- November 19th, 2006, 10:20 pm
#42410
Caught in Web of worry
Internet photos, rumors can ruin college careers
BY PAUL DAUGHERTY | ENQUIRER STAFF WRITER
About 9 o'clock on a Saturday night nearly two years ago, Doug Reisenfeld posed for a picture that changed his life. That's him, the man on the left, leaning in and slightly forward, his right arm extended straight out, as if he intends to shake the photographer's hand. In Reisenfeld's left hand is a red, 16-ounce plastic beverage cup. He's smiling.
To Reisenfeld's left are five Miami University undergraduates, all male, all attired only in white socks, gym shoes, headgear and Speedo bathing suits. They are members of the school's club water polo team. Each holds his own red, plastic cup, just like Reisenfeld's.
If only he'd known. This is what Reisenfeld says now. A man can volunteer to coach a sport for 13 years. He can take it from its infancy to a consistent national contender, putting in a full-time job's worth of hours, year after year. "I gave my life to it, for nothing, because it was fun" is how Reisenfeld explains it. Says his wife, Lynda: "He was gone so much, I was raising four kids by myself."
He can do that, and he can nudge straight some kids' lives in the process. Reisenfeld loved his players andthey loved him.
They baby-sat his kids, helped him build a fence in his backyard, stayed overnight.
He helped a female team member overcome
anorexia. He called another coed's parents, after her boyfriend had beaten her. "We were family," Reisenfeld says.
If only ...
This is what happens in the age of the Internet, when Big Brother looks like a cell-phone camera and what you assumed was your business suddenly belongs to everyone with access to a computer. In the age of virtual "communities" of bloggers, chatters, posters and voyeurs, nothing is private. Nothing is sacred. Nothing, in fact, is virtual. Not at all. This is what happened to Doug Reisenfeld, water polo coach, Miami University. It could happen to anyone.
CALL CAME OVER DINNER
He ended up at the party on University Drive because the team president asked him to come. The Miami men's team had just finished sixth in the nation, among schools with club teams. Given that collegiate water polo nationally is primarily a club sport, it was a big achievement. The men were in a partying mood.
When Mike Schrock called, Reisenfeld and his wife, Lynda, were having drinks at an uptown Oxford restaurant called Mac and Joe's. They decided to stop by for a few minutes.
As the couple left the restaurant, a parade of Speedo-clad undergrads ran up High Street, to the cheers of a few onlookers including, Mike Schrock would say later, the Oxford police. As it turned out, the group was almost entirely freshmen. The run was part of a team initiation that the university later would see as hazing.
Doug and Lynda Reisenfeld made the short walk to the party at Schrock's house on University Drive. They arrived to cheers from team members. Somebody gave Reisenfeld a beer. "What I saw was kids having fun," the coach would say nearly two years later.
He stayed 15 minutes, maybe half an hour. He congratulated his players. He laughed at the prototypically college prank of having the freshmen team members wear Speedos in the chill of December. He posed for a few pictures.
"I didn't see anything wrong with any of it," Reisenfeld says.
A senior named Ryan Carlson took the pictures. If Carlson had simply displayed the digital images for friends, Doug Reisenfeld likely would still be coaching water polo at Miami. But this was 2004. Cyberspace beckoned. Pictures that might have ended up in a scrapbook a generation ago now would be launched onto the Web.
Carlson, like most college kids, had accounts on Facebook and MySpace. The ease of communicating, socializing and networking on the Web is no more obvious than at sites such as these. In September, MySpace became the most-visited domain on the Internet in the United States, according to Hitwise, a tracker of Internet traffic. By early this month, MySpace had attracted 126 million users. The site, which is free, recorded 80 million visits in August alone. It's second nature to kids and young adults.
Carlson posted his party photos on another site, Webshots.com. It's not surprising that the photos eventually ended up on another site that would present them as an example of yet another college coach condoning questionable behavior by his athletes.
