Gridders on Defense Against Charges They’re Bullies : High school: Some officials say football players are fine individuals but seem to run into trouble when they are together.

After football player Jeremy Addison was stabbed in the chest while he punched out a fellow student at Ventura’s Buena High in 1993, he wound up being denounced in court as a schoolyard bully.

A year later, at the opposite end of the county, the same charge was leveled at Westlake football players David Behling and Scott Smith after they were both shot in a fight with a gang of Asian students.

And just last month, after Thousand Oaks football player Rick Coletta was stabbed in the neck by a classmate, two of his teammates were transferred to another school for beating up Coletta’s assailant.

Once again, the football players found themselves playing defense against charges that they were bullies.

Though high school athletes have had their ups and downs in status over the decades--including a time in the 1960s when they seemed as endangered as the sock hop--they have managed for the most part to keep their position as the big men on campus.

Even today, according to students and teachers at schools throughout the county, not much has changed from past generations in the high school popularity pecking order: Athletes still rise to the top.

They are clearly the most well-known group on campus, and teachers and administrators describe them as high-achieving, goal-oriented and motivated, the role models on campus.

But in some quarters, there is a new twist to the age-old tension between athletes and other segments on campus. The stereotypical dumb jock has been replaced by something more ominous: the dangerous jock.

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Dan Shilling is standing on the fringe of the social hub on the Thousand Oaks campus, far from the center of the quad where the Lancer athletes routinely claim center stage.

Shilling, an 11th-grader, is wearing torn blue jeans, and the flannel shirt that stretches well below his waist is buttoned all the way to the neck. His long black hair explodes from under a turned-around cap, and a small blue button stuck on the side carries the intriguing imperative: Question Reality.

No one is mistaking Shilling for a jock.

“Jocks are the kids who bring glory to the school, who help create the image that this is such a great school,” Shilling said, sarcasm lacing every word. “They help create the myth that everything in Lancerland is great.”

Things seemed less than idyllic last month when students were first shocked that Coletta, a senior football player, was stabbed on campus and then appalled by the brutality of the attack on the assailant by Coletta’s friends and teammates. Neither Coletta nor his assailant was seriously hurt.

Three students who allegedly participated in the attack on the 17-year-old assailant were arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor assault, and football players Adam Knox and Bill Sperry were transferred out of school and are barred from graduation ceremonies with the senior class.

A week later, about 100 students boycotted classes to protest the punishment.

Still, many on campus remain uneasy after watching football players pummel a fellow student. When asked about the team’s reputation, Shilling said: “Oh, you mean the guys who beat the crap out of that dude. They’ll beat you up if you do anything to cross them.”

That view is not restricted to the school’s social outsiders. Individually, athletes can be thoughtful, caring and engaging, students say, but when a group of them gather on campus, they often draw a wide berth.

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“When these team players get together, they think they’re invincible,” Thousand Oaks honor student Jessi Reems-Terrell said. “They’re like the brute squad on campus.”

Reems-Terrell described a team member she has known since elementary school, saying that in individual conversations he speaks of his dreams of being a coach so he can help kids.

“But this is the same guy who is mean to other students here,” Reems-Terrell said. “When he’s with the football team, he portrays himself as cocky and arrogant. I bet about 90% of the people who see him then think he’s a jerk.”

Even football players say that nearly every team has players who embody those qualities.

“A lot of guys try to show off, and push people around, saying ‘I’m a football player. Be like me,’ ” said Westlake’s Billy Miller, a wide receiver who has signed to play at USC. “You like football players or you hate ‘em.”

Keith E. Wilson, the Thousand Oaks principal and a high school football and basketball player a generation ago in Idaho, picks his words carefully, but concedes that athletes sometimes present a problem when they begin to act as a group.

“One on one, they are great kids, every one of them,” Wilson said. “When they get together, sometimes they get out of hand.”

The pattern of football players coming under attack has created something of a siege mentality among some athletes.

“Football players are unfairly labeled as jocks,” said Knox, a 250-pound lineman who will still be playing in the Ventura County All Star Game next weekend. “It’s an unfair word. If you’re a football player, automatically you’re mean, have a bad attitude and are a bully.”

Bill Sperry, a 170-pound defensive back who will be playing in the same game, says there is increasingly less payoff in terms of campus prestige in being an athlete.

“It sure seems that being an athlete is working against me,” he said. “Because we’re football players and everyone knows us on campus, we’re being singled out. We’re being made examples of.”

One county coach, who asked not to be identified, agreed with Sperry, saying the pendulum has swung against athletes. He attributes it to simple jealousy.

“I see teachers giving athletes more of a bad time, and I didn’t see that happening 10 to 12 years ago,” the coach said. “The science department can win two fantastic awards and nobody knows about it because the football team gets all the attention. Maybe teachers are getting bitter.

