About now in Sayreville, N.J., in any other year, in most any other football season, people would have been talking about the local high school’s chances to win a state championship.
They would be dissecting the Sayreville War Memorial Bombers’ last game, or chatting about which player had been the latest to draw the interest of college recruiters.
But this year, the topic around the water coolers is not win-loss records, but arrest records, and how Sayreville managed to end up in the agonizing place it now finds itself.
How did a system that’s supposed to protect its players and teach them to be responsible break down on almost every level? Those charged with watching over the Sayreville players — coaches, administrators, even parents — have failed.
Sayreville’s season has been canceled, and seven players — ages 15 to 17 — have been arrested on charges that include the sexual assault and hazing of four freshmen in the locker room. The initial accusations are profoundly disturbing: players accused of pinning down their teammates to assault them in a darkened locker room as others laughed and cheered.
If a scene like that can go unnoticed by high school coaches, who often spend more time with those youngsters than any other adults, what does that mean for college and pro teams, which have even less supervision? Here’s one thing it means: It helps explain how players like the former Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito could exist.
Incognito didn’t wake up one day to find himself bullying his teammate Jonathan Martin so cruelly that Martin left the team. A player’s aberrant behavior had to start somewhere, and be tolerated somewhere, perhaps by a coach who was clueless about what was going on in his locker room.
A good coach does more than just keep his nose in a playbook. He knows his players. He teaches them to trust one another, to protect one another. He keeps close tabs on them, because it’s his job to be their ballast when the adrenaline and hormones are raging.
“A good coach develops an I-have-your-back mentality among his players,” said Tony Maglione, who has coached high school football in central New Jersey for more than 40 years. “But who had the backs of these kids who were victimized there in Sayreville? Nobody. That’s a huge disappointment. It makes you sick.”
Fortunately, high school coaches who fail their players are in the minority. Most are good leaders, like Maglione. I know he’s a good coach because he was my high school basketball coach.
Maglione, who won state championships as an assistant football coach and a girls’ head basketball coach, is a member of the New Jersey Scholastic Coaches Association Hall of Fame. He is from a province south of Naples, Italy, and he could yell with such force that it would shake the gym’s bleachers. But I wasn’t scared of him; I respected him, like a parent I didn’t want to disappoint.
The relationship he forged with his players led them to battle for every loose ball, to push themselves so hard that during some practices, they ended up vomiting in a trash can. I don’t remember him shouting at us to run faster during sprints; I just remember wanting to run faster. By his actions and his example, and during speeches that doubled as life lessons, Maglione made us understand the importance of doing right over wrong. He managed to drill it into our heads without our even noticing.
Maybe that was his magic.
Did Sayreville’s coach, George Najjar, have those qualities? If the accusations are true, some of his current players, at least, didn’t seem to know the repercussions of doing something wrong, even something wicked, and they were not afraid to do terrible things to their teammates right in his locker room.
Maglione said he was shocked to hear about it because had coached against Najjar, who he felt was not the type of coach to “neglect things.” Still, he called it a coach’s responsibility to monitor what went on in a room filled with 60, 70, 80 teenage boys.
“You’ve got to take it upon yourself to have an adult in the locker room, no matter how awkward that might be,” he said, adding that his teams often had two coaches in the locker room.
Other teams across the country have those policies, whether written or not.
Justin Alumbaugh coaches at De La Salle High School in Concord, Calif., widely considered one of the top high school football programs in the country. His team had two prefects in the locker room at all times because, he said, having that many boys together at one time could easily make a situation “go haywire.”
Alumbaugh also works with the entire school staff, especially other teachers, to closely watch the players everywhere they go on campus.
“If we hear anything, like a kid being picked on, we immediately vet it,” he said. “These days you can’t keep your head in the sand. The more eyes and ears you have on them, the more chance you’ll have to pick up on a problem. You have to be proactive.”
How’s this for proactive? Alumbaugh stays in contact with parents and asks them to tell him if groups of players are meeting at their houses, just so he can stop any hazing or troublemaking before it begins.
No one at Sayreville appears to have been that vigilant. In time, more details may explain why.
Maglione said coaches — even at the Pop Warner level — could sometimes excuse a player’s behavior if the player was talented and could deliver on the field.
“You always have a good sense of what kind of kids you have, if they are good kids, but unfortunately their ability can get in the way of a coach’s thinking,” he said. “So, yeah, some coaches tolerate bad behavior, just like the colleges do, just like the professionals do. If the kid wasn’t as good, you’d bench him or kick him off the team. That’s just the truth.”
What disappointed Maglione the most about the events in Sayreville, he said, was that many players stood by and watched the assaults and apparently never felt confident enough to tell an adult about the problem. That’s not a football problem, he said. It’s a human problem.
“That’s when you know you have failed,” he said.