After senseless tragedy, Arizona State shamefully focuses on hockey

This week, the Arizona State University men’s hockey team soft-launched its season. Their coach, Greg Powers, did a virtual show-and-tell as part of a conference-wide media day.

According to reports, Powers was keen to talk about his hopes for a better year than last, when his team lost more than it won. Reporters were more keen to ask about the critical injuries suffered by one of Powers’s players during an Aug. 20 workout led by a former Green Beret.

The player, Matthew Mayich, 21, of Stoney Creek, Ont., was a new ASU recruit. This was the first time he’d ever worked out outdoors in the desert.

Toward the end of the session – held in 30-degree-plus temps, during which some players vomited – Mayich collapsed. The lawyer representing his family has said he is not expected to recover.

The university has promised an investigation. A preliminary report, released just before Powers’s presser, stated that ASU hockey coaches told their superiors that the Green Beret, Timothy Zeisel, would be addressing the team, but didn’t say anything about a workout. One wonders why you would feel the need to mention one thing, but not the other.

During his appearance this week, Powers no-commented every question relating to Mayich and the workout. He did reference “a difficult time” for the players and coaches, which I presume includes himself. However, he was apparently quite happy to advertise the program.

“Everything that we believe — and so many players that have played here before and the guys that are here now — that is great about playing hockey at Arizona State still are great about playing hockey at Arizona State,” Powers said, according to The Athletic.

It’s like a man standing over the wreck of the Hindenburg declaring, “Most zeppelin passengers are very satisfied.”

Training plan not submitted before hockey player’s collapse, Arizona State report shows

One cannot yet know what exactly happened at that workout, and who, if anyone, is to blame for it. But the way in which Powers and ASU have handled everything since is inexcusable. It’s beyond that. It’s incomprehensible.

I get that shame no longer affects most ambitious people. From the President on down, they’ll do anything to get ahead. But surely there are limits. This episode suggests there aren’t.

Whatever the specifics, Powers bore ultimate responsibility for the wellbeing of a group of young men. One of them was badly hurt on his watch.

This wasn’t a lightning strike. It was a planned activity that anyone with a iota of sense could tell you was a terrible idea. You don’t get involved in land wars in Asia, and you don’t do heavy-duty calisthenics outdoors in Tempe in August.

The right reaction to this tragedy isn’t, “You’re going to have to prove this was my fault.” It’s, “Whether or not I’m legally culpable, I have a moral obligation to take responsibility.”

If a professor at ASU had assigned her students to try rock climbing, and one of them had fallen on his head while doing so, this wouldn’t be a debate. That teacher would be canned so hard she’d be shelf stable.

The difference here is sports. Sports encourages suffering. It valourizes pain. I’m not against these things. I’ve learned a lot more from suffering than succeeding. I’d go so far as to say that the former makes the latter possible.

But that’s the suffering I chose. I didn’t have some ambitious suit who’s trying to leapfrog his way up the Division I ladder deciding how much suffering I can manage.

Mayich didn’t get a choice here. One can easily picture how things would have gone over if he’d gotten up midway through the workout and walked off into the shade (ie: not well). All the ways in which workers feel entitled to defend themselves from irresponsible leadership go out the window once you wrap them in a sports context.

In other professional settings, when something terrible happens, work stops. A reckoning of some sort occurs. The workers demand it, and leadership is shamed into doing it. But not in sports. This special category of work is far too important to halt, even for a moment.

The ASU hockey team, like all college teams, is a jumped-up math club. I don’t care how much money they spend on it. It’s no more important, no more useful and no more instructive than any college extracurricular. In fact, since math will get you a job, it’s probably much less so.

But based on the way the program has reacted, these people think they’re manning the trenches at Stalingrad – not one step back, comrades.

While poor Mayich lies in a hospital bed somewhere, the workouts continue. Powers is still in charge. The season will go on as usual. They haven’t even sorted out what happened, and they’re already into the recovery phase. Eventually, some tone-deaf fool will say the thing you dread is coming – “We’re doing it for Matthew.”

This isn’t a case of finding justice for Mayich. There is no justice in this, regardless of who is punished. It’s a senseless tragedy.

The only hopeful thing that could have come of it would have been, just this once, to see someone in charge set aside sports considerations for human ones.

Had Powers quit immediately, had his players refused to continue, had the program been shuttered, at least temporarily, that would have sent a powerful message about what matters in this life – people, not games. Coaches and players everywhere might have heard that warning. Things might have changed for the better, even just a little.

Instead, we have been reminded of what actually matters – sports, winners and losers, quitters never prospering and gamers never quitting. We’re already moving on from this story, probably because it’s too sad and too scary to think about for long.

And what will happen in the end? Some money will change hands, so that everything else can stay the same.