Playing it clean

“The decision to test the entire team and suspend competition for the season was extremely difficult, courageous, and a lightning rod for change. in the fight against doping in football, I hope others follow this example in support of transparency, integrity, and ultimately, concern for the health of young, impressionable athletes.”

Dr. Jack Taunton, Chair of the 2011 Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport Task Force on Drug Use in Football, Chief Medical Officer, VANOC

Warrior football player Brandon Eaket is in a high school auditorium talking about the dangers of doping:  He paints a frightening picture of the side effects of steroid use — liver damage, impotence, premature heart attacks and depression.

If you would have told Eaket a few years ago that he would become a leading voice in the fight against steroid abuse he would have said you were crazy.

After all, it was only three years ago that he was sitting in a high school classroom himself, a Grade 12 student and talented slotback receiver looking forward to playing for the Warriors.

However, in March 2010 he received a text that would change all that.

The text was from a friend who played football for Waterloo; something about steroids. After the class, he got a phone call. The news was bad, he was told.

“Be ready for more to come.”

By the end of the day, Eaket learned that a Warrior football player had been charged with trafficking steroids.

The news hit him hard. “I had just signed and committed to the University of Waterloo,” Eaket tells the rapt students. “All of a sudden, everything was going downhill.”

The football season was eventually suspended after a team-wide testing mission uncovered nine adverse doping results. Suddenly, Eaket was caught in the middle of what would become the biggest doping scandal in the history of Canadian university sport.

So, when Eaket decided to be part of an innovative education program called Succeed Clean, he tells a story that goes beyond the sobering health effects of appearance and performance enhancing drugs (APEDs). “The amount of guys it affected, beyond the nine guys, was tremendous,” Eaket says, “It affected other team members, alumni and the university.”

Succeed Clean, a Waterloo region initiative designed to reach 1,000 students from Grade 7 to 12 this year, is part of an effort to teach young people about the risks of using APEDS. A recent study published in Pediatrics revealed that 5.9 per cent of students surveyed had used steroids to build muscle.

Silence descends in the high school auditorium when a video begins playing on a large screen. In the video, Eric Polini, a former Warrior football player, talks about how using steroids in 2010 got him banned from playing varsity football for two years and ended his dream of playing professionally. Ironically, Polini started taking steroids to increase his chances of making the CFL: “I felt this was a last resort . . . I had two years to prove myself,” he explains.

In the video, Polini describes breaking down in tears when he admitted to his coach that he was abusing steroids. He also recalls his own father crying when he told him, and the shame he felt telling his younger brother that he had cheated. “You don’t want to make this mistake,” Polini says on video.

When the lights go up, Eaket tells the crowd: “Watching that video makes me queasy because I know what a good guy Eric is.

“Eric could have made it to the CFL — the clean way.”

Eaket actually didn’t know Polini back in 2010. But the connection between the player on the stage and the disgraced athlete on the screen shows the wide swath that is cut when elite athletes use appearance and performance enhancing drugs (APEDs).

The anatomy of a scandal

Eaket’s connection to Polini began on that March day in 2010 when Eaket received that first text about steroids. As a foster child who had been removed from his birth family when he was five, Eaket never thought he’d get to university. Few foster kids ever do.

He and his older brother were placed with a foster family after abuse was discovered.

While Eaket had a few opportunities to be adopted, he refused them because the potential adoptive families didn’t want to adopt his older brother who has cerebral palsy. A foster family came forward to raise the two Eaket brothers together when Brandon was nine.

So, by the time Eaket received that text message he was a teen who had learned to rise above more than his fair share of disappointments.

On that same day, back on campus, the University of Waterloo’s athletic director also remembers a call he received like it was yesterday.

“It was a Friday that I got the call about the arrests and seizure of these steroids,” says Bob Copeland. “That was a pretty sick feeling.”

The case that would become one of the biggest doping scandals in Canadian university sport broke, unbelievably, at a local McDonalds drive-through.

Police arrested then-Warrior football player Matthew Valeriote after a stolen credit card was used at the fast-food restaurant. His arrest led police to search Nathan Zettler’s home in Waterloo. Zettler, a fellow Warrior wide-receiver, would become the centre of the scandal when investigators discovered a closet filled with steroids, vials and large bags of needles in a closet. Police were investigating a series of break-ins on campus and in Waterloo neighbourhoods at the time.

Zettler pleaded guilty to multiple steroid and break-in charges this past January. Among other charges, Zettler admitted to possession of six kinds of steroids for the purpose of trafficking: nandrolone, stanozolol, testosterone, trenbolone, metandienone and praterone. He also admitted selling tamoxifen and clomiphene, drugs typically taken to counteract the effects of steroids.

Zettler faces sentencing in June.

Valeriote was sentenced to a year’s probation in 2010 and given a $200 fine for his part in the break-ins of March 2010. The fourth player involved, Eric Legare, was not charged with any drug offences, but he pleaded guilty to break-ins.  He received a nine-month conditional sentence and one year of probation in 2011.

