Colleyville player says pressure to improve prompted steroid use

By GREGG JONES and GARY JACOBSON
Staff Writers

COLLEYVILLE – Patrick heard it again and again: You need to get bigger, faster, stronger.

He heard it from his coaches at Colleyville Heritage High School. He heard it from his father, a former high school football star. He heard it from teammates.

Last spring, the wiry teenager decided he needed to do more than lift weights and swallow nutritional supplements if he wanted a body that would turn the heads of coaches and classmates. Some of his closest friends were already taking muscle-building anabolic steroids.

He decided to join them.

Patrick arranged the deal with a couple of phone calls, paying $200 to a varsity football player. A few days later, he dialed the player's cellphone to arrange delivery, reaching him in an SAT prepara- tion class.

Soon afterward, the player drove to Patrick's house in a Colleyville neighborhood, a place where brick houses the size of small hotels sprawl on wooded lots. He pulled into the driveway, rolled down his window and handed Patrick a vial of "Deca" – nandrolone decanoate, a popular steroid.

"Just go up to Walgreens and ask for 22-gauge needles," the player instructed Patrick before driving away. "Call me later and I'll tell you how to do it."

Every Monday and Thursday for six weeks, Patrick locked his bedroom door. Surrounded by Little League trophies, sports gear and posters of supermodels, he jabbed a needle into his hip, injecting the steroid.

He got bigger. He got faster. He got stronger. But nasty acne erupted on his back, a common side effect of steroid use. He hated that. So when he ran out of needles before finishing the vial, he quit.

"I don't think steroids should be viewed as a bad-kid drug," Patrick said. "Kids do it to improve themselves in life."

There was nothing hasty about Patrick's decision to use steroids. He talked to friends and fellow athletes who were doping. He checked out Web sites and chat rooms devoted to steroid use. He learned which drugs worked best, their side effects and "cycles," the length of time a steroid is used.

"I wasn't an idiot," Patrick said. "I researched it pretty good before using it."

In his popular circle, a world of weekend poker games and summers spent playing sports and hanging out poolside, Patrick wasn't a pioneer. Driven by pressures to look like teen models and play like all-stars, most of his teammates and friends already were using expensive nutritional supplements or steroids.

Their community is the sort of ambitious suburb where expectations are unusually high. Colleyville Heritage High School opened in 1996 with the motto "EA3 = Excellence in Academics, Activities and Arts." Just five years later, Newsweek rated it the 33rd-best public high school in the United States.

The quest for athletic excellence has led some to a secret shortcut. In the furtive fraternity of Heritage steroid users, banter about " 'roids" is tossed about beyond earshot of coaches, teachers, parents and disapproving classmates. Close friends who are using confide in one another. Guys speculate whether another's sudden spurt in size and strength was derived from a vial.

"It's kind of like a down-low thing," said Cameron Holbrook, a junior football player.

In the weight room, he has overheard senior football players speaking in low voices about using steroids. They talked about, " 'When's your next cycle?' or 'When did you do it last?' or something like that," he said.

It isn't difficult to figure out who is "juicing," Heritage athletes said. One giveaway is a dramatic increase in weight-room performance – say, an additional 30 to 50 pounds on the bench press in six weeks. Another clue is an eruption of acne, especially on the back.

Occasionally, girls are let in on the secret or even enlisted as accomplices. They're sent to buy syringes for male steroid users, sweetly duping pharmacists with stories about diabetic parents or pet vaccinations.

As Patrick wrestled with whether to use steroids or "andro," an over-the-counter steroid-like supplement, he was tutored by a friend on the Colleyville Heritage football team.

The friend had started his climb up the team's depth chart by using androstenedione, which had become popular when Mark McGwire admitted having used it during his 1998 assault on Major League Baseball's single-season home run record.

Until Congress recently outlawed it, andro was sold over the counter at Max Muscle and the Smoothie Factory, popular haunts for Colleyville's young athletes.

The supplement came with a warning label, and its sale was prohibited to anyone under age 18, but it wasn't hard to find a parent or big brother to bend the rules, Colleyville athletes said.

After andro, Patrick's friend graduated to an oral steroid, Winstrol, popularly known as "Winny." "You put it in your mouth and let it dissolve," Patrick explained.

By early 2004, his friend had decided to try an injectable steroid that promised even better results. Nandrolone decanoate, or Deca, was the steroid of choice for drug cheats on the Heritage football team.

