An off-season training camp was meant to strengthen Oregon's Philomath High School football team. Instead, an incident of "aggravated hazing" has turned the team upside down. Juvenile delinquency petitions will be filed against six players, aged 15 to 17, after a July incident involving 11 freshmen at the week-long off-campus camp, Benton County DA John Haroldson tells the Corvallis Gazette-Times. Haroldson says victims were held down while the accused made "offensive physical contact" with the teens' anus or testicles "as a form of initiation." Assistant coach and former player Cooper Kikuta, 22, has been charged with criminal mistreatment.
Kikuta—one of several coaches at the camp, per the Gazette-Times—is accused of "withholding necessary and adequate physical care for those who were targeted in his presence," Haroldson says. A superintendent says the Philomath School District condemns all hazing rituals and bullying and "will take appropriate actions toward coaching staff and students where justified and continue the healing process for affected students and their families." All coaching staff have been placed on paid leave during an investigation and Philomath's first three football games have been canceled. It isn't clear if or when the team's schedule will resume. (More hazing stories.)
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