“Before, maybe athletes were treated a little bit better than the regular student, which isn’t good either. But now punishment for athletes is more severe than for other students.”

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At Westlake High, David Behling still gets headaches from the gunshot wound he suffered a year ago after he and teammate Scott Smith arrived at North Ranch Park in Thousand Oaks to watch fellow player Curtis Simmons settle a longstanding dispute with student James Lee.

Instead, Lee and his friends attacked a crowd of about 40 students--including numerous football players--with a baseball bat and sticks before one in Lee’s group opened fire.

Smith suffered a wound to his right shoulder, and Behling was shot in the back of the head. Both recovered and played last season.

Behling is still upset that Simmons and the football players were portrayed by some as the bad guys.

“Lately, athletes have been getting most of the crap,” he said. “There are gangsters around school, the Westlake version of gangsters anyway, and the athletes have to stick up for themselves. We’re like a family. Almost like a gang.”

Behling’s teammate, Billy Miller, agreed that there is a special unity among athletes. If a Westlake football player had been stabbed in an incident like the one last month at Thousand Oaks, Miller said, his teammates would have responded exactly as their Thousand Oaks counterparts did.

“That situation would have happened here, too,” he said. “There’s a bonding that happens on the team. You share secrets and emotions.”

Miller, one of the most popular students on the Westlake campus, starred on the basketball team and was one of the most highly recruited football players in county history before signing with USC.

He projects an open and friendly manner as he talks about the image problems that today’s high school athletes face.

“Football is an aggressive sport and we’re taught to hurt people,” Miller said. “Football can ignite feelings. It’s like the bully thing. As a football player you’re identified as that even if you’re not. It’s our job as athletes to change that image.”

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Miller’s teammate, Dave Talbot, a 200-pound linebacker, acknowledged that some students are intimidated by football players. But he believes that view is unwarranted.

“They think that because we put on pads and hit each other and knock each other down that we’re going to do the same thing to them,” he said.

Thousand Oaks Football Coach Mike Kelly, who was hired in April, said he thinks the issue is serious enough to merit action.

He wants his players to emulate a time-honored sports ideal: tough on the field, gentlemanly off it, he said.

“It’s a real concern of mine, and we want to focus on losing that image,” he said. “We talk to kids about being good citizens. Does football attract kids who are a little more aggressive? Maybe. But being a good aggressive football player and a good citizen is not mutually exclusive.”

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Rick Scott, the football coach at Ventura’s Buena High, merely shook his head and wondered who had turned his world upside down.

Jeremy Addison, a senior linebacker for the 1992 Bulldogs, had just been hospitalized because of a collapsed lung as the result of a stab wound from a fellow student. But it was his assailant who was exonerated and Addison who faced misdemeanor battery charges.

A judge ruled that Addison’s attacker acted in self-defense because Addison had initiated the fight and chased down his fleeing opponent. Court records show that Addison eventually was convicted of battery, although the conviction was later erased after he completed community service.

Some Buena students at the time sided with Addison, saying the student who brought a knife to campus deserved punishment. And Scott was flabbergasted.

“You just shake your head and think, ‘This world is sick,’ ” he recalled last week.

Scott was a star quarterback at Rosemead High in the 1960s when he and his teammates “were put on a pedestal and got the prettiest girls.”

That might still be true, but changes in the culture in the intervening years have complicated that picture, he said.

“We didn’t have the fear that someone was going to pull a gun and shoot you,” he said. “We didn’t have security guards on campus when I went to school. Now, we have six or seven on campus.”

At Hueneme High, Ronney Jenkins says he deals with fear every day--and he’s a star running back and long-jumper at the school. Football players may sometimes seem threatening at other schools, he said, but at least a semblance of school pride comes with the package.

“I go to all these other schools and they have all kinds of school spirit,” he said. “We have nothing like that.”

Jenkins, who is black, said the tensions on his campus stem from gangs and race.

“The main thing on our campus is race. That’s how people choose sides,” he said. “The Mexican gangs don’t see me as an athlete. They see me as just another black.”

With those concerns, Jenkins scoffs at the idea of football players as bullies.

“Ain’t nobody scared of football players here,” he said.

Buena High’s Coach Scott agrees with Jenkins that the fear level on campuses is rising.

“Everybody is just so much more afraid,” Scott said. “We had gangs in our day, but it was nothing like it is today.”

But Scott chafes at the rough-neck image associated with football players, warning against those who would use recent incidents to fuel the stereotype of jocks as bullies.

In fact, he said, nearly any stereotype of athletes in today’s diversified culture is doomed to failure.

“Nowadays, athletes have to be treated as individuals,” he said. “So many come from broken homes. Some have no mothers, some no fathers, some have neither. Some are rich, some are poor. Our society is just so diverse.

“To stereotype a football player is really crazy because they are all so different.”