Drug Testing at Creighton Prep High School: Good Idea or Bad?

BY DIRK CHATELAIN
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER



Omaha Creighton Prep announced Tuesday that it will randomly test its athletes for performance-enhancing drugs, beginning this fall.

The all-boys school, which boasts a tradition of athletic prowess, will be the first in Nebraska to adopt a drug-testing policy of its kind.

Before participating in a sport, Prep students and their parents must sign a form consenting to year-round random testing. Students who don't consent won't be eligible. Students who fail a test must sit out one year.

Creighton Prep hopes the policy acts as a deterrent to steroid use and serves as a teaching tool about the dangers of performance-enhancing drugs, said Athletic Director Dan Schinzel.

"There are two reasons that schools hesitate to do this," Schinzel said. "No. 1, the cost, which we have found not to be an inhibiting factor. . . .

"The second reason is they think there's a cloud of suspicion that will come over their school. I don't think that's true at all. We don't think we have a problem. We're being proactive. We see this as an educational tool."

Other schools in Nebraska have tested athletes for illegal drugs, but Prep is the first to test for performance-enhancing drugs.

Administrators across the state applauded Prep's initiative but raised practical concerns about its execution.

Foremost may be this question: Who decides which kids are tested?

"You can't just pick them out for no good reason," said Steve Joekel, Millard West assistant principal for activities. "That's like throwing mud at the wall and hoping something sticks. It's only a good thing if you can apply it in a way that's equitable, practical and reliable."

Parents may approve of a policy in theory, said Alliance High School Assistant Principal Skip Olds, but opinions change when it affects their own kid.

"You better have your ducks in a row," Olds said. "They'll have a lawyer up there before you can blink an eye."

Participation in extracurricular activities isn't a right, Schinzel said, it's a privilege.

"From a legal standpoint," he said, "we don't have any concerns."

The testing process will work like this: Each calendar season, including the summer, the National Center for Drug Free Sport, which Prep has hired to administer the tests, will randomly select six to 10 athletes.

It sends the names to Schinzel. He contacts the athletes, informing them that they have 24 hours to visit a collection site and provide a urine sample.

The sample is sent to the testing organization, which analyzes it and contacts Schinzel with the results.

If an athlete fails the test or doesn't show up, he is ineligible to compete in any sport for one calendar year.

Creighton Prep will test 30 to 40 athletes per year. Each test will cost the school $100 to $150. Over the course of a year, Schinzel said, the bill would run $3,000 to $5,000.

"We don't see that being too great of a cost," he said.

New Jersey became the first state in 2006 to mandate random performance-enhancing drug testing in high school athletics. Florida, Texas and Illinois have followed. Schinzel expects Nebraska to adopt testing within the next decade.

"We wanted to get ahead of the curve," he said.

The issue of performance-enhancing drugs has been on schools' radar for a long time. But finding ways to conduct tests has proven touchy.

Joekel called it a "huge political hurdle to overcome," especially because of funding. Each dollar put into testing, Olds said, takes a dollar away from buying books.

Steroids have surfaced as a hot-button issue at every level of sport in the wake of major league baseball's doping scandal. Home run kings Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds and strikeout pitcher Roger Clemens, along with dozens of others, have been linked to steroids.

According to a University of Michigan report in 2006, 2.7 percent of high school seniors have used steroids at some point.

States that have adopted a drug-testing policy have found that it does deter kids from steroid use, but the problem wasn't as critical as some testing proponents suggested, said Jim Tenopir, executive director of the Nebraska School Activities Association. Tenopir spoke last month to a colleague in Texas, a state that began testing last year.

"To date," he said, "they've had one positive."

Last fall, Schinzel and Joe Ryberg, Creighton Prep dean of students, started working on a policy. They studied the random testing policies of the NCAA, which has been testing athletes since the 1980s. Their proposal won support of the Creighton Prep administration and a board of parents. Monday, the school sent letters explaining the policy to students' homes.

"We've had nothing but positive feedback," Schinzel said.

Schinzel said he hopes to negate potential conflicts by educating parents about testing procedures. Implementation is a tall task, though. Even the NCAA navigated a learning curve, Tenopir said.

Alliance's Olds doesn't think Creighton Prep's policy goes far enough.

In 1986, Olds designed a mandatory testing program not for steroids, but for marijuana, cocaine and other illegal drugs. It folded under pressure from the Nebraska Civil Liberties Union.

If he could, Olds said, he would still test his athletes for drugs, including performance-enhancing substances. But if you're going to take the time to employ a policy, test everyone, he said.

"Random is not the way to do it," Olds said. "If you're going to do one, do them all. Then you can look anybody in the eye and say, 'Our athletic department is clean.'

"With random testing, you can't say that. It's a Band-Aid."

Schinzel is confident that Creighton Prep's program will raise awareness. Prep won't test for illegal drugs — the school already has a testing policy in place for those — but it will detect the most common drugs on the NCAA's list of banned substances.

"All of us," Joekel said, "will be interested to see how it works."