Media outlets have been bursting at the seams this past week with the news of the suspension of the Warriors football team for the upcoming 2010-2011 season due to 9 players testing positive for banned anabolic steroids. Regardless of the outcry of the 53 clean players and hundreds of their supporters to allow the clean players to play the upcoming season on probation, the administration is standing by its decision to cancel the program for the year.
Where the question lies now is how we got to having nine of our varsity athletes using banned substances without catching on? A lot of questions regarding mandatory drug testing enforced by the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) which oversees all varsity athletics. I personally don’t believe that this is the right way to go, for a number of reasons. Firstly, mandatory drug testing of all athletes is outrageously expensive, ranging anywhere from $500-$600 per person, and there’s no way the CIS can realistically generate these funds year after year, since it oversees over 10,000 athletes across the country.
This extends above and beyond a simple dollar figure, however. The athletes selected to be on our varsity teams aren’t just selected to participate in their sport, they’re selected to be representatives of the University within each domain of their respective sport. This applies at every university that participates in any CIS sport, and each one chooses their own athletes, CIS simply runs the league. Why should we rely on CIS to babysit our athletes?
CIS currently reserves the right to randomly test any one of its athletes for the use of a banned substance, and it typically exercises this right on about 2-4% of its athletes every year, and the organization should have every right to continue this practice. What needs to be enforced, is that the Universities need to be held accountable for the athletes they choose to represent them within CIS. The next step, how each University goes about enforcing this, is entirely their prerogative.
Should a particular University’s athletics program have the time and resources to test all of their athletes before sending them out to compete and they feel it’s necessary to do so, they can sift through pee-cups to their heart’s content to assure that their athletes always compete clean. For the schools that may not have these resources, there are other ways to go about making sure that their athletes stay clean; through various monitoring and awareness programs to assure that their athletes realize the severity of the consequences of using banned substances. The point is, regardless of the funds and other resources available, there are plenty of ways to keep a school’s varsity program clean, while increasing general awareness amongst the athletes about this typically rarely mentioned subject.
In the case that an athlete were to test positive for a banned substance by a random CIS drug test, the metaphorical hammer should then come down both on the athlete themselves as well as their school for allowing them to compete. What the repercussions for the school would be are debatable in itself but the point is the school needs to take responsibility for the representatives that it selects. This isn’t American Idol, who gets picked to be on these teams actually matters to a lot of people in more ways then one. Both athletic departments and administrations need to take a moment and make sure they’re giving the right pep talk before they let they’re players step out on the field, and they need to make sure that it’s actually being heard.
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