The conditional sentence meant Legare avoided jail time.  He was ordered to serve his sentence under a curfew, abstain from drugs and alcohol. At sentencing, the judge was moved by Legare’s desire to turn his life around after a difficult childhood.

Zettler’s roommate at the time, Brandon Krukowski, was acquitted in 2011 of selling steroids to his teammates.

While police were busy with the criminal investigation, Copeland, with the support of senior administration at the university, made the controversial decision to initiate a testing mission by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) for the entire Warrior team.

More than a dozen people from the CCES showed up in Waterloo and a secretive process began that included a private meeting among all parties involved in the testing mission.

“We were actually sequestered in a meeting room at six o’clock in the morning because we didn’t want the players to see what was going on,” says Copeland.

“It wasn’t one of those ‘wink, wink’ things when athletes actually hear ahead of time that testers are coming. The players didn’t know. That’s key to the process. It has to be a surprise test.”

When the football team arrived for a meeting, the players were officially notified and told that anyone who left would be ruled an adverse test. Copeland remembers the players as being shocked: “It was very quiet.”

Luke Balch, the quarterback and captain of the team, remembers arriving on campus to find coaches and police assembled in a room. Every player was told to sign in and then the team was notified. “When I looked around there were some concerned faces, to put it lightly,” says Balch. “People were caught off guard. Players were upset.”

“It was at that point I knew that this steroid issue was going to get bigger.”

For Copeland, who later became the chair of the Ontario University Athletics (OUA) performance enhancing drugs education task force and a member of a national task force on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in football, the testing mission was as much an attempt to clear the clean athletes as it was to nab the steroid users.

“It was a gut feeling that it was absolutely the right thing to do,” Copeland says. “I was thinking about the majority of the players on the team who, without question, would be clean. We didn’t want them looking over their shoulder their entire life. Especially the biggest guys on the team, we didn’t want people saying, ‘I bet you were on the stuff.’ ’’

The results of the testing mission, revealed in June 2010, found nine doping violations, including the first North American athlete to test positive for the human growth hormone. The results prompted the university to suspend the football program for one year.

That controversial decision set off a storm of criticism and a media frenzy that would make headlines in the New York Times and on ESPN. Reporters showed up at the university’s spring athletics awards banquet looking for comment.

The coverage included stories of senior-year players who would lose the opportunity to play professionally; fears that the football program at the University of Waterloo would be dead forever; sympathy for players who would have to scramble to find another university to play for to save their football careers.

For Balch, who decided to stay with the Warriors, it meant losing many of the new recruits for the team and most of the senior starters who went to play at other universities. “These guys were my best friends. We were also roommates,” says Balch.

The media frenzy missed a story about a Kitchener kid who had signed on to play for the Warriors: Brandon Eaket couldn’t leave town to play at another university. As the legal guardian for his disabled brother, he wanted to stay in Waterloo so he could support him.

When Copeland reflects now on the decision to scrap the 2010 season, and the impact it had on the university and the players, he says: “Often the most difficult decisions are the most courageous. It was about the health of the athletes and the integrity of the institution.”

Copeland still has the 4,000 e-mails he received during the scandal, many of them highly critical of a decision that would affect not only the players on the team, but future players and students like Brandon Eaket.

Focusing on education

“Ever since the episode happened, we’ve been focused on education,” says Copeland, a driving force — with retired school principal Chuck Williams — behind the Succeed Clean program.

Williams says an important part of Succeed Clean is the research being conducted by the Faculty of Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University. In addition to the presentations by elite athletes, research is being done to examine student attitudes about APEDs. Williams has also led several “community conversations” with parents, teachers and coaches.

The Waterloo athletes work alongside Ontario Hockey League players from the Kitchener Rangers and varsity athletes at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. Succeed Clean is also supported by the Waterloo Regional Police Service and has been embraced by the region’s public and Catholic school boards.

Copeland’s push for education happened, in part, when a man from Texas called to talk about the Waterloo situation. Don Hooton is the president of a Dallas-based organization that has been going into U.S. schools for almost ten years to talk about the dangers of APEDs.

Hooton established the Taylor Hooton Foundation after his own son, Taylor, killed himself in 2003 after abusing steroids.

Hooton didn’t know his 17-year-old son, a promising baseball player with dreams of playing professionally, was using steroids. He also didn’t know depression can be a side-effect of doping. Through his organization, Hooton hopes he can prevent other young people from abusing APEDS, and alert parents to the side-effects of the drugs.

For Hooton, Waterloo’s decision to test the entire football team and ultimately suspend the Warrior football season was as unusual as it was admirable.

“When someone tests positive, the typical experience for colleges in the U.S. would be for the athletic director to explain to the senior administration that it was just one athlete, a rogue athlete, and to circle the wagons,” says Hooton.

