SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Four months after suspending its baseball program, UC Davis announced Friday that the team’s head coach was resigning after an investigation revealed young players had for years been subjected to hazing rituals that included binge drinking, strippers and jokes about gay sex.
“Head Coach Matt Vaughn failed to take appropriate steps to address a concern brought to his attention about possible hazing involving the baseball team in 2018,” the university said in a prepared statement.
The announcement came five weeks after UC Davis allowed the baseball program to resume practicing. Although the team will be allowed to play when the baseball season begins next February, it will face a reduction in its schedule.
In July, UC Davis announced it had suspended the team pending an unspecified investigation into “credible allegations of misconduct primarily related to hazing,” according to an online letter to the UC Davis community by Chancellor Gary May. At the time, he released no details.
A 34-page report released Friday by Wendy Lilliedoll, the investigations director at UC Davis, reveals a series of hazing rituals and other “initiation events” that had been a staple of the baseball program at least since 2016. They included a game called “beer boxing,” a competition that required two players to drink copious amounts of beer until someone vomited.
In another game, called “Don’t F--- Your Brother,” two teams of rookies “raced to drink a jug of alcohol.”
Other forms of hazing included eating live goldfish and other rituals in what had become a lengthy initiation ceremony each January, about a month before the start of the season.
In one case, the newcomers were told to meet at the top of a campus parking structure on a Saturday morning, where upperclassmen drove around them and shot at their feet with Airsoft guns.
“Throughout the day, the new players were sent from one baseball house to another,” the report said.
At each stop, they’d be subjected to a different ritual, such as “beer boxing” or a game called “mystery shot,” in which the rookies had to drink a mystery beverage that might include anything from dirt to Tabasco sauce. One player told investigators that he’d heard that someone had urinated in a newcomer’s cup.
At the end of the day-long series of initiations, “rookies were blindfolded, brought inside, and given lap dances by (redacted) team members,” the report said. “Ultimately, their blindfolds were removed, professional strippers performed lap dances on the rookies, and the returning players welcomed them to the team.”
The report said upperclassmen tried to scare the newcomers with hints that they’d be subjected to some form of sexual abuse.
“Upperclassmen made comments telling rookies to shave their ‘buttholes,’ to trim their nails, and not to wear underwear to initiation,” the report said. While most of the newcomers said they knew it was a joke, several of the young players “followed at least some of the directions,” the report said.
The report said the evidence “strongly suggested” that certain players used cocaine, marijuana and other drugs at parties.The hazing rituals, however, featured copious amounts of alcohol, according to the report.
“The first initiation event (‘Beer Boxing’) was structured so that half the rookies would drink enough to vomit by their first baseball house stop on Saturday morning, near the start of the day of physical exertion and drinking. One of the participants in the 2020 initiation described blacking out by the second stop, after being the ‘brother who got f---d’ in the anchor position of ‘Don’t F--- Your Brother.’ Another witness described seeing photos of himself lying in his vomit.”
In 2019 and 2020, the team included an initiation activity that required rookies to swallow a live goldfish, something that one player said 80 percent of them couldn’t do.
“Other witnesses described immediately vomiting up the goldfish or dumping it on the lawn rather than eating it,” the report reads.
Coach Vaughn ‘was aware of the 2018 initiation’
While the university made clear it held Vaughn responsible for the breakdown in discipline, the investigative report said other coaches had some limited knowledge of what was going on.
The report said Vaughn was told by a colleague in early 2018 that some athletes from other sports were concerned about drinking and hazing on the baseball team. While Vaughn told the investigator he questioned two or three of his older players in response to this allegation, his “own description of his response did not suggest actions geared toward understanding what happened.”
One player told the investigator that he had an impression that Vaughn “was aware of the 2018 initiation.” The investigator said it appeared two assistant coaches, Brett Lindgren and Lloyd Acosta, “had the same level of information” as Vaughn.