BadJocks.com would post the photos of Doug Reisenfeld and his players. Presented with the photos, and evidence of underaged drinking that included pressuring freshmen team members to chug vodka from pitchers, Miami fired Reisenfeld and put the water polo team on a year's probation.
Reisenfeld would argue that he never saw anyone drinking vodka from a pitcher. And, because water polo was a club sport, controlled by its members, he lacked the power to do anything about it, even if he wanted to. The school suggested no adult should condone underage drinking, even by simply witnessing it, or be involved, even peripherally, in an act of hazing, and that Reisenfeld's firing - later reduced to a year's suspension - was to punish the team members, not Reisenfeld.
Regardless, Reisenfeld says his integrity has been damaged and his relationships in the small community of Oxford have been strained. Mostly, he fears this: "Whenever someone Googles me now, the first thing that comes up is, 'Coach condones hazing.' If Lynda and I move and I want to get a job, the first thing I'm going to be asked is, what about this raunchy hazing thing you were involved in?"
If only he'd known ...
'MISINFORMATION HIGHWAY'
In retrospect, maybe he should have. The slippery, anonymous, anything-goes world of cyberspace flourished years before Doug Reisenfeld found himself on Webshots. Its influence on college athletics - big-time college basketball in particular - was firmly established. Now, it's routine and pervasive. Or, if you're a college coach, invasive.
"The misinformation highway," former Xavier and current Wake Forest basketball coach Skip Prosser calls it. Current XU coach Sean Miller refers to Web posting as "the new-age prank phone call."
Whether it's the posting of photos or rumors or ill-informed fan ramblings regarding recruiting, the Net has made coaches everywhere frustrated, angry and paranoid.
Prosser, for one, rarely poses for photos with women. If you're a male and you want a picture with the coach, you better not have a cup in your hand. The peril is so familiar to coaches now, they've coined a term to describe it: "No one wants to be Eustachy-ed," Prosser says.
On Jan. 22, 2003, a University of Missouri student photographed former Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy at an off-campus party in Columbia, Mo. The 47-year-old coach was kissing coeds and holding a beer can. That April, the pictures appeared in the Des Moines Register. Eustachy resigned a week later.
More than three years later, if you Google "Eustachy," the first entry is a reference to the incident.
One night soon after Skip Prosser arrived at Wake Forest from Xavier, he and his staff broke from a meeting to go out to eat. It was about 11. They found a restaurant-bar not far from campus. Prosser walked in, asked someone if the kitchen were still open. Told it wasn't, he walked out.
The next day, Prosser's wife, Nancy, still living in Cincinnati, asked him what he was doing at a bar at 11 at night. Taken aback, the coach asked his wife how she knew that. "She said she saw it on a chatboard," Prosser recalls. "That kind of thing happens all the time. The Internet is insidious."
Many college coaches now assign either graduate assistants, assistant coaches or team managers to scour the Internet, looking for false or vicious postings. Prosser, for one, says he stays away. "As a coach, you can't get on those things," he says. "You'll want to punch somebody or lose your mind."
Or, in the cases of Larry Eustachy and Doug Reisenfeld, lose your job. If only he'd known ...
VIRTUAL SPORTS BAR
From his office in Omaha, Neb., 44-year-old Anderson Township native Dave Moore follows UC athletics as closely as if he lived inside Shoemaker Center. He has two computers; one is always online. Moore says he spends "a couple hours a day, at least" reading about the Bearcats.
"BearcatDave37" rides the center of the cyberwave. He inhabits what he and millions of others now refer to as the Internet "community." It's a virtual sports bar, the new-age version of the water cooler or the barbershop. The difference is, you can say whatever you like, without consequence.
Moore says he feels a little silly sometimes, spending so many hours hunched over a computer screen, arguing, discussing and rumormongering. "My wife calls them 'my creepy Internet friends,' " he says. "But it's how I keep track of my teams."
There's no shortage of content. Moore surfs rivals.com. He reads Bearcatinsider.com and bearcatnews and Bearcats.com and the Bearcats board on ESPN.com. He's all over scout.com. He posts on the boards. He can't get enough. "If I'm busy after a big game, I hate it," says Moore, a manager for a credit card bank. "I want to see what people are saying."
