schoolboy football ended on a sour note for a handful of cities and towns last week because too many athletes, team leaders among them, put the party ahead of the practice.

Dave Hughes, the respected coach of the Hopkinton Hillers who managed to win despite the suspensions, says this could be the worst spate of underage drinking he has seen in his 37 years as coach.

Daily News sportswriter and editor Rick Smith, the man I call the dean of local sports, agreed. "This is easily the most I've ever heard of," said the 29-year veteran. "I couldn't believe it."

In some cases, the police were involved and made arrests. However, police involvement is not required.

The key is the Franklin-based Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, with 354 public and private high schools and about 195,000 boy and girl athletes under its supervision.

The MIAA policy on alcohol stands for all its members as a mandatory minimum: If a school athlete is caught with alcohol, even near beer, the athlete must sit out two games or two weeks, whichever is the longer period.

Some schools have extended the punishment period, while others include the summer as a time when the athlete must abstain.

In each case, the final arbiter is the school principal, who can use police information or collect it independently and then make the call.

In Dedham, 42 high school students were rounded up in early November after an underage drinking party. The group reportedly includes a number of field hockey players and a key football player. The court appearance for the group was set for the day after Thanksgiving. So the football player played in the last game of the season -- the day before.

"The system lets the principals use their discretion," said MIAA spokesman Paul Weitzel.

It can also create the kind of controversy that lasts beyond a season. Parents have been known to hire lawyers and threaten court-issued injunctions to allow their children to play in spite of the suspensions.

But sometimes, clearly not often enough, the penalties serve as a wake-up call.

Earlier this season in Medfield, two varsity football players were suspended for alcohol.

Coming off an 8-3 season last year, the Medfield Warriors played to a 6-5 record this year, a drop athletic director Jon Kirby partially blames on the suspensions.

"When you have two players like that who play both ways (on offense and defense), it's like losing four guys," he said.

Kirby says the suspensions are emblematic of a new attitude.

"When I played, the idea was you didn't want to let others down," he said. "I think that's been lost."

Have the two players in question learned from their mistake?

"I hope so," he said. "But it seems like people are not learning. It's getting worse not better."

The silver lining is that Medfield parents have formed a watchdog group they hope will keep them all better informed of potential parties and other kinds of trouble.

Wayland High senior and football captain Sam Breslin is, by all accounts, a straight-shooting team leader who has his sights set on Harvard, Middlebury or Bucknell in the fall.

He says the two players suspended on his team last week were devastated. But like so many others, they figured they wouldn't get caught.

"I hear it all the time: 'I'm not going to get busted for this.'"

That feeling of invincibility is only a small part of the equation, says drug and alcohol counselor Bill Phillips.

Phillips, once a high school star himself, said the number of players reaching for the bottle is increasing. He blames much of it on the lack of accountability.

"We take away dress codes. We take away all these things," he said. "And we don't replace them with anything."

Also, to protect their children, some parents will buy the beer or even the drugs and give them to the child on the condition that the beer and drugs are consumed at home where they are "safe," he said.

"Tell me, what message does that send?"
 

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