Even quiet kids at school never got bullied if they were good at football
I realise it's 2 different sports the closest hazing scenario I can think of is rugby
It wasn't that long ago that it was leaked to press that professional rugby players were forcing junior players to stick an opened bottle of beer up their arse and walk up and down the bus without spilling .
I would imagine that is just the tip of the iceberg
A lot of the stuff I described above was caused by some new rule the school had passed a few years before I got there. People that wouldn't have normally made the team were allowed to join because of the "everyone should get a chance to play" rule. They added something called 5th quarter to every game where the kids that wouldn't normally get to play at all were able to play for 2 minutes. Anyone that showed up to try-outs was guaranteed a spot on the team. As long as you came to every practice you were going to get at least 2 minutes of play time.
The starting players and coaches hated it. They didn't want those kids around and did everything they could to run them off. Football practice was torture. They'd do things like make us run in the heat for hours and deny us water. You weren't allowed a sip of water even if you were close to passing out from exhaustion. They made us run right beside to the water fountains for hours sometimes. They had another torture method called the Iron Man. You'd run to the 10 yard line and back, then the 20, the 30, the 40 all the way to the 100 and back. We were in groups of 5 so you barely got a chance to rest and sometimes they'd make us do it all day. Another thing they liked to do was bring in college players that were massive full grown men and make us line up across from them and hit them over and over again. Most of the things the coaches were doing were illegal but no one ever did anything about it.
Starting positions weren't determined by ability either. We had a kid that could throw the football further than anyone else and always hit the target. He had high QB IQ and could run almost as good as our star running back. He should have been starting every game. But he was from a poor family and his Dad wasn't on the booster club. Instead we had a starting QB that couldn't throw a spiral if his life depended on it. He'd get sacked all of the time and blame the other players for his mistakes. His Dad was rich and the head of the booster club. I bet his Dad donated thousands of dollars every season to the team.
I saw so many fights start over uniforms. We only had enough new uniforms for about half the team. All the others were blood soaked beat up uniforms from the 1970s. They couldn't play favorites when they were assigned each week. They had to randomly pass them out to different people to keep the school board off their backs. If you were one of the people that wasn't playing in the real game and you ended up with a new uniform you were expected to voluntarily trade it with a starting player. If you didn't you'd piss them all off and they'd bully you hard.
We also had this dumb ritual where on the first day of try-outs every year the team would get together and call freshman that had signed up into a classroom. Then they beat the shit out of them. A long standing tradition going back for decades. I went through it myself and so did everyone else.
In my third year on the team it caused big problems. We'd already gone through 4 or 5 freshman that all just happened to be white guys. When the first black kid got called into the room the other black players refused to punch him. This caused a lot of hurt feelings over racism and started a brawl. They had to send in a bunch of teachers and the school resources officer to break the fight up. That fight didn't stop all season. It would randomly start up again in the locker room during practice and before and/or after games. Someone would say the wrong thing and a brawl would break out. I tried not to participate in it but when you're trapped in a room with people throwing blows you sometimes have to defend yourself. It got so bad that they had to cancel the last 5 games of the season. We tried to play the home coming game but a big fight broke out in the locker room at half time because we were losing badly to our rivals. People started blaming each other and it went right back into the racism thing.
I quit the team that year. The next year they fired the head coach and made a lot of changes. The beating the freshman ritual wasn't allowed anymore. They kept doing it but they had to start doing it off school grounds.
Football sucked. I wish I'd never joined the team. I only tried out to see if I could make it and to have an excuse to work out after school. I was trying to put on muscle and being on the football team came with a lot of perks. You got to skip class all of the time, you were untouchable as far as being suspended goes and you didn't have to do your own homework if you didn't want to (the cheerleaders would do it for you). It wasn't worth it. I didn't get bullied too badly because I let it be known early that I wasn't going to put up with it. But I got my fair share of hazing and into several fights over it.
In the three years I played we never had a winning record for a season and never made the playoffs. The team was a disaster due to all the parents playing politics to get their own children a place on the starting lineup. We only beat our rivals once and we didn't do it at home coming we beat them while playing at their school.
Football culture is America is stupid. I guess I should be thankful it wasn't as bad as when my Dad was going to school. Back in the 1970s someone cut the lights off during a game and when they came back on the spectators from both sides had rushed the field and started to brawl. Several people guy stabbed. They took it really serious.
Our rivals were all on roids and cheated every way you could imagine. They had several students that were over the age of 18 but they claimed they were 16-17. People that should have been playing on college teams. They'd recruit players from all over the country and pay them to play for a season or two. It was wild.