Moore "knows" many of the posters on the UC boards. "It's a whole little community." Moore says he's careful not to "feed the trolls" - posters he says are just looking for a reaction - and enjoys the more responsible sites where, he says, there is less of what he calls "flaming", i.e. nastiness.
A 21-year-old Xavier junior named Chris Burch wrote in an e-mail: "I read two college basketball message boards and a handful of blogs daily. (Well, actually, I check them more than once a day. But let's pretend I'm not that obsessed.)." He posts at musketeermadness.com and unlike most, he presents himself as ChrisBurch08.
Last January, Burch took pictures of students camping out at Cintas Center before the Crosstown Shootout, hoping to score tickets, and posted them on musketeermadness. Alumni who saw the photos brought the campers pizzas; Burch claims that thread "stands as one of the most-viewed topics" with 11,107 views and 90 replies. "Pretty cool," he writes. "And definitely not something I could have shared with anyone even five years ago."
STAYING INVOLVED
Burch represents the flip side of the Internet's insidiousness. For every coach or player stung by an anonymous poster, there are 500 anonymous posters who see it as the best way to stay involved with their teams.
Wrote '93 XU grad Dan Letscher in an e-mail, "(While) it's silly to read the posters bemoaning XU's loss of a recruit for 2008 ... alumni from all over the globe are able to read about and comment on the one tangible we can truly hold onto from those glory years of college life - the love of a team and its representative spirit."
It's substantial enough now that people like Dave Berk can practically make a living from it. Berk isn't a journalist. He's "just a guy who has a feeling for what fans are interested in." Berk founded BearcatInsider.com in January 2005, and is a fully credentialed member of the media.
He and two others cover all UC sports and recruiting. Just as important, Berk monitors a message board he says now has 1,488 registered members. The growth has been exponential, he says.
Since the site launched in January '05, Berk says posts have totaled more than 30,000. Visits number more than 2.3 million. That's nearly 3,300 visits a day, give or take. As with others who frequent the Net, Berk sees his site as a cyber-village: "A place where people gather, a community of people interested in the (UC) program."
He's fastidious about what makes it onto his message board. "I have moderators who patrol the boards, looking for personal attacks," he says. "My philosophy is, if I wouldn't want to see it written or said about me, I won't allow it."
BADJOCKS.COM
It's not quite that way at BadJocks.com. Bob Reno is a 47-year-old with a communications degree from Ball State. He founded Bad Jocks in 2000, intending it to be a humorous site chronicling the missteps of athletes and coaches, college and pro. "There was a day when Tonya Harding was throwing hubcaps at her boyfriend and Darryl Strawberry was in the news for something dumb," Reno recalls. "I wondered if there was a Web site devoted just to the stupid things athletes do. It's still primarily a comedy site."
When you visit the site, you find links to the "top naked people in sports" and the "top naughty cheerleaders" as well as state-by-state links to lawyers specializing in DUI cases.
Reno has gotten religion lately, on the subject of hazing because, he says, "no one else wanted to." He is proud to have "broken" a story about supposed hazing within the Northwestern University women's soccer team. The Miami men's water polo incident was just another example, says Reno.
At first, Reno didn't post the Miami photos, because nobody could identify Reisenfeld. Reno consulted Dr. Susan Lipkins, a Long Island, N.Y. psychologist and author of the book, "Preventing Hazing." Dr. Lipkins looked at the photos - 54 in all, four of which included Reisenfeld - and determined hazing had occurred.
Reno contacted Miami. Eventually Doug Curry, the school's director of recreational sports, identified Reisenfeld as the man in the photo and asked Reno for more information. Curry forwarded the photos to Miami's Office of Ethics and Student Conflict Resolution. The director of the office, Susan Vaughn, met this past August with three members of the team, where it was determined that hazing and underaged drinking had occurred at the December 2004 party.