"We looked at all the other guys that were taking them – the starters," Patrick said.

He decided to give it a try. He scraped together money he had gotten for his birthday and from working a part-time job and paid $200 for a 10-milliliter vial, enough for one cycle of about eight weeks.

The football player who delivered the drug to his house in late March had transformed himself from a scrawny sophomore to a hulking senior starter. He was supplying a dozen or more football players with steroids, Patrick said.

A Heritage football player interviewed by The News independently identified Patrick's dealer as one of three or four seniors on the team whom he suspected of steroid use. This player said that among teammates, the dealer was widely believed to be using steroids because he had made exceptional gains in size and strength – and had terrible acne on his back.

Last week, The News approached the player whom Patrick identified as the dealer, but he declined to comment.

Once Patrick bought the steroids, it took him more than two weeks to work up the courage to stick himself with a needle. His steroid-using football friend gave him pointers. He searched the Internet for step-by-step advice and watched a decade-old football movie, The Program, to see how players injected steroids.

There was one other problem: The player had sold Patrick the vial of Deca without any needles. Afraid they might arouse suspicions if they bought the needles themselves, Patrick and his friend on the football team turned to a varsity cheerleader. A teenage girl would attract less attention, they figured.

The cheerleader went to a nearby Kroger supermarket. She told the pharmacist she needed to vaccinate a horse. He sold her the needles.

In late April, he asked his friend to come over to his house to watch him, "just in case something happened," he said. He used the syringe to draw a little more than a milliliter of fluid from the vial, squeezed out a few drops to get rid of air bubbles, then jabbed the needle into his hip.

After six weeks of regular injections and with only sporadic work in the weight room, Patrick improved his bench press by 30 pounds. He shaved more than 0.2 seconds off his 40-yard dash time. He grabbed a 10-foot-high basketball rim for the first time.

"It kind of freaked me out at first," he said.

Patrick braced for the side effects.

"I talked to people on the football team who had taken them before who said the worst part of it was the depression," he said. "You'd get depressed for, like, the first four days. You'd be sitting in your room, pissed off about stupid things."

It never happened. He didn't feel depressed. He didn't explode with the violent rages often associated with steroid use. The only side effect he noticed was festering acne on his back.

Patrick still had three or four injections' worth of Deca left when he ran out of needles in early June. He returned the vial and his syringes to a hiding place in his bedroom closet and went off on a family vacation. When he returned a couple of weeks later, he left the steroids in his closet. He didn't want to go through the hassle of buying more needles. Besides, it was summer, and he didn't want acne on his back when he took his shirt off.

In late September, Patrick's mother was looking for a pair of new jeans in her son's closet when she spotted a bulging leather travel bag on a top shelf. Curious, she looked inside and saw a vial of clear liquid and some syringes.

"I thought it was heroin," she said. "My mind left my body."

She was shaking as she phoned a local Walgreens and gave a pharmacist the name on the label: Decagen.

No, not heroin, the pharmacist said. Steroids.

"I know this sounds strange, but I was relieved for a moment that they were steroids," Michelle said. "And then the anger hit."

Michelle rushed out to her car and drove straight to the school. She found her son in the parking lot and ordered him home.

"How long have you been using steroids? Where did you get it?" she demanded.

His reply stunned her: "A football player."

Michelle phoned the high school and poured out her story to assistant principal Ted Beal. She asked him to investigate her son's allegations of steroid use at Heritage. Fearing retribution from coaches or athletes who were using steroids, she insisted that he protect her son's identity.

Later that day, Mr. Beal called Michelle back. He said that head football coach Chris Cunningham had assured him that steroid use wasn't a problem among his players, Michelle recalled.

"They were just totally defensive," she said.

Mr. Beal declined to be interviewed for this story. He referred written questions to the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District. In a written statement, spokeswoman Robin McClure said the school responded to the anonymous parent's phone call "by opening an investigation into the allegations. Repeated requests by campus officials for the individual to provide specific information [were] declined."

Michelle says that in her first phone call to Mr. Beal, she gave him the name of a football player who Patrick said was using steroids.

"They basically blew me off," she said.

Furious, Michelle phoned the Colleyville Courier, a weekly newspaper. She repeated her story. She let a reporter photograph the vial of steroids.

