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Saturday, October 11, 2014

In Sayreville, a Football Season's Cancellation Leads to Quiet and Questions - New York Times

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Sports |In Sayreville, a Football Season’s Cancellation Leads to Quiet and Questions



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Sayreville’s football season was canceled last week after accusations of hazing. On Friday, seven players faced charges of sexual crimes. Matt Rainey for The New York Times




SAYREVILLE, N.J. — Late on a graying and increasingly gloomy Friday afternoon, with its vaunted football team shut down, shamed and soon to be scarred by sexual crime charges against seven players ages 15 to 17, the band played on.


The Sayreville War Memorial High School marching band, that is.


One staff member said it was just practice. The students went through their paces, as parents drove into the parking lot, mingled and snapped photos, as pizza boxes were stacked on a table with the dinner hour approaching.


“There’s still plenty of stuff for these kids to do,” one of the band’s supervisors said. “Jazz band, concerts — they’re not going to be left in the lurch because there’s no more football season.”



On a grassy patch near the empty stadium a few hundred yards away, a few football players tossed a ball around, trying to score them into nets the size of ice hockey goals. This improvised activity would have to do in place of the canceled homecoming game that night against Monroe and the rest of the season, which was called off last week by the district superintendent, Richard Labbe, after hazing accusations of a sexual nature surfaced.




The Sayreville Leprechauns youth league practiced Friday, originally the day of Sayreville’s homecoming football. Matt Rainey for The New York Times

“No, thank you,” one of the players said when asked if he would speak with a reporter. Another football player, playing pickup basketball, said, “It’s all bull.”


On campus, staff members in blue sweatshirts suspiciously eyed those who were not school employees or parents. The Sayreville police, in marked cars, surveyed the expansive sports complex behind the school on Washington Road in Parlin, an unincorporated community within Sayreville and Old Bridge Township.


Mr. Labbe, a former football player and Sayreville assistant coach who had spoken to NJ.com about one of his own sons having been hazed, was no longer available for comment, his office said. He later released a statement after the announcement of the charges by Andrew C. Carey, the Middlesex County prosecutor, in a joint statement with Chief John Zebrowski of the Sayreville Police Department.


“As should be evident by now, the Sayreville Board of Education takes this matter extremely seriously,” Mr. Labbe said, “and thus will continue to make the safety and welfare of our students, particularly the victims of these horrendous alleged acts, our highest priority.”


But around town, there were questions about the four separate attacks that that police said occurred from Sept. 19 to Sept. 29. Were they isolated incidents this season or had hazing been a ritualistic part of Coach George Najjar’s team, known as the Bombers? NJ.com had quoted several of Najjar’s former players at Lincoln High School in Brooklyn about initiations like paddling that were routine in the 1980s during preseason training camp.


Across the street from the school, walking to his car, Mitchell Kevett, a 17-year-old senior, said he had played football at Sayreville as a freshman but quit because he was not big enough to compete for playing time.


“None of that happened when I was on the team,” he said. “But it’s pretty upsetting to me because I grew up with these guys. I’m just trying to stay neutral without knowing the facts.”




Teenagers played basketball Friday. Matt Rainey for The New York Times

The accusations alone were “absolutely shocking” to Robert Keating, 52, who was walking through Kennedy Park with his two children.


“What were those kids thinking?” he said, shaking his head. “I went to this high school. I don’t remember any trouble like this every happening. But the football team was never very good then. That was before the money went into it and people started making such a big deal out of it.”


Inside Angelo’s, a pizzeria on Main Street, that’s what baffled John Shara, 56, a 20-year Sayreville resident. He motioned to the store owner at the counter and said: “They play a game on Friday night and he tells me that no one comes in here because everyone’s at the field. They play on Saturday, you go into the diner down the street and you’ve got all these 50-year-old men in their Bombers caps and sweatshirts.


“Honestly, I don’t get it. I understand if you’re in Texas, or Iowa, in a town where there’s nothing else around for 20 miles.”


Beyond a few parochial schools competing for mythical national titles with out-of-state powers, it can be difficult to understand such passion in a place not far from the home of two N.F.L. teams and whose state university now competes in the Big Ten. High population density suburbs spill into one another, presumably blurring residential lines.


Lately, Sayreville has often been referred to as a blue-collar town, as if that explains its fealty to a football program that has won three sectional titles in the last four years. But football connects communities of all economic strata in New Jersey. It tugs on the heartstrings of parents whose children have long since moved on. It connects longtime residents to their lost youth.


But the sport is under siege in so many ways — the N.F.L., among other alarms, dealt with a disturbing hazing issue just last season. Now Sayreville, with a population about 44,000, is in the cross hairs, divided and disturbed.




John Shara, a Sayreville resident, said places like Angelo’s Pizza were often quiet on football Fridays. Matt Rainey for The New York Times

“I hear people from here calling up radio stations and saying it’s just a little hazing and screaming about losing the season,” Mr. Shara said. “Hazing is hitting a kid with a towel or jockstrap. What we’re talking about here is not hazing, it’s criminal. If it’s true, they should shut it down for five years. I mean, how do you leave 60 or 70 kids alone in a locker room?”


Earlier in the week, Mr. Labbe said that coaches were unaware of any incidents, which Stuart Green, the director of the New Jersey Coalition for Bullying Awareness and Prevention, considered excuse-making, if not exoneration.


“At any level, even the N.F.L, with the question of bullying and abuse, the media focuses on the players and not enough on the culture,” Mr. Green said in a telephone interview. “Not to excuse the behavior, but it’s the job of the adults to not put these kids in that kind of environment and expect them to police themselves.”


Back at the high school, as darkness settled over the empty sports complex, police cars with headlights on discouraged any further activity as warrants were readied, with officers soon to fan out in search of the seven players, who were not identified because they are under 18.


Downtown, on Main Street, in the park behind the municipal building, lights glowed in the distance, a tackle football practice under way for the Leprechauns, one of two youth development programs in Sayreville — the Panthers being the other — that feed into the high school. The players were ages 5 to 7.


“They used to do flag football at this age, but they start them young,” said Bernard Robinson, 43, whose son, Jordan, played for Mr. Najjar at Sayreville and is now a junior studying physical therapy at West Virginia.


“He told me they were talking about what’s going on here all the way down there,” Mr. Robinson said. “When Jordan was a senior here, the kids who are seniors now were freshmen. He told me, ‘Dad, none of that ever went on when I was a senior, and it never happened to me when I was a freshman.’ If I know my son, he would have said something.”


Robinson pointed to his youngest, Jaden, on the field.


“I’m starting all over again,” he said. “Got a long way to go.”


So, apparently, does the story in Sayreville, whose latest version of Friday night lights turned out to be the glare of cameras waiting for news on teenage suspects at the police station.



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