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Troubling news hits proud C.B. West program hard

Drive north along Business Route 202 into Doylestown, past a hospital campus on the left and a wall of verdant trees on the right, and soon a striking sight will emerge before you. Just as you reach the borough's border, a large gold-and-black placard wel

CB West's War Memorial Stadium where there will be no varsity or junior varsity football played for the rest of the season. (Michael Bryant/Staff Photographer)
CB West's War Memorial Stadium where there will be no varsity or junior varsity football played for the rest of the season. (Michael Bryant/Staff Photographer)Read more

Drive north along Business Route 202 into Doylestown, past a hospital campus on the left and a wall of verdant trees on the right, and soon a striking sight will emerge before you. Just as you reach the borough's border, a large gold-and-black placard welcomes all visitors to "Doylestown, Home of Central Bucks West, AAAA football state champs 1991-97-98-99." Behind the placard, rising from the ground like a sleek gray mountain, is the home-side grandstand of War Memorial Field, C.B. West's stadium.

People know Doylestown for a dozen reasons or more - for its distinctions as the hometown of author James Michener and as Bucks County's county seat, for its boutiques and its trendy restaurants, for its accent on the arts and its culture and the charming County Theater. And for a long time, people knew Doylestown for its high school football team, the Bucks of C.B. West.

In a state with a legacy of football powerhouses, West was sui generis. Under head coach Mike Pettine, the Bucks won 326 games, and lost just 42, over 33 years. They won those four state titles in the 1990s. They set a state record with a 59-game winning streak. They inspired a documentary film and a book. They turned a fall Friday night in an affluent, suburban small town into a happening - 10,000 people, often more, filling War Memorial, sharing something that made them all proud.

That time has never felt more distant than it does now, because people again are thinking of the C.B. West football team. For all the wrong reasons.

Mike Pettine answered his phone late Thursday afternoon not knowing any of it.

He did not know that the Central Bucks School District had posted a press release on its website, announcing that the remainder of C.B. West's varsity and junior-varsity football seasons had been canceled because of hazing allegations. He didn't know that the district had suspended all of the school's football coaches. He didn't know that superintendent David Weitzel had sent a letter to the district's parents and staff members with details of an inquiry that revealed "students new to the team were expected to participate in several initiations that were both humiliating and inappropriate," including requiring "a rookie to grab another player's private parts while fully clothed . . . in front of most team members."

"I'm glad I'm sitting down right now," Pettine said.

How the rest of this story will unfold is anyone's guess. The police have begun an investigation. Weitzel said the district learned of the allegations on Oct. 14, but Jason Bucher, C.B. West's principal, e-mailed the school's football parents on Oct. 17, saying that the school had looked into the matter and found no "intentional mistreatment" of any players. A week later, here we are, with only questions.

The wonder is how and why these kinds of incidents continue to happen. Just this month, Sayreville High School in New Jersey canceled its season after seven football players were charged with a host of hazing-related crimes - aggravated sexual assault among them. Always, it seems, hazing is a front-page, top-of-the-newscast, trending-on-Twitter story. Coaches and administrators and parents are told to be sensitive to it, to poise their antennae for it. And still it happens.

"You're going to start needing a guard in the locker room," Pettine said.

Pettine, who retired as West's head coach in 2000, was notoriously tough, prone to screaming at his players until his spittle dampened their cheeks. When his career began at what was then Central Bucks High School in 1967, he inherited a tradition of "initiation. It was all in good fun, but then it seemed every year one or two guys - and it takes only one or two guys - would get carried away.

"They'd put mustard in their hair, and one time, somebody comes in with oil from a car and other stuff. I've got kids burning their eyes, and that was it. I saw the writing on the wall that it's only going to take one episode and everything will come tumbling down, which obviously happened here. It seems with kids today, it has to be black and white on this issue."

A few former C.B. West football players reached out to me via e-mail Thursday evening. This sort of thing didn't happen when we were playing, they said, and never would have. Yes, to be there around C.B. West in the late 1990s and early 2000s was to see a program that - in its success and pressures and expectations and attention - had grown beyond anything normal at the high school level, and that environment brought its own problems and concerns. Nothing like this, though. Nothing like these questions.

The Bucks were 2-6 this season, and one ex-player speculated that maybe the losing allowed the wrong kind of culture to set in among the kids and coaches. "Winning teams and programs do not do this," the West alumnus wrote. "Sure, we had some quirky guys, but no one would think about humiliating someone."

All these years later, someone apparently did, and around a high school in a small suburban town, everything is a little darker, a little sadder, a little more removed from a proud and wonderful past.

@MikeSielski