The Wilfrid Laurier University football team was called to a mandatory meeting Wednesday morning, only to discover it was about to undergo an unannounced drug test.
Of the almost 90 Golden Hawks players who attended the meeting, 65 were asked to supply either blood or urine samples to a collection team from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport. According to Wilfrid Laurier athletic director Peter Baxter, no one on the football squad either refused to be tested or acknowledged using a banned substance such as anabolic steroids or human growth hormone.
"I always believe our kids make good decisions," Baxter said Wednesday. "But I also understand we need a testing program to be a deterrent and to verify the kids are making the right decisions."
Canadian Interuniversity Sport officials, with help from the CCES, vowed to intensify testing efforts after last year's calamity at the University of Waterloo. Eight Warriors football players either admitted to using, refused to be tested or produced a positive result for steroids, while a ninth player was caught with HGH in his system. Two current players were also charged by local police with possession of performance-enhancing drugs for the purpose of trafficking.
That brought CCES drug testers to other universities in the Southern Ontario region, although the testers failed to collect samples from the Laurier football team last spring, when they went to the athletic department instead of the stadium. Asked if that was a reason why Laurier was targeted for testing so early in the new year, Baxter replied: "I can't speak for [the CCES] We're obviously in close proximity to where this whole issue started.
"We'll wait for the results [which are expected to take several weeks]but I can say our guys took it in stride. They co-operated and there was nothing abnormal."
Athletic directors across the country recently received an e-mail from the CIS informing them drug testing would be done early this term. The ADs were asked for their co-operation.
Baxter said he was first contacted by the CCES on Tuesday. Soon after, the Golden Hawks players were summoned to a mandatory meeting by head coach Gary Jeffries.
The CIS is hoping that testing 65 players will send a message it is serious about eliminating performance-enhancing drugs and will conduct more tests than it did prior to the Waterloo scandal. In 2009-10, only 89 CIS football players were checked for drugs, down from the 391 players tested in 1992-93.
The CCES has also established a 17-member task force to determine the best way to combat drugs in football from the junior level to university and college. Various schools, such as Waterloo, Laurier and the University of Western Ontario, are educating their student athletes on the dangers of steroid usage - what's in the drugs, what they do to the body - through presentations from the Taylor Hooton Foundation.
Hooton, a high-school baseball player from Texas, committed suicide at 16 after using steroids and suffering from depression. Don Hooton, Taylor's brother, is speaking at Laurier on Sunday.