Two former University of Waterloo football players who transferred to another college in order to fulfill their dreams of playing college football were denied eligibility. The former Warrior football players had to seek another college football program after the Waterloo Warrior program was shut down for a year after a steroid investigation. The harsh sentence for the football team has been criticized for punishing innocent players who were not involved in doping. The overreaction to the steroid scandal will unfortunately keep players Matt Vonk and Steve Ples from playing football next year.
Vonk and Ples were among seven ex-Warriors who played at Laurier last season following a steroid scandal that sacked their former team last spring.
“They’ve had their hearts ripped out again,” said Laurier football coach Gary Jeffries, who condemned the CIS’s rulings.
“How many times can you do that to a person?”
The former Warriors tested clean and then transferred to Laurier in protest of UW administration’s decision to suspend its team’s season.
The Waterloo football woes originated with a steroid bust involving a single player who was busted with thousands of vials of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone last year. This sequence of events led to the largest steroid investigation in the history of Canadian college football by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES). The investigation resulted in eight analytical and non-analytical positive doping test results and the suspension of the entire football team for one year.
About Millard Baker