St. Louis School
players trash
Vegas hotel rooms

Half of the team is put
on probation for a drunken
victory celebration this month

By Pat Bigold
Star-Bulletin

At least half of the St. Louis School varsity football team has been placed on probation after reports of drunken misbehavior at a Las Vegas hotel earlier this month.

Father Mario Pariante, school president, said that he is still looking into the matter after approving the punishments.

The probations put players on notice that one more serious offense could bring expulsion from school, principal Burton Tomita said.

"There was just blatant destruction of rooms," Mike Critchlow, security chief at the hotel, told the Star-Bulletin.

Critchlow said beer was found in the rooms of most players.

He said the players seemed to converge on three rooms in particular to celebrate their lopsided victory over Green Valley High at Sam Boyd Stadium earlier that night.

"They turned the box springs on the beds upside down, jumped on them and broke all the wood inside them. They pulled phone jacks out of the walls in two rooms. They partied real hard in those rooms."

"I take full responsibility for what happened," head football coach Cal Lee said this morning. "I should have supervised better."

Critchlow said the other 28 rooms occupied by St. Louis players were abused to a lesser extent.

"All the rooms that the boys stayed in were just basically trashed, with garbage thrown everywhere," he said.

Chris Martikyan, one of two security guards on duty at the time, said the disturbance took place between 3 and 5 a.m. and that during that time, guests complained about players keeping them awake.

Martikyan also said players were throwing beer cans out of windows into the parking lot.

Lee said he went out by himself to The Strip at about 2:30 a.m. and did not return until it was time to board the bus for the airport at 6 a.m.

He said he had asked security to keep an eye on the players.

Lee said that some assistant coaches went out that night, but some were left behind to watch over the players.

Asked if he regrets going out to the casino district that night, Lee said, "Right, right, right. I believe so. But it was my first time out and I figured at 2:30, go out there just to try to relax just a little. There was a lot of stress as far as making sure everything was going according to plan."

Lee said he was aware that there was damage at the hotel and he has told his players they will have to pay for it.

He said he told the hotel manager, Ed Yap, to send him the bill.

Yap said he sent St. Louis a bill for about $1,064 for damaged beds, telephone jacks and bedspreads.

"Alcohol was left in a majority of those rooms, and that had been purchased off of our property," Critchlow said.

"Several rooms had major barfing in them, and you could smell the alcohol in it," said Sheila Serna, head of housekeeping at the hotel. "They ordered pizza the last night they were here, and it was ground into the bedspreads, the carpets, where they had pizza food fights."

Serna said that in two rooms mattresses were ruined when players melted candles into amenity trays and stuck them to the mattresses.

"One room had a major flood," Serna said. "They used bedding to soak up the water, and I don't know what was in the water but it ruined two bedspreads."

She said the water seeped out of the second-floor room and down to the bottom floor.

Serna also said there was a large hole in a wall of one room where someone apparently had swung a door open and rammed the knob into the wall.

Lee said the final bed check was made at 3 a.m., a half hour after he left the hotel.

Asked to react to a security guard's statement that he saw some coaches drinking in the hotel the night of the postgame disturbance, Lee said, "That's possible."

Critchlow said he had his first problem with the St. Louis players two hours after they arrived the morning of Sept. 3.

"They were pretty well-behaved when they first came in, but then they all piled into the restaurant to eat. I don't know who told them that everything was free. They were given free meal tickets for breakfast, but those tickets don't include drinks and they got upset about that.

"They were verbally abusive to the restaurant staff. There was one girl who almost quit because they were giving her such a hard time, using abusive language on her. Then our head engineer caught them up in the hallways cursing real loud and kicking the walls."

Lee admitted that an incident took place in the restaurant but said there was no verbal abuse of hotel employees.

Critchlow said he would welcome the team back if there was better supervision.

"The whole thing was that it wasn't well-supervised," he said. "The adults were all given separate rooms, and there was no supervision in each players' room."

"You just don't turn that many boys loose in Las Vegas and tell them, 'There's four of you in a room, and it's yours for four days.'"

Tomita said that when he heard about the problems in Las Vegas, he called the team together and asked those who were not involved to stand aside. Those left sitting were put on "behavioral contract," or probation.

He would not give a specific number for the probations, saying the list was with Lee, who is also the athletic director.

Tomita indicated that some innocent players might have sat with their teammates out of a sense of team loyalty.

One starter contacted by the Star-Bulletin last night said he stayed in his room and slept during the time the players were said to be drinking and partying. Nonetheless, he said he wanted to sit with his teammates and bear the same burden of probation.

Pariante said he will not tolerate such incidents and promised to impose strict new standards for coaches chaperoning players on road trips.

Pariante also said he probably won't allow a team to travel to Las Vegas again.

"There are lots of other places to go that don't offer the same occasions to get into trouble," he said.

Pariante said discipline won't be lenient on football players. He said one player has already violated probation by getting into a fight with a junior varsity player. He said that case could lead to expulsion if evidence warrants it.