Georgia coach Kirby Smart remembers having his head shaved when he was a freshman soccer participant at his alma mater again within the mid-Nineties and busing tables after crew meals.

Older gamers placing the newbies of their place by hazing stays ingrained in crew sports activities in any respect ranges within the United States. That will not be the best way Smart desires to run the Bulldogs, who’ve gained two straight nationwide championships.

“Now, those freshmen, the guys we sign, they have to play,” Smart mentioned this week at Southeastern Conference media days. “So when you create this separation of, they have to do this and they have to do that, they’re not ready to play. They’re like a different team.”

The NCAA has discovered 175 infractions of its sports-betting coverage since 2018, and there are 17 energetic investigations.

Bob Huggins says he has checked right into a rehabilitation facility following a drunken driving arrest and disputes that he resigned at West Virginia.

Oral Roberts’ baseball crew embraces being the underdog in a school sports activities panorama dominated by Power Five cash, the switch portal and identify, picture and likeness offers.

Vice President Kamala Harris saluted greater than a thousand U.S. faculty athletes from championship groups who gathered Monday on the White House South Lawn.

While main faculty sports activities applications have turn out to be multimillion-dollar, high-stakes companies run extra like skilled groups, ritualistic hazing stays a problematic custom inside them. School rules forbidding hazing, greater than 40 state legal guidelines in opposition to it and horror story after horror story haven’t stopped it.

“I think it’s happening more often than people realize and we see it making the headlines around what’s happening in high school locker rooms,” mentioned Elizabeth Allan, a professor on the University of Maine who has studied hazing on campus. “And so students are coming to college often having experienced hazing in their high school athletics programs.”

Northwestern fired longtime football coach Pat Fitzgerald after a college investigation discovered allegations of hazing by 11 present or former gamers, together with “forced participation, nudity and sexualized acts of a degrading nature.” Fitzgerald, who was reportedly making greater than $5 million per 12 months, was let go after he was initially given a two-week suspension.

The faculty is now dealing with at the very least two lawsuits by former gamers and extra are potential. Players said hazing was so rampant in the football program it had become normalized.

“You’re overpowered, you’re dominated by the culture,” mentioned Lloyd Yates, a member of the Northwestern soccer crew from 2015-17.

Allan mentioned research have proven about half of all college students report experiencing some sort of hazing in highschool. She mentioned hazing could be discovered wherever a big group is making an attempt to determine a hierarchy.

“If you understand hazing as a form of an abuse of power, then you can see how in those environments or group situations where people are jockeying for power or trying to enforce some kind of hierarchies, hazing is an easy way to kind of make clear who’s got the power,” she mentioned.

She added that always those that have been hazed are conditioned to perpetuate the dangerous conduct.

“It was done to me, so … this is what we do here,” Allan mentioned.

Forty-four states, together with Illinois, have legal guidelines in opposition to hazing; some deal with it as a felony.

The NCAA, the biggest governing physique for faculty sports activities within the United States that features greater than 1,100 member faculties and greater than 400,000 athletes, doesn’t have guidelines concerning hazing. Instead, the affiliation defers to state legal guidelines and faculty insurance policies.

Particularly egregious and violent acts of hazing routinely draw headlines. Fraternities and different school-based teams have typically been concerned regardless of the efforts of organizations like the Anti-Hazing Coalition.

Members of the Florida A&M marching band have been convicted of manslaughter and felony hazing for the 2011 beating demise of a bandmate, Robert Champion, and were given multiyear prison sentences. A Minnesota highschool soccer crew suspended its season and fired its coach in 2021 after a hazing incident; a former pupil and soccer participant was given probation for assaulting the sufferer with a rest room plunger.

Susan Lipkins, a psychologist and researcher who research hazing, mentioned she believes incidents have elevated in “frequency and severity, and in sexuality.”

“So the reason it has become more sexualized is that it is the quickest way to humiliate someone and to make them powerless,” Lipkins mentioned.

Experts say even seemingly innocent acts of hazing that also happen within the skilled ranks — youthful gamers being pressured to hold gear, put on foolish costumes in public or clear up after crew occasions — ought to be discouraged by coaches.

Allan mentioned a study involving NCAA Division III college athletes again up what was suspected.

“In general, hazing goes from mild to severe,” Lipkins mentioned.

Vanderbilt linebacker Ethan Barr mentioned head coach Clark Lea despatched a gaggle textual content to the crew with a hyperlink to a information story in regards to the Northwestern hazing scandal.

“I don’t know all too much about it, but it was definitely a little stunning to see that kind of behavior not stop when people knew about it,” Barr mentioned.

Lea mentioned he doesn’t immediately handle hazing along with his gamers, however the objective is to create an setting the place they’ve a optimistic expertise — and for them to be snug coming ahead if one thing is stopping that.

Gerry DiNardo was the top coach at Vanderbilt, LSU and Indiana from 1991-2004. He mentioned he by no means skilled hazing as a participant at Notre Dame within the early Seventies and by no means needed it in his applications.

DiNardo, now an analyst for the Big Ten Network, mentioned he went as far as to inform his gamers that they may not be part of fraternities that hazed their pledges. These days, DiNardo can’t think about high-level recruits placing up with hazing and selecting to play for applications the place it’s a custom.

“Everyone says we got a great culture. But what is a culture?” DiNardo mentioned. “It’s the way we do things. And if you have people doing things like we’ve heard described, you know, that’s toxic culture.”

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AP Sports Writer Teresa M. Walker contributed.

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Follow Ralph D. Russo at https://twitter.com/ralphDrussoAP and hear at http://www.appodcasts.com

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AP faculty soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/college-football and https://twitter.com/ap_top25