All of the coaches have been under suspension since July. Lindgren and Acosta’s status wasn’t immediately clear; they aren’t among the group of interim coaches running the program.
In addition, the investigator said there wasn’t conclusive evidence “that any coaches knew about the specific events initiation entailed.”
At one point, investigators found a “GroupMe” chat that after UC Davis suspended the team one player “was instructing peers over the chat to ‘deny … to the highest degree,’ while another told GroupMe members to ‘Delete and Destroy everything’ such as videos that could be used as evidence in the investigation.
“Many players corroborated that upperclassmen told them before the initiation that it would be ‘the most fun you never want to have again,’ or something similar,” the report reads. “One player was emphatic that the initiation was an unambiguously positive experience that was not problematic in any respect. One was unequivocal that the initiation was an abusive experience he thought should stop.”
Many said they thought it was an overall positive bonding experience but they thought some elements were problematic such as excessive drinking, the report said. Just about everyone said they were ‘disgusted” by the “mystery shot” and goldfish chugging rituals, the report said.
New training promised for athletes
In response to the findings, the university said it was prohibiting all unsupervised team activities on and off-campus and an administrator will travel with the baseball team for what the university says will be a shortened season, with a reduction in the non-conference schedule.
All UC Davis athletes will be required to take new training intended to prevent hazing.
UC Davis will also begin a national search for a new head coach, the university said. In the meantime, interim coaches will run the team, a group that includes Davis resident Randy Choate, who once won a World Series with the New York Yankees.
“We are deeply saddened that students who have been a part of the baseball team experienced events that negatively impacted their health and wellbeing,” Rocko DeLuca, UC Davis’ athletic director, said in a prepared statement. “We appreciate those who reported their concerns as well as those who participated in the investigation. Their actions will help the baseball team create a healthy, supportive culture.”
When it announced the suspension of the program in July, the university said players could renounce their commitments to play for UC Davis. It wasn’t known how many players have gone elsewhere.
The Aggies are coming off a dismal season — finishing last in the Big West Conference with an 8-32 record, the program’s poorest showing since 2009. UC Davis has fielded a baseball team since 1938.
The baseball scandal comes just two years after the university disbanded the student-run UC Davis Cal Aggie Marching Band for similar misconduct allegations.
Known by its nickname Band-uh!, the band had for decades been a boisterous and instantly recognizable fixture at UC Davis games, rallies, parades and community events.
But behind the scenes, some members were growing uncomfortable by a raucous, sexually charged, alcohol-soaked culture that had been part of the marching band since before most of its current members were born. In 2019, allegations of inappropriate conduct were first published in The California Aggie, the UC Davis student newspaper, prompting the university to hire the Sacramento law firm Van Dermyden Maddux to independently investigate.
With the university’s investigation into the band underway, the program was placed on an interim suspension that eventually led to its complete disbandment soon after the Sacramento Bee published an investigative report, describing a culture of hazing, binge drinking and people taking off their clothes.
Three people told The Bee they had sexual experiences so traumatizing they sought professional therapy, and one woman said she had to be hospitalized for a psychotic breakdown.
The Bee obtained a copy of the band’s “Hymnal,” which contains 68 pages of songs about sex, bestiality, incest, rape, masturbation, oral copulation, decorated with hand-drawn pornographic illustrations. The Bee also obtained video taken at a band practice on campus, featuring several students performing in their underwear. Students described an alcohol-saturated, “hyper-sexualized” culture in which people were encouraged to “make out” with as many as possible.
The students shared stories of “Shirts-Off O’clock,” in which partygoers take off their shirts at a set time. One woman alleged she was groped during a naked hot tub session one of the band’s sections hosted at an annual retreat called “Cabin” held in the Tahoe area. In September 2019, the university announced it had made the interim suspension permanent. It created a new “university-supervised” band with a new name, uniforms, governing structure, bylaws and guidelines.
