Athletics a tool to fight teen drinking

Molly Ball

Wednesday, April 13, 2005 | 10:26 a.m.

In the fight against teen drinking and drunken driving in the Las Vegas Valley, Clark County school officials have tried to use athletics as one means of stemming the problem.

But the effectiveness of that method has been hampered by a large loophole, as evidenced by two former Coronado High School baseball players in uniform at Spring Valley High less than six months after a car crash that police said involved alcohol.

Barred from the Coronado baseball team because of the incident, two of the three boys involved moved so they could continue to play.

Critics say the case also illustrates lax attitudes toward teen drinking, especially among parents.

"We have to start doing more for kids to realize there are consequences for breaking the rules," said Erin Breen, director of the Safe Community Partnership at UNLV. "As a community, we do nothing until there's a monstrous tragedy."

The three players were coming home to the Anthem Country Club in Henderson on the night of Nov. 12 when the car they were in struck a fire hydrant. No injuries were reported, but police found the vehicle on the median with two flat tires. The 16-year-old driver smelled like alcohol, according to the Henderson police report; there were two cases of beer outside the car and two more within, and open cans both inside and outside the car.

The passengers had left the scene, according to the report.

The driver failed a field sobriety test. Taken to the juvenile detention center, his blood alcohol was tested at 0.17. For an adult, the legal limit is 0.08. He was cited for driving under the influence, having an open container of alcohol in a vehicle, and not paying full attention to driving, all misdemeanors.

Coronado took a hard line. The school went beyond the standard athletic suspension and told all three students that the incident would disqualify them from playing baseball this year.

Two of the three students subsequently moved. When the baseball season began March 10, they were suiting up for Spring Valley High. The third student remained at Coronado and accepted his punishment.

The fathers of the two teens who moved denied that their sons had been drinking. The father of the driver refused to comment on his son's police citation. He claimed the crash was caused by standing water that caused the car to skid.

"We moved specifically to get out of the area we were in because of the high level of drugs and alcohol at that school (Coronado)," the driver's father said. "It definitely had nothing to do with baseball."

The father of the teen who moved after being a passenger in the incident, meanwhile, said only the driver had been drinking.

"The administrators at that school threw my son off the baseball team without even finding out what happened," he said. "I had to sell my home and move so that my son could play baseball."

It was not clear from the police report about the vehicle crash whether the passengers in the car were cited for drinking.

The father said his son referred to himself and his friends as "we" in a written statement to the school only because he didn't want the driver to have to take all the blame.

"My son was a scapegoat. All he did was to be a passenger in that car, and he hadn't been drinking," said the father.

Clark County School District Athletics Director Bill Garis called the situation "frustrating."

"This is why we need to change our policy in Clark County -- to eliminate this loophole," he said.

Tragedy struck Coronado High School almost exactly a year before the incident involving the three baseball players.

On Nov. 10, 2003, a 16-year-old drunk driver ran his car into a cement wall. Three of the teen's passengers were killed in the crash; two were Coronado sophomores. One of the victims, 15-year-old Kyle Poff, was a Coronado baseball player.

After the 2004 incident, on the heels of a candlelight vigil commemorating the anniversary of Poff's death, Coronado baseball coach Mike O'Rourke told the teens they would not be allowed on the team.

School district athletic policy mandates a 90-day suspension from sports for using drugs or alcohol, whether on or off campus. The suspension begins immediately and in this case would have been finished before the start of baseball tryouts. But school officials didn't think that was sufficient punishment.

"The coach took a stand, and we concurred," said Principal Monte Bay. "We wanted to let the kids know that we were just not going to tolerate that, so the consequence was over and above the minimum."

The three were told that even though no rule barred them from trying out, they would not make the team.

"The coach has discretion in whom he selects for his team, and it can be based on setting an example for the team of behaviors that are acceptable," Bay said.

O'Rourke declined to be interviewed.

A Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association rule states that transfer students must sit out a year of school sports, but that rule applies only to students who switch schools without moving. District investigators verified that the two teens were living at their new addresses, Garis said.

Garis, the Clark County athletic director, said Coronado was within its rights in barring the students from baseball. "I respect Coronado's position on this," he said. "That's probably the way our drug policy ought to work."

Garis said he favors changing the policy so that suspensions from sports for drugs or alcohol start at the beginning of the sports season. That way, athletes' substance use in the off-season wouldn't go unpunished.

That's one of the policy changes being considered by the NIAA, which has been working on a uniform statewide policy on drugs and alcohol. The draft policy was discussed by the NIAA's board at its March meeting and is being refined for further discussion at the meeting in June.

The centerpiece of the proposed policy is a three-strikes system that would replace the one-size-fits-all punishment currently in place in Clark County -- the 90-day suspension that is now the rule. Instead, first offenders would be treated more gently and repeat offenders more harshly.

A first offense would be punished with a six-week suspension, starting at the beginning of the sports season, which could be reduced to two weeks if the offender agreed to take a substance education class.

A second offense would bring a 90-day suspension, also effective at the beginning of the season. And a third offense would get the student permanently barred from school athletics.

The most controversial aspect of the proposed policy is a provision that requires student athletes to turn themselves in. If they do, they are eligible for the graduated suspensions. But if they do not and the infraction is discovered, the team forfeits all of its games to that point.

Washoe County has been piloting the policy for three years with good results, said Eddie Bonine, senior director of student services for the Washoe County School District.

"Before, we had a policy similar to Clark County's, where the first offense is 90 days," said Bonine, who helped to write the Washoe County policy. "We were having parents, students and coaches knowing about alcohol and drug use but not reporting it," because of the severity of the punishment.

The proposed policy allows kids to make mistakes and learn from them while still treating the issue seriously, Bonine said. He said there have been only three second offenses in the program.

"My head's not in the sand on this. I know kids are going to drink and drug," he said. "But we have had 88 percent of the kids come forward on their own admission, and they've gone through the education program and they haven't returned on a second offense."

Bonine said the policy is expected to encounter resistance from those who see it as a softening of punishments for substance use. The self-reporting portion, he said, has already been criticized by those who see the forfeitures as unfair collective punishment for individual crimes.

Because of such criticism, Bonine said, the draft policy is being presented to the NIAA in two versions, one with and one without the self-reporting requirement.

"We can bend on that," he said. "But that's been the teeth in our program."

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