logo
Inside the dangerous and sordid world of university rugby initiations

Inside the dangerous and sordid world of university rugby initiations

Yahoo12-02-2025

In 2019, 19-year-old University of Gloucestershire student Sam Potter died from alcohol poisoning following a rugby initiation ceremony that involved excessive quantities of Guinness, lager and rum.
The teenager from Surrey had taken part in a four-hour drinking game as part of an end-of-season celebration among rugby team-mates. They took turns downing 'concoctions' of alcohol in a shed, with a sheet of tarpaulin laid on the floor to catch any vomit.
Potter's friends were unable to wake him the next morning. Toxicology reports showed the student had a blood alcohol level more than four times the legal drink-drive limit, and a coroner recorded that he died an 'alcohol-related death'.
Later that same year, the Universities UK (UUK) lobby group published guidance warning British students about the dangers of initiation ceremonies. It said the impact of each incident was 'significant, with far-reaching effects on families, friends and the wider university community'.
It was hoped the horrendous incident would serve as a wake-up call that hazing rituals could no longer be shrugged off as the type of harmless fun associated with fraternities at American colleges.
But more than five years later, hazing rituals are still happening in sports clubs across UK campuses, with men's rugby clubs widely regarded as the most dangerous culprit.
Telegraph Sport has learnt that initiations include forcing students to drink bodily fluids from a dead sheep's head, eat dog excrement and carry dead animals in pockets throughout ceremonies, with extreme bullying and a culture of fear widespread.
Telegraph Sport has spoken to numerous current and former university students who have been subjected to extreme activities as part of rugby initiation ceremonies in recent years.
Similar types of behaviour are also commonplace at weekly socials, which tend to take place on Wednesday nights, but the initiation of first-year students has escalated to a different level.
All of the students requested anonymity, telling Telegraph Sport of their fears that they would be shunned by their peers for exposing details of the covert events, including those who have already graduated.
Many described being forced to drink dangerous levels of alcohol and a 'cycle of abuse' passed down through year groups, mostly from older male students to their younger male peers who are determined to make initiations more extreme year on year.
Although colloquially used to describe a set of activities required to gain entry to university societies, UUK defines hazing as any university event where students are forced to participate in dangerous behaviour by their peers.
Initiation ceremonies have typically centred around excessive alcohol consumption, but substance misuse, bullying and harassment – including subjecting younger students to risky behaviour designed to humiliate them – are now par for the course.
The Telegraph revealed last summer that students were sexually and physically abused during rugby club initiations at Harper Adams, an agricultural university in Shropshire.
Documents from an internal investigation carried out by the university included claims that students were lashed with belts, forced to drink bodily waste and were sexually assaulted with wine bottles during the incidents.
Harper Adams admitted that some of its students had suffered abuse in recent years after they were subjected to 'extreme activities' during social events, but insisted it had put measures in place to turn the tide.
At a separate university in the Midlands, a student told Telegraph Sport that rugby squad members were forced to drink alcohol out of a sheep's head during hazing rituals.
Senior members of the squad brought the animal's head to an initiation ceremony and made first-year students consume fluids directly from its mouth as if performing CPR. A mixture of alcohol, urine and spit had been poured through the cavity of the sheep's severed neck for the rugby players to drink.
Students at two separate universities also told Telegraph Sport that their rugby clubs had their own versions of a 'crucifixion cross', to which team members were tied for as long as five hours as forms of 'punishments'.
Others described grim antics on university rugby tours to Salou, in Spain's Costa Dorada. One said he witnessed a friend 'picking up dog poo from the street and putting it in his mouth'. Another ex-student said he was made to 'eat' parts of his own passport, leaving him unable to fly home until he sourced a replacement.
Despite studies showing drinking is on the wane amongst Gen Z, initiation ceremonies appear to remain alive and kicking, potentially driven underground as campus culture becomes more polarised. Some have suggested social media may also have exacerbated initiation culture by egging pupils into more extreme forms of public humiliation.
