Waterloo Scandal from a Different Angle

As many football fans now know the Waterloo Warriors football program has been suspended by the University of Waterloo following the results of team wide drug testing. The university decided to suspend next season after 9 players tested positive for banned substances. The university ordered the whole team to be tested following charges being laid by the Waterloo police against a player involving steroids and other illegal contraband.

Many people have chimed in and given their opinion on this situation and what could be done, how it could or should have been dealt with or how to prevent it. I have been reading responses on the Canada Football Chat and tsn.ca and many of them are placing all the blame on the school for making its decision to cancel the upcoming season.

Many people have been mentioning that this decision by the university has hung the clean student-athletes out to dry; I agree with those points and this decision will forever impact the members of the Waterloo Warriors football community. The university’s decision has stuck the student-athletes with tuition fees, apartment leases; it may have cost some athletes possible professional football opportunities as well as many other problems that these athletes are now facing.

I feel for these athletes and can sympathize to a certain extent. I have never been part of a steroid scandal but I did have to endure a scandal during my time in university. I personally never had a full season cancelled shortly before either my return to school or in my rookie year but my teammates and I at McGill University did have our season cancelled early and had the possibility of the season being cancelled hanging over us every day of that season.

The circumstances were obviously quite different because the Waterloo scandal deals with the decisions of individuals and the scandal we endured was a result of team decisions. For those of you unfamiliar with that scandal, we had to deal with a hazing incident; which the media used to slanderously attack players and the team without correctly gathering the facts of the event in question. The media is obviously a two-edged sword; sometimes the desired story gets published and other times its just looking for a big story.

I am in no way defending our team’s actions; but I do mention this experience of which I am not proud of because I believe it brings forward a similar dilemma. Waterloo University has now had to deal with a public relations disaster. McGill University also had to deal with a public relations nightmare during our scandal and in the end it also decided to cancel the rest of our season. By no means does getting to play 6 games and then have the season cancelled compare to losing the whole season but the universities decided the same fate for the football program. A university’s public image is crucial to its existence and therefore extreme actions follow when that image is tarnished or altered.

The institutions decided what they thought would be best for the image of the school, not the football team. We had to discover this for ourselves at McGill and now the Waterloo athletes as well. The collective of people in the administration from McGill, and now Waterloo, decided that something needed to be done and set some precedents. Obviously this decision deeply impacts the current Waterloo football community and its near future but I believe that in the long run it will have a greater impact on a national level for football and hopefully amateur sport.

This decision by the University of Waterloo will force the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport (CCES) to look deeper into how they can help prevent, monitor and control the substances that athletes are inducing in amateur sport. The athletes are ultimately responsible for their decisions to ingest banned substances but the governing body needs to assume some responsibility as well. When a community has lots of crime the police force is expected to control and clean up the mess and I believe the same could be said about doping in sports. If athletes can get away with doping then unfortunately some athletes will do so and until more rigid procedures are enforced doping will continue.

I believe that the current testing procedures are ineffective. I think that the “randomized” testing is well for lack of a better word, not random enough. I believe the term random in randomized testing, should also mean time of year; not just during the season, the testing should be sporadic. A university athlete trains and prepares him or herself year round and the drug tests should be put into effect during the off-season as well. It is obviously impossible to test all athletes several times a year due to the financial and logistical problems this poses but there are other plausible options and methods of performing these tests that could help control the doping dilemma.

I also think that invoking “targeted testing” would be a good idea, a procedure could be designed that would require teams to nominate a few players from opponents in their conference and have some of these players tested. Some players may find this shocking but if you have nothing to hide and are abiding by the rules then there should be no problems. I realize this allows opponents to control part of the testing process but I am only suggesting that this is done once a year to possibly help control some of the people that slip through the cracks of the randomized testing process.

In my five years at McGill University, I was never tested once. No big surprise here, I am like most university athletes, I was never tested during my entire amateur career. When I reflect and look back, maybe a couple teams in my conference may have wondered if I had taken any performance enhancers. I have never, and never will take anything of that kind but I was 191 pounds at my first McGill football training camp and by the time my fourth year training camp started I was 225 pounds. Not the biggest jump in the world but some teams may have been curious if my gains had been obtained through hard work or with the use of performance enhancers. I would not have been offended or had a problem with submitting to a test at any time to prove it.

Aside from the changes that I believe could help the testing process I also think that student-athletes need to take more responsibility. One thing that I probably didn’t understand well enough when I was in university was that just like I expect the school to support the athletics department and football team; it expects me to “support” the university. It expects me to represent the university to the best of my abilities.

When you are given the opportunity to play on a university team, you are representing yourself, your teammates, your coaches and all the alumni. This means that there are hundreds and thousands of people that your actions will reflect on. If you cheat, your actions not only affect you but all the people from your community. I hope that from this event some new effective procedures are put into place to allow athletes who are clean to continue to compete honestly and not have to suffer the consequences for other athlete’s poor, immoral decisions.

Let me know what you think.
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