On Oct. 1, the Courier published its interview with Michelle, who was not identified in the story. The three-column headline at the top of its front page screamed: "Steroid Use Suspected in Some Area Schools."

Much of the article was devoted to local football coaches' adamant denials of steroid use in their programs.

Of his players, Coach Cunningham said: "To my knowledge, they aren't using any steroids or anything like that."

One football player's dad had a different reaction.

"I knew this was going on," Tom Holbrook thought to himself. His son Cameron was a member of the junior varsity team.

In Michelle's circle of friends, the buzz about the Courier article – and speculation about the identity of the anonymous mother – waned within a week. Gossip about a Colleyville Heritage student's suicide replaced debates about possible steroid use among their sons.

Coach Cunningham had warned his players that a negative article about the team was about to appear in the Courier. He assured school administrators that his boys were clean; he urged the kids not to use steroids.

Meanwhile, The Dallas Morning News added Colleyville to an investigation into high school steroid use that already was under way. In early October, The News interviewed Michelle and Patrick for the first time and began investigating their allegations.

Coach Cunningham's initial investigation into the steroid allegations ended quickly, without any confessions or disciplinary action. But school officials began to pay closer attention.

In late October, during the school's annual drug awareness week, brief warnings about steroid use were broadcast over the Heritage intercom along with the usual messages about marijuana and cocaine. And steroid warning posters suddenly appeared in the football locker room and school hallways.

Speculation about steroid use at Heritage was still simmering on Nov. 4, when the school's junior varsity football team sealed an undefeated season with a victory over neighboring rival Grapevine High. During the game, some Grapevine fans heckled their opponents about the steroid allegations.

During the varsity game the following night, Heritage players and fans endured more taunts, amplified by several homemade signs. At least one Grapevine fan held a placard that parodied the Colleyville Heritage team slogan, "Bustin' Loose."

It read: "CHHS ain't bustin' loose – they takin' juice."

Heritage lost, finishing the season with a 4-6 record. In an end-of-season meeting, Coach Cunningham told his players that it was just as well because more wins would have resulted in even worse scrutiny over the doping allegations, Cameron Holbrook said.

When The News approached him in mid-November, Coach Cunningham denounced the steroid allegations as a trumped-up tale by an angry or unbalanced mother.

"This whole thing could be made up about her son," he said over the phone, speaking nearly nonstop for 15 minutes. "This lady is a liar. There's nobody in my program who's on steroids. If there was, I'd be the first one to do something about it. You've got a crazy mom who's looking for someone to blame for her problem."

Later that afternoon, sitting in his cramped office just off the cavernous weight room where sweaty football players were already grunting through off-season workouts, Coach Cunningham fumed about media interest in the anonymous mother who had turned a spotlight on his program.

He insisted that cases of steroid use at any high school were "few and far between."

"I can only think of one instance in 20 years of coaching that I know of any high school player taking steroids," he said. "In the nine years that I've been here, I do not know of a single case of it. And I'm talking about our entire athletic program. So for her to come along and say these things, I just don't know where that came from."

After a reporter asked the coach about it, he acknowledged that he had confronted a football player about possible steroid use a few days earlier.

The confrontation was triggered by an incident on the team bus after a junior varsity game Oct. 28. Cameron Holbrook had launched into a profane cheer about the team's opponent. The bus driver reported the outburst to coaches.

Later that evening, Coach Cunningham pulled Cameron into his office.

"What led me to even think that [he might be using steroids] was the fact that this lady had called," Coach Cunningham said. "So all the sudden, it just popped in my head. I told the coach I was talking to, 'You think it'd be Cameron?' "

After comparing the outburst on the bus to an incident of " 'roid rage," the coach said he asked Cameron whether he was using steroids.

"And he said no," the coach said. "He said, 'You can test me.' I said, 'No, Cameron, we're not gonna test anybody.' "

It was not the first time Cameron faced questions about steroids.

In a December interview, he said that teammates and other students have asked him, sometimes pointedly, how he put 50 well-chiseled pounds on his body in a year and improved his bench press by the same amount while growing only an inch in height.

Asked if such a physical transformation would be possible in a fit teenage athlete without the use of steroids, Charles Yesalis, a steroid expert at Penn State University and a former strength and conditioning coach, described the gains as "exceedingly rare."

