KAMAS, Summit County — No one wants to see the South Summit football team pull off an upset of 3A’s top-ranked team more than Principal Wade Woolstenhulme.
But five days before the Wildcats hosted Morgan Friday night, Woolstenhulme and his administration made the tough decision to suspend 14 players, mostly members of the varsity team, for vaping on the team bus.
“This is not about winning football games,” Woolstenhulme said. “It’s about saving lives. This stuff is killing people now.”
The principal said they received a tip that players were vaping on the bus that carried student athletes to away games. The district has cameras on its buses, so they reviewed recordings to confirm that players were vaping on team trips.
“We were able to go back and look at just what was going on on our buses,” he said. “We identified student athletes who were vaping on the bus. I approached the football team on Monday, told them where we were at, and gave them the opportunity to come forward voluntarily. Twelve of the 14 came forward voluntarily.”
The school had to cancel its freshman and junior varsity games Thursday, as it moved a number of players up to the varsity team in order to play Friday’s region game against Morgan. With just one week left in the regular season, Woolstenhulme said the school likely won’t play sub-varsity games next week either.
The players who turned themselves in will have a road back, but it will take at least two weeks — and some work. Those who didn’t come forward on their own were dismissed from the team permanently.
“At this point, we have put together through our school psychologist a packet of educational information that we’re requiring all of these violators to fill out,” he said. “We’re giving them the option to get more help through counseling and through our psychologist and provide them with referral information.”
He said he hopes to show these students how dangerous vaping is, something he thought might seem obvious after two students were hospitalized with lung illnesses related to vaping at the start of the school year.
“You just assume they’re vaping nicotine,” he said. “That fruity stuff, I think, has gotten worse, and I think more common is marijuana. ... There is no way to prove that, but it’s just from what some have told me.”
Woolstenhulme said vaping has become a pervasive problem.
“Vaping has kind of become a big deal,” he said. “I’ve been dealing with it for the last four or five years, here at the high school. You catch kids, and I have a whole drawer full of Juuls and electronic cigarettes, and I show them to the Summit County Sheriff’s Office to use in putting up their displays to educate parents.”
He acknowledges the approach being taken by the schools isn’t nearly as punitive as students might have suffered a decade ago.
“They’ve really been indoctrinating us with the restorative justice,” he said. “Fifteen years ago, it had been, you just drop the hammer and they’re out of school, and it’s over. But then, what happens to the kid?”
He said he’s a bit old fashioned and changing has been difficult, but he believes in the approach that considers the “individuals impacted by punishment meted out, especially when it comes to teenagers. Hopefully it will pay off in the end.”
He said he knows this will be a painful lesson to those on the team, but he feels like this is a life-threatening situation.
“I feel so strongly about this that if something happened between now and Monday that exposed 20 more players were involved, I’d be willing to shut the whole program down just ... to make the point, ‘We’re not going to do this; it’s not good for you; and it’s not what South Summit High School represents.’ ... We are doing our best, and the kids are our No. 1 concern, even though it’s hard on the ones who get caught.”