Telegraph Sport has been shown the private social media channels of one university's first XV men's rugby team, whose name has been anonymised to protect students' identities.
They provided a window into the sort of horseplay often associated with a heavy drinking culture in a typical university sports club – photographs of students' shaved heads and eyebrows, and nudity in public places.
But they also revealed a more extreme side to initiation ceremonies. One photograph shared on the rugby team's Facebook group chat showed a pair of dead animals stuffed inside a student's jacket pockets. Another showed two first XV rugby players engaged in a game of tug of war using university ties knotted to one another's testicles.
Private messages exchanged between the students also displayed examples of older team-mates ordering freshers to obey their demands. In one message, a final-year student commanded first-year students to each show up to a rugby club social bearing a fortnight's worth of alcohol, painkillers, three pairs of knickers and a blindfold.
In another series of messages sent before a rugby match, students were instructed to each bring £5 as 'hush money' to encourage the sports club's coach driver to turn a blind eye to their antics.
On another occasion, the rugby captain demanded each player to provide a £20 'cash bribe' to discourage a local restaurant owner from informing the university about a chaotic food fight nights earlier. At the social, one player was whipped 'in the face with a buckle'.
The messages were spliced with photographs of a player with his front tooth knocked out, of a team-mate with a lattice of lash marks on his naked buttocks, and another student with no clothes on doing a handstand on a coach to a rugby match.
The former student who shared the social media channels with Telegraph Sport, who has since left university, said he wanted to expose the toxic culture that often hides in plain sight at university sports clubs.
'People know about this stuff going on, a lot of them are too scared to say anything,' he said.
The exact scale of dangerous behaviour in hazing ceremonies and sports club socials in the UK is hard to gauge. There is no central body that collects statistics on the subject, and freedom of information requests to universities tend to yield little, since many of the incidents either go unreported or take place off campus in local pubs and venues.
Between 2016 and 2019, 20 universities launched investigations into initiations or hazing events, according to data from information requests to 155 universities.
Guidance issued by UUK said the prevalence of initiation ceremonies was 'difficult to assess, in part because they break university disciplinary codes and so remain covert'.
Several students said they also felt their complaints had slipped through the cracks as they witnessed the buck being passed between student unions, senior university officials and external organisations.
British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS), the national governing body of university sport in the UK, said in its latest annual report that it received 63 official complaints 'alleging misconduct' relating to matches last year.
Many of these involved spectators getting drunk on the sidelines of sports events, according to a log of its misconduct cases. BUCS insisted that none of these were related specifically to hazing rituals.
The university sporting body, which organises competitions across UK campuses, launched an anonymous reporting tool in 2020 encouraging students to blow the whistle over dangerous initiation events.
The number of reports raising concerns about hazing ceremonies has more than doubled this year, BUCS told Telegraph Sport. The organisation has received 11 reports from students about dangerous initiations this year to date, up from five in the entire last academic year. BUCS would not disclose the figures for the three previous academic years that its reporting tool was live.
It is a far cry from the United States, which last month signed into law the Stop Campus Hazing Act in one of Joe Biden's final acts in the White House. The former US president introduced a legal requirement for universities to disclose all hazing incidents reported to campus authorities in their annual security reports.
The change came after a spate of college campus deaths from acute alcohol poisoning among students subjected to dangerous initiation rituals.
In the UK, there are fears that failure to instigate a culture change could damage uptake of some university sports altogether. The Rugby Football Union has already been warned that it faces an existential crisis because of tanking participation at a schools level.
An independent review commissioned by the RFU said last October that the sport was sinking in popularity among school pupils because of 'changing attitudes' and an 'image problem with some who may see it as a game for… 'posh white boys''.
