Jim Foster out as baseball coach at Northwestern.
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Northwestern had several coaches depart the program in February, and the team struggled to a 10-40 record. After the season, 16 players reportedly entered the transfer portal.
Radio station 670 The Score in Chicago reported that Foster discouraged players from seeking medical attention for injuries and that players hid their injuries from him. The station also reported that Northwestern coaches and other staff members attempted to meet with Gragg but were denied an opportunity.
This seems like fallout from a story I missed covering earlier this week: football coach Pat Fitzgerald got canned on Monday, for pretty much the same reason.
The firing of Fitzgerald, 48, comes after the school announced Friday that he’d be suspended without pay for two weeks this summer following the conclusion of a university-commissioned investigation into allegations made by a former Northwestern football player. The school said the investigation, which was initiated in January and conducted by an outside law firm, did not find “sufficient” evidence that the coaching staff knew about ongoing hazing — though there were “significant opportunities” to find out about it.
The school then reversed course Saturday night after The Daily Northwestern published a story detailing allegations from the former player, who described specific instances of hazing and sexual abuse. That led Schill to write an open letter to the university community in which he said that he “may have erred in weighing the appropriate sanction” for Fitzgerald and acknowledged focusing “too much on what the report concluded (Fitzgerald) didn’t know and not enough on what he should have known.”
I have to say that I am appalled at both of these coaches. I am not naive about college sports, and how they are pretty much now basically mini professional sports, with many programs having larger budgets and incomes than some professional teams. However they still are dealing with amateur athletes, who at the end of the day must leave their time at the university with their body intact and their minds educated. The coach is responsible for enabling both of those to happen, and any roadblock that he, or she, puts in front of that calls for immediate firing.
In both of these cases, the Athletic Director is also suspect as well, for not overseeing the underlings more closely, and if a thorough investigation is not made by a disinterested party, I could see any player who suffered hazing or sexual abuse filing a rather large suit against the University and others involved.
It is sad to see that at a time when the NCAA was forced to begin to allow it’s athletes to recoup some financial gain from the money that they made from their efforts, the NCAA itself continues to not look out for their best interests by not having standards that are forced to be upheld by all universities and have any real teeth behind them. They obviously want these things to go away quietly, so that they don’t upset the financial applecart.