When Do Initiations Become Hazing?
Jessica taylor
Reporter
This May, the women’s crew team initiated the freshmen and novice girls, new to the team this season. My freshmen year on crew, our boat was never initiated, and my boat mates always regretted never having that experience whenever we saw a new group of rowers initiated into the crew team; the juniors and sophomores on my boat recalled their initiations as some of their fondest memories of their first year on crew. For many rowers on our team, and likely most athletes in all the other sports teams at our school as well, initiation is seen as a right of passage and a bonding experience —a way to welcome the newest set of athletes to the team.
Our boat put so much effort into planning our initiation: holding a sleepover the night before, making t-shirts for our freshmen, and gathering all our ridiculous spandex and hats to lend them. We wanted it to be as perfect as possible —we slaved over those t-shirts for hours— so that the new girls would always look back on that day with fond memories. We made sure we had exciting and fun activities for the freshmen to do, such as rowing through the hallways and being given a pop quiz. At the same time, we took special care to make sure we did not plan anything disruptive to the school environment or anything utterly humiliating for the girls.
Nevertheless, some parents, teachers, and students always seem to have a problem with sports doing initiations. Often, they term the event as “hazing;” a far more harmful form of initiation intended to terrorize the new athletes. Our team took great precautions to assure that our initiation would not come close to hazing at all. We called up all the girls parents first, making sure that they were fine with our plans; we purposefully planned activities for them to do that, while they might feel somewhat silly, they would have fun doing —we wanted to make sure that we did not give them anything too demanding to do. We also expressly stated that they were not to leave class at any point to do something initiation related, such as coming to one of us to get a quiz answer. When parents, teachers, or students complain about sports holding initiations for new athletes, it often seems that they do not actually take the time to see what these initiations are like. They have heard rumors about horrifying initiations and automatically assume that all initiations are traumatizing. If the people who complain about the damages caused by initiation were to take the time to actually watch the events unfold, they would see that they often end up simply being an amusing, somewhat embarrassing day for the new athletes.