It has prompted the national sporting body to play whack-a-mole and suspend any university rugby teams accused of allowing dangerous behaviour, including Harper Adams, which was issued with an interim suspension order last September. The Shropshire university has since been allowed to return to competitions.
Last month, a legal case lent weight to suggestions that hazing culture at university rugby clubs may itself be traced to top British schools. Methodist College, one of Northern Ireland's leading grammar schools, agreed to pay out more than £50,000 to a former schoolboy after he was allegedly coerced into stripping naked and having his head shaved as part of an initiation ceremony.
Gabriel McConkey claimed to have witnessed other boys perform acts on a sex toy while on a rugby trip to the Algarve for warm-weather training. His family sued the school's board of governors for alleged negligence and failure to properly supervise the senior rugby squad on the trip.
The problem is also not limited to rugby, although students suggested the sport was linked to the most extreme out of any university initiation rituals.
Telegraph Sport also spoke to the father of another student who claimed his son was abused at his university's shooting club socials.
'I don't want to sound as if I don't want them to have fun. They're adults, they can do what they want. But there's a line in the sand that is being crossed,' he said.
'They're made to do these things – and there's one or two of the older guys that are making them do these things. [Getting] blind drunk, drinking from a bucket, eating dog food, eating rotten cheese… young 18-year-old guys have to stick a match up their penis, light it and drink a bottle of wine before the match gets burned to them.
'Now that is not [and] will never be socially acceptable to do that to anybody. That's what makes my blood boil.'
The student chose not to report the incidents to his university, instead turning to his father, who suggested leaving the institution after his first year and getting a local job while he considered what to do next. One year later he still has not returned to higher education.
Students who do choose to report dangerous behaviour at initiation ceremonies often come to regret it. One said that he has been ostracised by the wider rugby community – which he says can feel small, insular and gossipy – for speaking out.
'Since leaving, it got out that I had reported what had gone on to the university. I bumped into someone who went there and they said: 'If it's you, I'm going to kill you.' And that was straight to my face,' he said.
'It's really following me around. For instance, I was dating a girl and we went to a ball, and one of the people there went to my university, and they basically identified me and said: 'Oh he's the snitch.'
'And then in everyday [terms], I mean I was playing rugby recently and one of the guys turned around and he says: 'Oh if I ever get my hands on you I'm gonna f-----g kill you.' It's because of how small the community is – it sort of heightens everything.'
A change in tactics has started to occur from institutions with some universities realising that banning entire sports teams has so far failed to outlaw dangerous initiations and even driven events beneath the radar, and are instead targeting the individual perpetrators directing them.
'If a complaint comes to you about a rugby society doing X, Y and Z, you can mostly point exactly to who it was, and then you ban them specifically,' the sports events officer at one Russell Group university said.
'You don't stop rugby from going to their fixtures, because then you kind of paint them all the same brush. It's really important that you pinpoint who the users are, who are the people perpetrating such activity, and then you make them responsible.
'It's a really bizarre phenomenon. It's definitely something that not enough has been done about or said about, but I think everyone's waking up that this exists at university.'
An RFU spokesperson said: 'The RFU continues to work with universities, student club committees and the SRFU [Scottish union] to ensure that the rugby environment is positive and inclusive to all who wish to play. We recently launched the Behaviours Toolkit resource as an extension of the Higher Education Behaviours Charter, a joint charter with BUCS, the SRFU and other home unions that provides education and guidance to universities and colleges around conduct.
'We actively encourage anyone involved in the sport to report any inappropriate conduct as we can only act if we are aware an issue exists. The BUCS website provides an email for issues to be reported, discipline@bucs.org.uk, or you can contact the RFU via SpeakUp@RFU.com.'
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Karoline Leavitt gets fiery as she's pressed on Trump's military response to Los Angeles protests
Karoline Leavitt gets fiery as she's pressed on Trump's military response to Los Angeles protests

