Coach: Charges hurt school

Each week in the football team’s locker room, Head Coach Brent Guy posts stories about athletes that have received national attention, trying to show the members of the Utah State University football team that even the most seemingly insignificant actions by a university athlete could be blown out of proportion by the national media.

From players getting kicked off a team for fighting to bigger issues, Guy said he puts them all up on the bulletin board where everyone on the team sees them as they walk in and out of the locker room.

After former quarterback Jerod Walker was arrested and charged with rape April 13, Guy was showing the team national stories about Utah State. Starting with the local coverage and moving to national, Guy said he wanted to illustrate exactly what he had been trying to tell the team all along.

“The reason I did it was to try to impress upon them, ‘We keep telling you that things of this nature will explode,'” he said.

Although Guy said he wasn’t surprised at the national attention the story got, it did come at a time when the national media was talking about college athletes messing up. With all the press attention the Duke lacrosse team has been getting, rape is a hot issue across the country right now.

It is also an issue that has brought Utah State a lot of attention.

“They don’t necessarily associate a good or a bad act with an individual, they associate it with Utah State,” he said. “It’s all a lot bigger than any of us – including myself – what we represent.

“Is it fair? No. I always tell the guys ‘fair’ is where you ride the rides, fair is not life. We’re never off-duty. We’re always being watched, and you have to understand that.”

But, he said, they are a team and they accept things as a team. It’s something the coaches tell the team early on, he said. As college athletes, they are living in a fish bowl. With the attention the athletes get for playing football, as well as the fact that USU is in a small community, every member of the team has to give up some personal freedoms to represent the team.

“For every 10 things we do positive in the community, one bad thing happens and it erases the 10 good things,” he said. “That’s just the way society is, because what sells and what draws attention in the media is bad, not good.”

That shows true with the national stories on the Duke lacrosse team.

Three members of the lacrosse team have been accused of raping a stripper hired for a team party March 13. Seyward Darby, editor in chief of The Chronicle, the student newspaper at Duke, said she was surprised at how much attention the case got.

“[It] certainly has blown up beyond anything we could have imagined,” Darby said. “In the short term, it certainly hasn’t been great for the university.”

She said it has been hard to see all the attention the school has gotten for some students’ actions because it doesn’t reflect what the school is really all about. She said the story isn’t about Duke, a white school, and Durham, a black community – but the national media, which is very removed from the issue, has chosen to simplify it and portray it that way, she said. It’ll be hard for the school to move past that image.

The only way to move past something this big, Guy said, is to educate the athletes and make sure it never happens again.

“You can’t ignore it,” he said. “You’ve got to keep talking about it.”

-aedmunds@cc.usu.edu