Harvard has cancelled the season for the men’s soccer team after learning that the players on the team were keeping sexual scouting reports on female soccer players and were not forthright about it.
According to Harvard student newspaper “The Crimson,” Harvard athletic director Robert L. Scalise emailed the school’s student athletes to share the news of the season’s cancellation.
“As a direct result of what Harvard Athletics has learned, we have decided to cancel the remainder of the 2016 men’s soccer season,” Scalise wrote. “The team will forfeit its remaining games and will decline any opportunity to achieve an Ivy League championship or to participate in the NCAA Tournament this year.”
Harvard recently learned that members of the men’s soccer team was ranking female soccer recruits based on looks and giving them hypothetical sexual positions. These “scouting reports” were until recently available publicly through Google groups. The scouting reports happened in 2012 and apparently continued through this year. They were not isolated to one or two members of the men’s team either.
“Harvard Athletics has zero tolerance for this type of behavior,” Scalise added.
The scandal received attention when “The Crimson” wrote about them last week. That led to some of the women mentioned in the report to write a response in the form of an op-ed.
With a record of 4-0-1 in conference and 10-3-2 overall, Harvard led the Ivy League and had a chance to clinch a berth to the NCAA Tournament. That opportunity has been lost.