Yahoo

time30 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Karoline Leavitt gets fiery as she's pressed on Trump's military response to Los Angeles protests

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt got into a heated back and forth with reporters on Wednesday as she held her first briefing since President Donald Trump' federalized the National Guard in California and sent active-duty Marines to join them in cracking down on protests and unrest over immigration roundups in Los Angeles. Leavitt condemned the protests as 'shameful,' citing what she described as 'left-wing radicals waving foreign flags' who she accused of 'viciously attacking' Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents as well as Los Angeles Police Department officers as part of an assault on 'American culture and society itself.' Leavitt also condemned Democratic elected officials in the Golden State, specifically Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, accusing them of having 'shamefully failed to meet their sworn obligations to their citizens' by not ordering a forceful military response to protesters. She also lauded Trump for ordering the 'mob' of protesters to be 'stamped out.' 'The criminals responsible will be swiftly brought to justice, and the Trump administration's operations to arrest illegal aliens are continuing unabated,' Leavitt said. She added that Newsom and Bass had sided 'with illegal alien criminals in their communities and violent rioters and looters over law enforcement officers who are just doing their jobs.' But Leavitt's pugnacious attacks on California leaders did not satisfy reporters, who repeatedly asked her about the extent to which the military service members who've been deployed in Los Angeles are authorized to aid in immigration law enforcement, nor did she fully explain how Trump's threats to use 'very big force' against protesters at his planned military parade in D.C. this weekend comport with America's constitutional guarantees of free speech. She also aggressively denied that the immigration crackdown that precipitated the protests and violence over the weekend had been ordered up in an effort to change the national conversation from Trump's messy split with billionaire Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX boss who wrapped up a stint as an unpaid adviser to the administration late last month. Asked about the possibility that Trump's crackdown was meant as a distraction to their social media war, Leavitt replied: 'That's an incredibly disingenuous attack.' She said Trump had been moved by 'images of border patrol and ICE agents being hailed with rocks and Molotov cocktails' and 'vehicles being burned to the ground with illegal aliens flying foreign flags.' Leavitt's press briefing came less than a day after Trump threatened to forcibly put down any protests that spoil the military parade he has ordered up for his birthdayon Saturday to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army's founding during the American Revolutionary War. During a media availability in the Oval Office on Tuesday, the president warned that any protests of the parade would be 'met with very big force' on Saturday. He reiterated the explicit threat a moment later, telling 'those people who want to protest' that they would be 'met with very big force' once more. He also opined further that any protest against the parade on Saturday would consist only of 'people who hate our country.' The president has a long history of pushing for the use of state violence against protests, which he considers to be a personal affront and a reflection of weakness on his part. During protests for racial justice in Washington following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer, he reportedly pushed to have military and law enforcement open fire on other protesters, asking then his then-Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Mark Milley, why National Guard troops deployed as a result of the demonstrations could not shoot protesters in the legs. But Leavitt denied that Trump has any intention of attacking protests against his parade or his policies this weekend. Seemingly ignorant of the president's history of urging violence against demonstrations, Leavitt claimed the president 'supports the right of Americans to peacefully protest' and 'supports the First Amendment' while suggesting that the protests in Los Angeles have consisted entirely of 'mobs of violent rioters and agitators assaulting law enforcement officers, assaulting our federal immigration authorities.' 'Thankfully, the President took action and stepped in to protect our federal law enforcement agents, to perfect protect federal buildings, to protect the federal mission of deporting illegal criminals off of our streets, and that mission will continue every day, as far as we're concerned,' she said.

American woman dies after Bushmills road traffic collision
American woman dies after Bushmills road traffic collision

Yahoo

time30 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

American woman dies after Bushmills road traffic collision

A pedestrian has died following a one vehicle road traffic collision in Bushmills, County Antrim, on Wednesday. Police received a report of the collision on the Causeway Road shortly before 12:30 BST. Allison Eichner, an American citizen from Connecticut in her 40s, was taken to hospital but died from her injuries. One person was arrested, and remains in custody, assisting with enquiries. Detectives are conducting enquiries to establish the circumstances of the collision and have asked for anyone with information to come forward.

