Player, parents detail a pattern of hazing at C.B. West

On Oct. 28, five days after the Central Bucks School District canceled C.B. West's football season and suspended the program's coaching staff in the wake of hazing allegations, head coach Brian Hensel released a public statement that was at once apologetic and defiant.

"The notion that my coaching staff fostered a culture whereby lack of supervision and hazing was an ongoing norm is not just unfair, but patently false," Hensel wrote. He later added: "It is also my sincere hope that the investigation will reveal that this alleged hazing was a one-time, isolated incident."

But even before the school district removed Hensel as C.B. West's coach on Tuesday, people who are or were affiliated with the West program had contradicted both his assertion and his hope. In a series of interviews over the last three weeks, their accounts make it clear that the hazing at an Aug. 16 team picnic - which led to the season's cancellation, the district's investigation, and Hensel's firing, even though he didn't attend the picnic - was not a one-time, isolated incident at all.

It was, instead, a worsening aspect of what the program's culture had become, part of a larger pattern of inappropriate behavior among players that had become entrenched over time and that was carried out amid oft-willful ignorance from coaches and parents. And it justified Hensel's removal as coach.

In a letter to the community announcing Hensel's dismissal, David Weitzel, Central Bucks' superintendent, cited a "lack of guidance and adequate supervision of the team over the course of the whole season by the Central Bucks West football coaches." That lack of supervision presumably included this year's "Slap/Lick/Fondle" initiation, overseen by the team's seniors, in which a rookie player would slap one teammate's face, touch his tongue to another's, and briefly touch the private parts of a third.

Two years earlier - according to a current C.B. West football player, one of his parents, and a parent of another player, all of whom agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity - the underclassmen's rite of passage had been different. At the 2012 program picnic, held at a campground near Peace Valley Park in Doylestown and attended by players, parents, Hensel and his assistants, and cheerleaders, the players engaged in an annual tradition, dating from the beginning of Hensel's tenure as head coach in 2008, of giving haircuts to the program's first-year players.

Those haircuts, according to the player and his parent, were given with parents and coaches present and included two styles that were supposed to resemble male and female genitalia. Photographs from the picnic, provided by the player and parent, confirmed that at least two rookies had haircuts of that type, though another parent said it was "a total lie" that anyone used sexual terms to describe the haircuts. "Haircuts were never a problem," the parent said.

The rookies were supposed to wear the haircuts for a week, although aside from some teasing from their elder teammates, there was no real penalty if they got rid of their outrageous hairdos, the player said. A former C.B. West assistant football coach, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that he objected to Hensel, other members of the coaching staff, and to the players themselves about the haircuts. They told him the tradition was harmless, he said.

At the 2012 picnic, the players then went to a more remote part of the park, away from the coaches and parents, for their initiations. Each rookie had to do what the player described as "mayo shots." That is, the player would lick mayonnaise off a teammate's body parts, including the nipples and the groin. One player became nauseated after swallowing the mayonnaise and ran off, in view of parents and coaches, according to a parent who saw him.

The following year, the initiation changed again. This time, according to the player, with the upperclassmen and the school's cheerleaders looking on, every rookie had to simulate having sex with a stuffed toy pig.

A story like this one has all kinds of potential caveats. Teenagers do dumb things, and they hide those things from their moms and dads and coaches. There can be a fine line between team-building and hazing. A parent might hold a grudge against a coach. It's likely that not every parent or coach knew what was happening during the team's initiations, and it's certain that some who did know did not regard the hazing as particularly egregious.

In fact, the two parents who spoke to me agreed that there had been an "underground movement" among the team's parents to remove Hensel as coach - not because of the hazing, but because they were upset with his overall handling of the team: how he divvied up playing time, how he disciplined (or declined to discipline) players, how he appeared to play favorites. But parents were afraid to speak up for fear that Hensel would hold their complaints against their sons.

"In a sense," one parent said, "we enabled it."

A district spokeswoman said Tuesday that Weitzel wasn't aware of any such sentiment among the program's parents, and the investigation didn't turn up any of the details of the team's 2012 and 2013 initiations. In a text message on Oct. 30, Hensel said he would "try [his] best" to call me for an interview. He never did, and he did not respond to a voice-mail message Tuesday. He and his coaches refused to sign a code of conduct, mandatory for every coach in the Central Bucks School District. They were the only coaches who refused, according to Weitzel. It makes you wonder.

This has been a bitter, difficult time around Doylestown and a high school with a proud football past, and people of good faith can disagree about so much here: the hazing's severity, the actions of the players and the coaches and the parents and the district, the challenges and responsibilities that coaches accept when they assume leadership of high school sports programs.

Again, caveats. But beyond everything else, this sad situation comes down to this: From haircuts to mayo shots, from a stuffed pig to "Slap/Lick/Fondle," ask yourself what next year's initiation might have been. Then ask yourself, if your son was going to be a rookie football player at C.B. West in 2015, whether you'd risk finding out.

@MikeSielski