A specialist who studies alcohol and athletics spent most of Saturday talking with about 480 Emporia athletes about the subject, then followed up with a presentation to about 20 adults who had been invited to a dinner meeting at the First United Methodist Church.
John Underwood, founder and president of the American Athletic Institute in Chestertown, N.Y., was brought to town by Emporians for Drug Awareness.
Underwood, a former All-American athlete, has worked with athletes at major college and Olympic levels and cited a variety of sources to show the damage that happens when young brains are exposed to alcohol.
He had been disappointed in one aspect of his meetings with the athletes here: although all of their parents had been invited along with their teenagers, only five parents attended.
“Athletes are not immune to this problem,” Underwood said. “Athletes’ use of alcohol actually surpasses (overall use) in 11th and 12th grade.”
Underwood told his audience that it was time for parents and educators to become accountable for monitoring the youngsters in their care and for being better role models for behavior. It is difficult to separate alcohol and athletics when the parents themselves are holding tailgating parties at football stadiums, for example.
“These parents are taking no ownership of their kids’ problem,” Underwood said. “... Wouldn’t that be amazing, that we had parents who set an example for their children?”
He cited statistics that showed about 58.5 percent of athletes were drinking alcohol regularly during their senior year, and that 14 percent of seventh-grade athletes drink.
“The average high school drinker has five drinking episodes in 30 days,” he said, with most of the drinking done on Friday and Saturday nights.
They believe they are able to drink, he said, because the penalties if they get caught are minimal. He suggested creating an Alcohol Enforcement Team in the community to watch for under-age drinkers and to prevent the private parties often hosted by parents or young adult friends. With the change in Kansas law, adults who host parties with alcohol for youngsters can be prosecuted.
“You got to crack down on it,” Underwood said. “You’ve got to go after it.”
He cited a sheriff in Kalispell, Mont., as an example. Kalispell was an area of heavy drinking for underage youths when the sheriff was elected in 2004.
“In four years, he’s arrested 4,000 kids for underage drinking,” Underwood said.
He recommended not only having harsher penalties for drinking infractions, but enforcing them equally, and suggested a campaign to let parents and children know that enforcement will be done at school and on the streets. The campaign would be publicized well before instituted to make sure that everyone involved is aware.
The second part would begin when the first underage drinker is arrested, he said. Police would notify the media to come cover the arrest.
“You think we’re not serious about this? We are,” Underwood said.
He also said it is important for athletes and teens — and their parents — to break the code of silence that protects alcohol-law violators from punishment.
Parents, too, protect youngsters as well as parents when they fail to report parents and other adults who provide alcohol to youngsters.
“You have to take ownership of your kid’s problem,” he said. “When you catch a kid, it’s not the first time he drank. It’s the first time you caught him.”