College students, agitators and a Hamptons brat among 86 arrested at rowdy NYC anti-ICE protest
College students, agitators and a Hamptons brat among 86 arrested at rowdy NYC anti-ICE protest

New York Post

time41 minutes ago

  • New York Post

College students, agitators and a Hamptons brat among 86 arrested at rowdy NYC anti-ICE protest

They shouldn't have trouble making bail. Cops cuffed 86 demonstrators at a rowdy anti-ICE rally in Lower Manhattan Tuesday, among them the daughter of a Moroccan actor, a self-proclaimed poet from an upscale college and a coed whose family owns a posh home in the Hamptons, The Post has learned. 'My sense is, the vast majority of the 2,500 people that were there, were there to protest peacefully,' NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said on Fox 5 News. 'There was a smaller group of a few hundred where we did have to make arrests. Some of them were looking for trouble.' Advertisement 6 The NYPD said 86 people were charged in a rowdy anti-ICE demonstration in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday. The protest in Foley Square against deportation arrests by federal immigration agents began peacefully but grew increasingly violent shortly after 5 p.m., with the mob hurling bottles at cops and throwing traffic cones into traffic, an NYPD spokesperson said. Of the 86 who were charged, 52 were issued summonses for disorderly conduct and other minor charges, while 34 were arrested and charged with more serious crimes, including felony assault. Advertisement Among those busted was Vega Gullette, a 19-year-old student at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers who describes herself as 'a Moroccan-American writer, artist, and lover of junk.' The teen, who was charged with second-degree assault and disorderly conduct, is the daughter of Sean Gullette, an actor, screenwriter and director whose credits include the Darren Aronofsky films 'Requiem for a Dream' and 'Pi.' 6 The NYPD said 86 people were charged in a rowdy anti-ICE demonstration in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday. Carlos Chiossone/Zuma / 6 The NYPD said 86 people were charged in a rowdy anti-ICE demonstration in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday. Aristide Economopoulos Advertisement Also among those charged was Rachel Schreiber, 22, of Brooklyn, who is facing resisting arrest, reckless endangerment and attempted assault charges in the melee. Records show her parents own a $3 million home in Westhampton Beach. 'I'm not giving any reaction,' her mother told The Post Wednesday. 'I'm not ready to talk about this with the press.' Some of the pinched protesters are no strangers to Big Apple demonstrations. Advertisement Robert Mills, 40, who was charged with reckless endangerment and issued a disorderly conduct citation in Tuesday's scuffle, was charged with obstructing governmental administration in April during an anti-Israeli protest in Brooklyn, the Jewish News Syndicate reported. 6 The NYPD said 86 people were charged in a rowdy anti-ICE demonstration in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday. REUTERS 6 The NYPD said 86 people were charged in a rowdy anti-ICE demonstration in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday. REUTERS Tabitha Howell, 40 — who was cited for disorderly conduct — was among those injured when a crazed Queens woman drove into a Manhattan Black Lives matter protest in 2020. 'It's one thing to face physical recovery,' Howell, who said she suffered five bulging discs in her back and a traumatic brain injury in the incident, told The Post at the time. 'It's another to try to process what happened mentally and emotionally.' Meanwhile, Tisch and Mayor Eric Adams gave assurances this week that the city will not devolve in to chaos like Los Angeles, where ICE agents sparked outbreaks of violence that required the National Guard to step in to try to restore peace. 6 The NYPD said 86 people were charged in a rowdy anti-ICE demonstration in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday. Meir Chaimowitz/NurPhoto/Shutterstock Advertisement 'Watching what was going on in California, I spent the weekend on the phone with our federal partners in New York City — the head of the FBI in New York, federal protective services, homeland security investigations,' Tisch told MSNBC's 'Morning Joe. Additional reporting by Kevin Sheehan

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store