, Asbury Park Press EATONTOWN
As a student at Red Bank Catholic in 1983, Joe McAuliffe vividly recalls the disillusionment at seeing one of his competitors inject himself in the locker room at the Teenage Power-Lifting Nationals.
And as a strength and conditioning professional, he has watched in disbelief as one kid gained 65 pounds in five months, and another put on 40 pounds of muscle over the summer. He has banned at least a half-dozen young athletes from his gym for such decidedly unnatural feats.
The Tinton Falls resident may have four drug-free power-lifting world championships on his resume, but he knows a little something about steroids. As a consultant to the governor's task force on steroid abuse, his input helped shape the landmark decision to have New Jersey become the first state to do random testing of high school athletes.
And from McAuliffe's perspective, it's long overdue.
Sure, there are the statistics from the Centers for Disease Control that show steroid use among athletes in grades 9-12 rose nationally from 2.5 percent in 2000 to 6.1 percent in 2005. But when McAuliffe showed up at the NJSIAA wrestling championships last March, his instincts and training told him something wasn't right.
"As a professional, I saw steroids in Atlantic City. I thought there were some blatant violations," he said. "But I think the landscape's going to be a little different next year, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of those kids aren't back."
That's not an indictment of every kid who competed there, mind you. But based on the evidence, it would be downright naive to think it's not going on. Now area athletes will be participants in a program that the rest of the country will be closely monitoring, looking for someone to take the lead in what has become the single biggest hot-button issue in sports.
As student-athletes, parents, trainers and coaches slowly filtered into McAuliffe's JM Power facility on Saturday, where he was giving a seminar on steroids and the new regulations, it was hard to believe it's taken this long for someone to take action. The random testing will be a strong deterrent, but education is the key to any program like this.
As he sat with his son, William, who will be a junior on the Colts Neck High School football team in the fall, Dennis Patelis clearly understood the ramifications of the new policy.
Patelis played at the University of Rhode Island with Steve Furness, the defensive lineman who won four Super Bowl rings with the Pittsburgh Steelers but died of a heart attack at 49, amid speculation of steroid use. Patelis also grew up on Long Island, so he's well versed in the tale of Lyle Alzado, who made it from tiny Yankton College to NFL stardom thanks to steroid abuse, before dying of brain cancer at age 43.
"(Furness) was 250 pounds when he left Rhode Island, and he was 280-290 with the Steelers within a year or two," Patelis said. "I remember when he came back to Rhode Island, he was massive.
"As a father, it worries you from a competitive nature. There are other athletes still doing it, despite the fact that New Jersey is going to monitor it. And my son has to work out that much harder. How do you compete with someone who's doing it?"
The pressure on young athletes is more intense than ever. Pressure from coaches to gain weight and strength. Pressure to make the varsity and be popular off the field. Pressure to perform and get a college scholarship.
"You see it in the weight room, people are getting bigger and stronger, so you want to get bigger and stronger," William Patelis said.
The problem is that kids are continually bombarded with mixed messages about steroids, seeing and reading about successful athletes caught in the web of performance-enhancing drugs. And 17-year-olds think they're indestructible, so long-term health consequences are irrelevant.
"What scares me with young kids now are the salaries you might get by signing a professional contract," said Hazlet's Eddie Hernandez, a strength and assistant football coach at St. John Vianney. "If this is what I need to achieve that, then you know what? Maybe I'll give it a shot to get into the league, sign a big contract and then go off it."
If it scares Hernandez, it scares me. And it should scare you, too. If you ever met Hernandez you wouldn't think anything would scare this former international power-lifter and body builder. But he sees first-hand the effect someone like Barry Bonds can have. He may be the center of controversy, but he's probably got $100 million in the bank.
"At the level of power-lifting and body building I competed at, it crosses your mind," he admitted. "Did it cross my mind? Sure it did, but I never did it. But you see what guys were able to do when they use drugs."
Random testing should help relieve some of the pressure on young athletes. But this is just a first step. An initial salvo in the attempt for the NJSIAA to get its arms around the problem, while showing the rest of the country that such a program can be successful.
The program to be instituted next school year, however, is only a small sampling, with approximately 500 of the 10,000 or so athletes in state championships to be tested. Participants know when it's coming, and anyone whose team won't qualify for the states has nothing to fear. The next step in terms of a deterrent would be to randomly test all athletes. The NJSIAA and the state are splitting the estimated $100,000 startup cost for the program, but it's difficult to put a price tag on saving a kid's life.
The first version of the testing program also fails to provide team sanctions for individual infractions. Could you imagine the peer pressure within the locker room on guys if a baseball team, for instance, would lose a championship because a team member tested positive? That might be the greatest deterrent of all.
There will be lawsuits, of that you can be certain. But here's to hoping the program stays the course and evolves into something that becomes a model for other athletic associations to follow.
"A message has to be sent out strongly throughout the country, to stop these kids from even having this cross their mind," Hernandez said. "And it's got to start at the lowest possible level, and I think the high school level is a good start. And what better place than New Jersey."
