Stockbyte/Thinkstock(CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) — The men’s soccer team at Harvard had its season canceled by the university after documents surfaced showing players ranking members of the women’s team based on sexual appeal and physical appearance.
According to the Harvard Crimson, the team created a “scouting report” in 2012 of the women’s soccer team’s new recruits. The report had apparently become a yearly tradition and continued through 2016, the university newspaper reported, leading Harvard University Athletics Director Robert Scalise to cancel the rest of the season.
“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 in an email to student athletes according to the Crimson. “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 University President Drew Faust said in a statement she was “deeply distressed” that the 2012 report apparently continued and was more widespread throughout the team.
“The decision to cancel a season is serious and consequential, and reflects Harvard’s view that both the team’s behavior and the failure to be forthcoming when initially questioned are completely unacceptable, have no place at Harvard, and run counter to the mutual respect that is a core value of our community,” she wrote.
In an op-ed with the Crimson, members of Harvard’s women’s soccer team said they were “beyond hurt” by the report because they had considered themselves to be friends with the men’s team.
“We have seen the ‘scouting report’ in its entirety,” they wrote. “We know the fullest extent of its contents: the descriptions of our bodies, the numbers we were each assigned, and the comparison to each other and recruits in classes before us. This document attempts to pit us against one another, as if the judgment of a few men is sufficient to determine our worth. But, men, we know better than that. Eighteen years of soccer taught us that. Eighteen years—as successful, powerful, and undeniably brilliant female athletes – taught us that.”
The men’s soccer team was scheduled to face Columbia University on Saturday and if they had won, the team would’ve clinched an automatic NCAA bid.
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