The school dismissed Reisenfeld without a hearing.
Bob Reno never talked with Reisenfeld, either. "I had other stories at the time that I was pursuing. It didn't seem to require a lot more research. I probably could have done more to get his side of it (but) I let the university handle it."
Reisenfeld argues that he didn't see anyone making freshmen water polo players drink vodka, and if he had, he'd have stopped it. He says he wasn't aware of the strict hazing guidelines included in Miami's Student Code of Conduct. He says he's never seen the code of conduct. "I simply coached and set schedules," he says. "If I really wanted to discipline a player, I could. But the team would have to back me up. It was a student-run organization."
As for Miami's reaction, Doug Curry says simply, "anybody affiliated with student organizations needs to know the rules."
PARENTS SPEAK UP
Through two, hourlong interviews, Reisenfeld remained incredulous that his role was even an issue. "It didn't dawn on me that I should even care. I'm not a varsity coach," he said.
Reisenfeld's dismissal was more painful because he grew up here. He was a four-time all-American swimmer at Seven Hills School. He swam for the Cincinnati Marlins. He was living in Miami, Fla., when he was asked in 1994 to come back and start the water polo club.
The first team had just 15 members and practiced from 10 to midnight, the only time the pool was available. It won the Mid-American Conference championship. Over the next 12 years, the men's team went to the national collegiate club championships 11 times. The women's team, added in 1996, advanced to the nationals the last five years.
Over the years, the teams competed in Florida, California and Massachusetts, covering most of their expenses with donations and fundraisers. Because he was not a varsity coach, Reisenfeld believes his relationship with his players was more like family. Players' parents confirmed that notion recently. They wrote letters to Miami, in support of Reisenfeld, protesting the school's decision to suspend him. "We are comfortable entrusting our daughters with Doug," wrote David and Lesly Wade, parents of two team members.
The parents of Kyle McGarrity wrote: "Kyle adopted Doug's family as his family away from home. We knew Kyle was in good hands." Wrote Sarah Churchill, a team member between 1997 and 2001, "His passion for water polo, loyalty to Miami University and dedication to his players make Doug a remarkable coach and person."
Now, Doug Reisenfeld is at home in Oxford, coaching youth soccer. Recently, he wanted to form a Select team for a spring league. His 11-year-old daughter would be among the players. Reisenfeld got resistance from at least one parent. "He said I shouldn't coach his daughter because I was involved in a hazing incident," Reisenfeld relates.
Meanwhile, he says the water polo club is "crumbling." The men's team that represented Miami in 11 national championships in Reisenfeld's 13 years needed to "borrow" players from other schools at a recent tournament, to have enough to compete.
Reisenfeld is allowed to return to coaching May 7, 2007, but he won't. "The only thing I want to say to Miami University is, 'You're welcome'," says Reisenfeld. "I'm hurt and I'm sad, and I miss those kids. But what happened to me was wrong."
Meantime, the collegiate water polo club national championships are at Miami this weekend.
Which brings us back to the photo:
Miami water polo coach Doug Reisenfeld, smiling at left, celebrates another successful season with his men's team. The well-meaning coach was caught in the Internet's ceaseless, indiscriminate glare. If only he'd known.
E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com
"Recruits and their families read (chatboards). They see that UC isn't going after so-and-so as hard as they had been, and they start wondering what's going on. We have to be proactive. We have to find that stuff and tell (recruits and parents), 'Those aren't university Web sites.'"http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dl ... 9/-1/CINCI
UC coach Mick Cronin
"If a kid's not shooting well, he's got 75 people on the message boards dogging him. He reads that, and it's worse."
XU assistant Chris Mack
"As a coach, you can't get on those things. You'll want to punch somebody or lose your mind."
Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser on chatboards.
"I read two college basketball message boards and a handful of blogs daily. (Well, actually, I check them more than once a day. But let's pretend I'm not that obsessed.)."
Xavier junior Chris Burch
- By SeoulFlame
- By Purple Haize
- By Dalegarz1