"Voluntary" letters are not fit to print in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Dear Chronicle editors:
Bruce Adams' interesting piece on Cal strength coach John Krasinski ("Summer sweat on campus: Bears football players growing under Krasinski," August 5), is incomplete. And I think you know it.
"Voluntary" summer workouts? Please. Athletic scholarships, which used to be four-year guarantees, are now one-sided year-to-year contracts. "Student-athletes" have discretion about attending "voluntary" sessions the way a Wal-Mart employee has a choice about working unpaid overtime.
Recently a University of Missouri football player, Aaron O'Neal, died after collapsing at a "voluntary" workout. In 2001 three Division I players died. The mother of one of the victims, Northwestern's Rashidi Wheeler, filed a high-profile lawsuit against the university that is still pending.
Among the pieces of evidence in that case is a Rodney King-like video of the incident, which shows the strength and conditioning coaches coolly continuing to run a brutal drill during which other players also drop like flies -- while Wheeler, a chronic asthmatic, lies on the sidelines fighting for his last breaths and an ambulance is summoned too slowly.
Why would such a videotape even exist? Because Northwestern head coach Randy Walker wanted a complete report from his strength coach on who opted to participate in this "voluntary" workout.
The industrialization of college football is out of control.