Mater Dei Hazing Incident

To what embarrassing actions do you refer? I would agree that there is a great deal of embarrassment emanating from the school, but I don’t  believe it originates from Father Jenkins. I would imagine that any attempt at reorienting the school’s priorities would piss off a lot of people.

My recollection is that the assault on the kid outside his home happened over a year ago. There has been plenty of time to hear “both sides“ of the stories.

The issue is not just two recent episodes. It is a continuum of changes that started in the 1980s. My perspective on parochial school athletics goes back quite a ways. I don’t follow basketball so I don’t know when the “McKnight model” was instituted, but beginning in the 80s or 90s it became common for kids to transfer into MD for basketball. That "dynasty" has continued ever since to the point that Trinity League basketball is not competitive and in fact over time no school in Orange County or LA County is very competitive versus the dynasty. It’s so routine now that nobody even pays notice when the program hauls in another transfer or a freshman from Barbados or God knows where, sorta like nobody notices the recurring headline that "Brittney Spears Disrobes for Camera" any longer.



Mater Dei traditionally had a strong football program, especially in the 60s and to some degree into the 70s but then became just better-than-average until Rollinson took over around 1990. First I recall the Sparks cousins fiasco and then almost every year it seemed there would be 1 or 2 impact players transferring into the football team. But although MD was an outlier in this regard the volume was not out of control, just enough to stay under the radar. Then from 2000 until around 214 or so MD didn’t win a CIF championship although Santa Margarita, Servite and Orange Lutheran did (this is sometimes referred to as “competition”). When Negro took over at Bosco the flood gates opened at that school and within a year or two MD followed suit and now suddenly no other Trinity team other than than Bosco can come within roughly 30 points of them on average. They have not lost a game to any local school other than Bosco since then and they’re now having trouble scheduling local games for obvious reasons. I may be mistaken (I don’t follow HSFB so closely any longer) but I seem to recall that there were about 11 kids who made either first or second team all County and at least 8 senior D1 players, to say nothing of the underclassman. And they have a "director of player personnel" whose activities we both are familiar with.



This is not the purpose of either parochial or CIF athletics and we both know this. We are old buddies. You and I used to be on the same page back in 1999 when I started posting about HSFB. You were as indignant a critic of Mission Viejo/Bob Johnson and its tactics/transfers as anyone. But it seems that every time MD itself took one more step towards the dark side you found a reason to justify, if not deny it.



Whether someone is drunk or not - a kid or not - a trio jumping someone else and beating the crap out of him is an assault by definition. It was pretty obvious that the kid who suffered the "traumatic brain injury" did not have any serious neurologic trauma. “TBI” is a very loose term and encompasses everything from minor to severe injury. But that is not remotely the point and whether or not the kid participated in a "nationally prestigious showcase" or not, that type of activity should have been eliminated by the coaching staff. Parents have a right to expect that a school and its coaches will stamp out this type of behavior and not cover it up.



When you open up the admissions on the basis of athletic prowess rather than character or religion you are going to wind up with a certain number of kids who do not behave or belong in the parochial environment. "Environment", by the way, is why parents such such as myself paid large sums of money to place our kids in these schools.  What has happened at MD was predictable and the process started years ago. There is an old saying that "No single raindrops believes it is responsible for the flood" so it’s not clear at what point the pursuit of victory at the expense of tradition and ethics became a flood, but it is time to make changes, good buddy…………………………Luca

The problem, SK, is that even if you are fine with a particular school’s placement of priorities it destroys the chances of other kids who are compelled to play against them on a ridiculously uneven playing field. Public schools can walk away and say “Play in your own fornicating sandbox with the other IMG’s, but do it without us.” I can see that point.

But the other parochial are screwed because of the rules (or, more correctly, the absence of rules) adopted by the club teams. It is beyond me why some adults are so obsessed with winning high school games that they’d go to such lengths.

I will happily stipulate that something "untoward or inappropriate happened in either incident." Now what?

I really like Mike Brennan (he hired me at Servite) but this feels like my Dad leaving my Mom to marry another woman.

Now they're stealing our administrators.

I guess Sondheimer was referring to this.



Not a good look for Mater Dei. A cover-up is always worse than what it's covering up.

This is odd, to put it diplomatically. If the school has been telling everyone to reserve judgment and wait until "the truth" comes out, why try to suppress the deposition of an AD who was in a position of authority when at least one of the incidents occurred? If the school and the athletic department are blameless, one would think that the input of the AD at the time would be valuable to serve their purpose.

If the school responds at all to questions regarding this (and they won't as they will adopt the time honored dodge that "We are not allowed to speak on the record regarding a legal proceeding in process"), I can see two lines of defense:

1).This is just typical lawyer wrangling and has nothing (nothing, I say) to do with suppression of the facts, and/or,

2). The former AD holds animus towards the school and would give flawed and disingenuous testimony that is irrelevant to the matter at hand.