Napa High football program can't shake off effects of hazing incident
The Napa High School varsity football team is back in action, popping pads and preparing for another season. But after months of rumor, finger-pointing and uncertainty, little seems normal on the practice field off of Marin Street.
There is a new head coach, a starkly diminished roster and a mass of lingering resentment in the wake of a hazing scandal that nearly brought down the program.
So much has happened since I first wrote about this topic back in early April. So much.
For one thing, Napa High football almost went away. On May 18, principal Annie Petrie emailed a letter to parents explaining that the school had made offers to six candidates for the position of varsity head coach, an opening created when former coach Troy Mott resigned in protest over increased involvement by Napa Valley Unified School District in hiring assistant coaches. All six candidates declined.
'In order to meet the safety, conditioning, and training needs, as well as the need to provide academic options, we have determined that the last practical date for the coaching staff to be in place to be June 15th,' Petrie wrote.
Where some saw tragedy in the making, others sensed opportunity. During this suspended state, some of Napa High's more gifted varsity seniors found flyers in their mailboxes, apparently left by a supporter of American Canyon High School to the south.
'All we want to say is do you want to join a rival program that is still rebuilding, still learning to win?' the mailer read, referring to Vintage High in Napa. 'Or, in your senior year do you want to play on a team that is competing for a Section Championship? If we added someone with your tremendous talent to an already extremely FAST and talented team we would be a force to be reckon (sic) with.'
Below the text was a photograph of a championship ring overlaid by the numbers '42-14.' That was the score by which American Canyon defeated Vintage last season.
Napa families braced for the loss of football. Many of them were outraged. Then, on May 23, Mott gave in to his loyalties and offered to return in sort of a consulting role. Many of his former assistants quickly fell in line, and the season was saved. The new coach is Jesus 'Chuy' Martinez, who previously ran the JV team.
Meanwhile, the past eight months have marked a steady flow of accusations, meetings, hearings, negotiations, decisions and appeals for accusers and accused, for school administrators, school district officials, Napa County School Board trustees and Napa Police Department investigators.
The process has been drawn out, messy and frequently arbitrary, and virtually no one is satisfied with it.
Most of the hazing victims have transferred out of Napa High. For the accused, the fallout has been mixed. At least one, a kid with a documented learning disability, was allowed to return to school almost immediately last winter. According to district superintendent Patrick Sweeney, whom I spoke with by phone several weeks ago, his board suspended nine students and eventually expelled five of them. The county board later overturned three of the expulsions. Some of the disciplined students have transferred out of NHS, though for some reason the district denied the transfer request of at least one boy who sought to leave the district.
Even those kids who were reinstated during the spring semester lost ground. I spoke to a Napa High parent (his son played football but has no ties to the hazing case) who became an advocate for two of the accused because he believed the boys — both Latinos and sons of immigrants — weren't being adequately represented. He described one student who foundered in independent study during his expulsion, receiving Fs and incompletes. He is still struggling to catch up.
This advocate told me he and his wife laid out about $25,000 on legal fees to defend the students.
'Best money I've ever spent,' he added.
I'm sure Sweeney and other members of the school board would dispute them, but parents I spoke to offered a litany of complaints about the way the process was handled. I heard that Spanish-speaking parents weren't provided with translators or with documents in their native language, that one student's forms were signed by an older sister rather than a parent, that people received docs that mistakenly included the names of minors who should have remained anonymous.
I personally read a statement made by an alleged victim, composed in choppy language and filled with typos, and another statement from the same student filed a few weeks later, this one in crisp, perfect English.
Predictably, things got ugly. Parents directed hateful messages at Petrie and Sweeney, and at least one family brought suit against another student for false accusation.
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