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It could have been worse at Central Bucks West if officials hadn't acted

It could have gotten worse. That's the crux of the thing. That's why Central Bucks High School West's football team didn't play its homecoming game Friday night against rival Central Bucks East and why it won't play its regular-season finale against William Tennent. That's why the Central Bucks School District w

It could have gotten worse. That's the crux of the thing.

That's why Central Bucks High School West's football team didn't play its homecoming game Friday night against rival Central Bucks East and why it won't play its regular-season finale against William Tennent. That's why the Central Bucks School District was right to suspend the school's varsity and junior-varsity coaches and cancel C.B. West's season Thursday in the wake of alleged hazing by players against their younger teammates. That's why all of this - the turmoil and the disappointment and the questions - was necessary.

It could have gotten worse. Yes, Superintendent David Weitzel and C.B. West officials made a decision that didn't affect only those players who were involved in this alleged abuse. It affected C.B. West students who are in the marching band and on the homecoming court, and it affected students who play football and march in the band and were selected to the homecoming court at C.B. East, a wide swath of students who didn't do anything wrong. In the most unfortunate aspect of the entire situation, the decision to some extent has stigmatized everyone who wore a C.B. West jersey this season, whether he participated in the hazing or not. He's part of it now, even if he wasn't really part of it, and again, that is a shame.

It was also necessary, because it could have gotten worse, because no one said anything sooner. Weitzel told The Inquirer on Friday that the C.B. West football program had a six-year tradition of rookie players' getting haircuts during the preseason - an innocuous rite of passage. But the rituals intensified to the point that some players apparently groped others' private parts and threw towels over their teammates' heads and shoved them into the showers in a crude approximation of "waterboarding," and the coaches, Weitzel said, never stepped in to say, Enough.

"If this stuff is allowed to go unchecked, it will evolve into something more," said one C.B. West football parent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "That's what was happening here. The coaches totally know what's going on. It's been happening every year."

It could have gotten worse. C.B. West's was one of the best and most recognizable high school football programs in the country for three decades, when head coach Mike Pettine and his right-hand man, assistant Mike Carey, ran it with iron fists. They were not easy to play for. They raged at players who made mistakes, who were late for practice, who weren't giving a full effort or tapping into the full depth of their potential, who maybe just needed to grow up a little.

But that was a different time. Pettine and Carey could get away with that kind of coaching - in part because C.B. West won nine out of every 10 games it played, and that success afforded its coaches more credibility; in part because back then parents might have been more inclined to let a coach coach, no matter how harsh his methods might seem.

It could have gotten worse, and maybe Pettine and Carey and everyone affiliated with C.B. West should be grateful that it didn't get this bad years ago. The players were quasi-celebrities in the 1980s and 1990s, signing autographs for children after games. The sense that these teenage athletes were something special was thick throughout the school's halls then, and perhaps it never really went away.

"The football culture at West is so different than it is at East," a former Central Bucks school official, who requested anonymity, said Friday. "The expectations on kids are so different."

But those expectations, those excesses, could function as terrific deterrents, too. If football consumed the players' lives, then the risk of what they might lose if they did behave badly - the chance to share in a state championship, to be part of West's winning tradition - was usually enough to keep them in line, especially when the coaches might be watching.

"When we were there, there was no hazing," said former C.B. West player Phil DiGiacomo, who graduated in 2001. "It's kind of funny because when we were there, if anyone ever got picked on, it got straightened out by an older guy real quick, mostly because we feared Pettine and Carey - that, and we were too damn tired to do anything else."

There isn't a lot of fear, though, during a 2-6 season, not for a program that had become just another thread in the tapestry of suburban Philadelphia high school sports, just another box score in the paper, just another football team playing on Friday nights and letting its players horse around with each other - until what's happening is more than mere horsing around. Until someone looks 50 miles to the east - to Sayreville, N.J., and seven football players charged with aggravated sexual assault and other hazing-related crimes. Until someone finally notices just how bad things can get and says something before everything gets worse, because it could have. Everything could have gotten much, much worse.

And now, it might not.

@MikeSielski