Cameron said he has bulked up by sticking to a strict regimen of lifting weights six days a week and drinking four 2,200-calorie protein shakes a day.

He doesn't deny that some Heritage students are yielding to the temptations of steroids.

"I guess most kids are trying to get better and coaches are really trying to get the kids to get better, so they always try to take the easy way out," he said. "I'm guessing it's at every school."

Among Colleyville Heritage football players, the pressure to get bigger and stronger is relentless. They compete against some of the nation's best high school teams, including neighboring Southlake Carroll and Denton Ryan.

Heritage players fill out "goal cards" for weight and strength gains and are tested periodically to see whether they've met these targets. Coaches sometimes lower these goals to more reasonable targets, Coach Cunningham said.

In past seasons, a chart that ranked football players by the amount of weight they could lift was posted in the workout room, athletes said.

Coach Cunningham said he and other coaches prepare diet and weight-room plans for players looking to gain weight and strength.

"That's the type of thing that deters kids from turning to something that's going to put them in danger to reach their goals," the coach said. "I'm not just going to give them the goals and not tell them how to get there. Anytime you do that to a kid, you're asking for trouble."

Cameron said the temptations grow as players prepare to make the jump to the varsity squad.

"The kids are always like, 'You need to get bigger because these kids that you're going to play now are going to be huge,' " he said. "Right now they're saying they don't want to [use steroids]. But when you get on varsity and actually see the real picture of how big these guys are, you never know – they might start."

By early December, Coach Cunningham had changed his views about steroid use on his team – at least in private. In meetings with players, he acknowledged a problem, Cameron said. On another occasion he urged football players who had used steroids or were thinking about it to talk to him or the school counselor, the parent of another Colleyville Heritage athlete said.

He called Cameron into his office and told him that he had compiled a list of players who he believed used steroids. He pressed Cameron to tell him everything he knew about steroid use on the team. He asked him about a steroid dealer known as Big Mike, who the coach said was supplying the players, Cameron recalled.

Around the same time, rumors that The News was preparing to publish a list of Heritage steroid users circulated among football players and their parents.

Ultimately, nine athletes admitted having used the drugs. The football player who had sold to Patrick and other athletes even wrote a note of apology to Coach Cunningham, Patrick said.

School officials say the district has "stepped up its efforts already in place to educate students about the health risks and legal consequences resulting from the use of steroids."

Heritage athletes say Coach Cunningham has been saddened and angered by the discovery of steroid use on his team.

After saying little about the subject last fall, he is talking to his players about steroids, "trying to get in our heads the side effects and stuff, and that he hates cheaters," Cameron said.

The coach has focused his anger on the team's seniors. In December, two seniors were lifting weights at the school when he walked up and tossed some recruitment letters at their feet.

"Here are your letters," the coach said coldly, turning away without another word, according to an athlete who witnessed the incident.

On Dec. 15, he took a larger step in his fledgling campaign against steroids: He contacted the Plano-based Taylor Hooton Foundation and asked if he could host one of the foundation's seminars on youth steroid use at Heritage.

"He just wants to get it stopped," Cameron said in December, " 'cause it's ruining his reputation, too."

E-mail gjones@dallasnews.com
and gjacobson@dallasnews.com

NOTE ON SOURCES

A Colleyville Heritage High School athlete and his mother agreed to speak to The Dallas Morning News about steroid use at the school on the condition that their real names and his age not be revealed. The athlete, who admits to having used steroids, is identified in this story as Patrick, and his mother is identified as Michelle.

Two reporters from The News interviewed Patrick at the family's home in October, shortly after his mother discovered steroids in his bedroom closet. Michelle was present during the interview. The reporters interviewed Patrick and his mother again in late January. The News also spoke with her separately on more than a dozen occasions, both in person and by telephone.

Michelle said she agreed to talk to The News because she feels it's important to warn other families about steroid use and the indifference she experienced from school officials. "There are too many kids that I have known ... on this drug for me to remain silent and to watch something happen to them," she said.

At the same time, she and her son feared retaliation from other Colleyville athletes, coaches and parents. "We'd have to move if our names came out," she said.

The News verified much of the information obtained from Patrick and Michelle by interviewing other athletes, parents and coaches. And the newspaper corroborated a central element of Patrick's account by having the clear liquid his mother found in his room tested by a private laboratory. The testing identified the liquid as nandrolone decanoate, a popular anabolic steroid.

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