Greg Hansen: Archaic district policy hurts, haunts Canyon del Oro’s football team

Except CDO will now be playing without six starters for the remainder of the season. They were dismissed from the squad for alcohol consumption, which violates the school district’s zero-tolerance rule implemented 27 years ago.

Here’s the sequence of events, as provided by Arizona Superior Court, Pima County, Case No. C20223999:

• On September 17, six CDO football players attended a party at which beer was consumed.
• On Sept. 19, CDO principal Tara Bulleigh received, via an anonymous email, a video showing the six football players at the party.
• On Sept. 20, Bulleigh interviewed all six players individually, reminding them of the Amphitheater School District’s 1995 “Special 24/7 Rule for Interscholastics Athletics and Competitors” under which there is zero tolerance for alcohol consumption.
• On Sept. 22, Bulleigh informed the six players that they were dismissed from the football team.

The players and their families quickly arranged for legal representation and went to court, where they received a temporary injunction that allowed the six to play in victories over Catalina Foothills and Douglas.

But about 24 hours before last week’s win over Pueblo, Pima County Superior Court judge Richard E. Grant ruled against the six Dorados.

Wrote Grant: “This is a difficult case given the students’ obvious achievements — both academically and athletically — and the detrimental consequences which may flow from the Amphitheater Unified School District’s choice to implement such an inflexible policy.”

Said Oro Valley attorney Michael Redhair, a CDO graduate who advocated for the six football players: “The penalty didn’t fit the so-called crime. It’s devastating to these kids and terribly unfair in my opinion. A one- or two-game suspension would’ve been more appropriate. Young kids make mistakes. The key is to then mentor them and work through it together rather than just showing zero tolerance and walking away.”

Allow me to add a personal experience to the “zero tolerance” approach from my alma mater, Logan (Utah) High School:

I flew to my hometown in the fall of 2014 to attend the funeral service of my lifelong friend Bob Lauriski, Utah’s “Mr. Basketball” during the high school season of 1970. He had died as a relatively young man, unable to overcome a series of health issues.

The somber day got worse when my high school football coach, Hal Lewis, was pushed into the chapel in a wheelchair; Lewis had recently had a leg amputated. The former BYU running back, always full of energy, would soon die, too.

Before I left the mortuary that afternoon, I stopped to talk to Coach Lewis. I had not seen him for 30 years and wanted to thank him for helping me transition from boy to man, which he did so well with hundreds of Logan High School Grizzlies.

Instead of reflecting on his great success as a coach, Lewis spoke instead of an emotional afternoon in the early 1970s, when I was a part-time reporter at the local newspaper while attending Utah State University.

Lewis called to tell me he had kicked nine players off the Logan High football team. Their crime? They had attended a keg party up Logan Canyon over the weekend and some had consumed a beer or two.

He kicked all nine off the team for the year’s final eight games. No wiggle room. Those were the team rules, after all. No drinking. It was an unforgiving penalty then as it would be today.

On that mournful afternoon in 2014, coach Lewis said he wanted to clear his conscience.

“I did the wrong thing that year,” he told me and several other ex-Grizzlies, including one of the nine dismissed for attending that long-ago keg party. “I was a young coach at the time and didn’t understand the life-long meaning of kicking all of those kids off the team. I went too far. I should’ve suspended them for a game or two, taught them a lesson, and then figured out a way for all of us to move on and grow from it.”

My tough-as-nails coach began to cry. So did I. So did the player who was kicked off the team 40 years earlier. It was the last time I saw Lewis; he soon died of pancreatic cancer. But I will never forget his message that day.

“I hurt those boys more than I ever meant to,” he said.

This is not 1972 anymore. Zero-tolerance rules for high school athletes seem archaic. CDO coach Dusty Peace spent a day in court last week, pleading for his players to get a second chance. He was unsuccessful.

I asked Todd Mayfield, head football coach at Tucson High and Palo Verde High for a combined 28 years — winner of 172 games and the 2005 state championship — if he implemented similar zero-tolerance rules in his coaching career.

“I took it case by case and year by year,” he said. “Yes, kids got in trouble all the time, but we worked through it together rather than give up on them. In all my years coaching in Tucson, I never heard of anything like this CDO decision.”

I asked the Amphi School District to explain the reason they cling to the zero-tolerance rule.

“Before participating in our athletic programs, all students and their parents sign an agreement that the student will comply with those rules,” said Michelle Valenzuela, director of communications for Amphi Public Schools. “The District does enforce rules when violations occur to ensure that all students, staff, and our community can trust that the rules are meaningful and are applied fairly and equally.”

In the case of the six football players at CDO, the rules need to be changed. Work with the kids. Don’t expel them. As my high school coach regretfully learned, it shouldn’t be a life sentence.