CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 4 (UPI) — After finding the men’s soccer team had produced “scouting reports” on their female athletic counterparts for many years before and after 2012, including this year, Harvard University has decided to cancel the rest of the team’s season.
Harvard University Athletics Director Robert Scalise canceled the rest of the 2016 men’s soccer season after discovering this week that the reports have been a more widespread, continual practice, rather than a single occurrence of one group of athletes.
Harvard administrators started investigating the reports after the Harvard Crimson reported last week on a 2012 “scouting report,” which contained numerical physical evaluations of that year’s women’s soccer recruits, speculation on their sexual orientation and assigned them a sexual position using other baselessly vulgar opinions.
“The decision to cancel a season is serious and consequential, and reflects Harvard’s view that both the team’s behavior and the failure to be forthcoming when initially questioned are completely unacceptable, have no place at Harvard and run counter to the mutual respect that is a core value of our community,” said Harvard President Drew Faust in a statement.
Administration’s cancelling of the rest of the season, which includes forfeiting the rest of the team’s games despite their top rank in the conference, was embraced by coaches and administrators as the right thing to do, despite their disappointment.
The university said it intends to install a systematic program of awareness and training designed to teach athletes that what had been a regular practice is wrong, insensitive and unacceptable.
Six members of the women’s soccer team issued a response expressing that they were “beyond hurt” by the reports, especially considering the male players were in many cases close friends.
“We have seen the ‘scouting report’ in its entirety,” the women wrote. “We know the fullest extent of its contents: the descriptions of our bodies, the numbers we were each assigned and the comparison to each other and recruits in classes before us. This document attempts to pit us against one another, as if the judgment of a few men is sufficient to determine our worth.”