Hooton says too often universities are more focused on the win-loss record and the university’s reputation rather than on the well-being of the athletes.

Copeland believes that Succeed Clean is part of the answer to the doping problem in elite sports.

“Whether it was through research or just anecdotally hearing from kids, we found that nobody talks to athletes,’’ he says. “Players on our team told us that nobody had spoken to them about steroids when they were younger.’’

Hooton, whose organization reached 175,000 people last year, says, “If you’re waiting until these athletes get to college . . . you’re waiting way too long.”

Ali Barras, the Waterloo cheerleader who works with Eaket on Succeed Clean, told the high school students that she worked out with Eric Polini, the Warrior who admitted to using steroids. And while most people picture football players and body builders when they think of steroids, she says the fastest growing group of steriod abusers are young women — “Young cheerleaders trying to look a certain way.”

While competitive cheerleading demands a high level of athleticism, she pointed out teens not involved in sports are also using steroids. They are referred to as “mirror athletes” because they want to look better, not perform better.

When Barras and Eaket warned the students about the risks of using APEDs, they gave a sobering list of possible side-effects: acne, bloated appearance, premature heart attack, liver damage and clotting disorders. Males face the risk of reduced sperm counts, impotence, breast development, shrinking testicles and premature baldness.

Side-effects for females can be facial hair, deepening of the voice, breast reduction, menstrual cycle changes and abnormal muscle growth. Students were also warned about the effects on the brain — “roid rage” and depression.

Barras warned that underground APEDs bought over the Internet are made in unsanitary labs and cut with such substances as motor oil. She also reminded the students to be cautious with all products they are buying. Everything from protein powders, to vitamins, to diet pills can be harmful to their health. She said following Canada’s Food Guide will do more for building muscle than any synthetic pill.

“Save your money,” Barras said. “Buy real food.”

While the university cautions its athletes about the risks posed by supplements, Eaket told the crowd, “It’s up to you guys to know what you’re putting into your body.”

More than education

Although education is part of the solution for doping, Copeland points out that random testing of university athletes has unfortunately been cut back, despite the fact that research shows it helps reduce APED abuse.

“The cuts to testing are counter to one of the key recommendations of the national task force,” Copeland says.

The cuts to university testing were confirmed by Paul Melia, president of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES). He says the federal government wants the CCES to focus resources on Olympic athletes, which means a reduction in tests done on university athletes. “We’re not doing as much as we need to do,” says Melia.

While he hopes to expand the Succeed Clean program across Canada one day, Melia admits that the use of APEDs among young people is a complex health issue. He would like to see the RCMP, local police and border officials communicate better to protect young Canadians from the illegal steroids making their way across the border.

He also acknowledges that university football is particularly vulnerable to the doping subculture. Melia said one of the more surprising things that came out of the Waterloo scandal was the fact that clean athletes actually respected the athletes who were found to be using steroids. “There was a sense that the clean athletes were in admiration of the athletes who were really taking risks to make the team better . . . there was that kind of distorted thinking,” says Melia.

Brandon Eaket and Ali Barras

Warriors football player Brandon Eaket and cheerleader Ali Barras take the Succeed Clean message to local senior elementary and secondary students. The fastest-growing group of steroid abusers are young women, Barras says.

Balch says he’s been questioned over and over by media and friends about whether he knew players were using steroids: “Guys aren’t doing it in the change room. You’re not going to show other guys that you’re cheating,” says Balch. “You’re not just competing against other teams, you’re competing against your own teammates for a spot.”

Ironically, the football subculture that Melia says can push young athletes to a breaking point also has a supportive side. Brandon Eaket knows the value of this other aspect — the one filled with mentors and coaches who have stepped up to help a young man who not only wants to stay clean but also support his older brother. It includes coaches who cut him a little slack when he needs to attend to the responsibilities of being a legal guardian.

“Waterloo shows a genuine care for my needs,” says Eaket. “They really stepped up and helped me in situations. They know I have responsibilities outside of football.

“Playing football at Waterloo has meant everything to me. If it wasn’t for football, I probably wouldn’t be at university.”

How to fight the problem

The 2011 Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) task force on drug use in football made several key recommendations. Two years later, several recommendations are being explored by various stakeholders in Canada, but only one — mandatory education about performance-enhancing drugs for coaches — has been put into place nationally.

A disappointment for Bob Copeland, University of Waterloo’s athletic director, is that testing for appearance and performance-enhancing drugs (APEDS) has actually dropped since the national task force recommended increased testing to help curb abuse.

“The larger issue is that these kinds of drugs are still not getting the same kind of attention as the hard-core street drugs,” says Copeland.

From the CCES perspective, the 2011 recommendations are part of a long-term strategy to change behaviour, says chief operating officer Doug MacQuarrie. He points out that some of the recommendations are “fantastically expensive” at a time when “resources available in Canadian sport are taxed . . . the willingness of public officials to open the pocket books for these kinds of strategies” is not there.