BBSW Vol. 2: How to write an explosive exposé in COVID times; How a fun football hack spreads
"It's remarkable that we pulled this off without one Globe staff member setting foot in the newsroom."
Sometimes you come across a scandal so explosive, so rich with nuggets too outlandish to believe, that you don’t know where to start.
Sometimes you just have to let the story tell itself.
This is one of those stories, from the front page of this past Sunday’s Boston Globe, written by Bob Hohler and Brandon Chase.
It sinks its hooks into you right from the jump.
DANVERS — Public officials in this North Shore community have concealed for more than 16 months a disturbing secret.
Disturbing? Concealed? Sixteen months? OK, you have my attention, go on…
In June 2020, a varsity boys’ hockey player reported to school officials and police that two teammates physically restrained him the previous season while another repeatedly struck him in the face with a plastic sex toy because he refused to shout a racial slur in one of the all-white team’s regular locker room rituals.
Um….what?!?
The sessions were known on the team as “Hard R Fridays,” the “R” referring to the final letter of the n-word, according to the player and other individuals who separately learned about the team’s alleged tradition.
The player later reported the incident to a special investigator commissioned by the Danvers School Committee. He also told school officials, police, and the special investigator that a player touched him inappropriately after the team stripped naked in another locker room ritual known as “Gay Tuesdays,” according to the player and three other people who were with him when he made his statements to investigators.
What’s more, more than half of the 2019-20 hockey team allegedly participated in a disturbing group text chat laced with deeply offensive words and images. In a transcript obtained by the Globe, one text made a crass joke about how Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, while numerous others included videos making light of the violent deaths of Black people, and one mocked an image of a Black Danvers High student, suggesting he was being lynched.
Gulp.
I’m at a loss for words. I need a minute to recover.
***
Nearly a year’s worth of work went into uncovering this ugly story about a North Shore high school hockey community gone poison, and the characters here are like something out of a TV drama. A school committee member fighting for answers while her colleagues close ranks. Town officials fighting like Hell against public records requests from a dogged reporter. A decorated cop’s reputation at stake. A whistleblower from an unexpected source.
Numerous follow-ups have seen the hockey team kicked out of their home rink, a community outraged, and even more ugly allegations surface.
Bob Hohler is something of a Grim Reaper at the Globe. If you work in a public relations office, there are few things as scary as hearing “Bob Hohler from The Boston Globe is on line one.”
The Hohler’s of the world are a dwindling breed in this day and age of journalism. He only writes sparingly, stays mostly underground, and doesn’t have any social media presence. When he does pop his head above ground, it’s usually a long investigative piece thousands of words long, deeply sourced, full of colorful details but lacking sunshine in tone.
Hohler was a political reporter for the Globe for nearly 15 years, many of them spent covering the White House, before moving over to the Red Sox beat in 2000. His coverage of the epic 2004 World Series is some of the best deadline sportswriting ever done in this town. And yet despite his hard news background, he called his time on the Sox beat “the greatest challenge of my career.”
Fifteen years ago, I had the honor of doing some research for Bob for a story he was working on about minority coaching hires in college football. My job was to call up the sports information director at every New England college playing football, and ask them how many minority coaches were on their coaching staff. Some SIDs were super cordial. Others were evasive. Still others berated me over the phone, calling me not-so-nice names I can’t repeat here, and threatening to call my boss. I held my ground and got what I needed. The story was got recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors that year, and thus it remains one of the great honors of my career.
I’ve gotten to know Brandon a great deal over the last few years. I’ve long admired him from afar. As high school editor of ESPNBoston for six years, I followed a lot of would-be MLB Draft prospects during the spring months. Some writers who cover high school baseball bring their own pocket radar, something cheap that’s usually 1-2mph off but can at least give you an idea of how some hot prospect’s pitch is moving. Brandon is the only guy I ever saw bring a freaking Stalker Pro. He cares that much about the details, especially with his beloved baseball.
I have so many questions. Primarily, how is it that the only adult in the room in this whole thing is the 18-year-old Danvers High student?
Max Leete, a three-time high school state wrestling champion who graduated from Danvers High in June, was the school’s representative last year to the School Committee. Leete, who is Black, said he recognized the hockey team’s culture as toxic and blamed the school system for not publicly holding Baldassare responsible.
“Kids are kids, and kids can change,” Leete said. “But adults in power must be held accountable.”
But we can save those thoughts for another post here. What I really want to focus on is the craft of this story, because you may only get a chance to write something like this once in your career. So you have to nail it.
COVID-19 just made everyone’s job harder to pull off. Jeff Pearlman has a great piece this week about one of the most dreaded parts of a journalists’ job — knocking on a stranger’s door — that is worth your time. As someone who regularly knocked on doors in inner-city Jacksonville after homicides 15 summers ago as an intern for the Florida Times-Union, I can assure you this is one part of the profession that doesn’t get easier over time.
In another era — perhaps even as little as 2-3 years ago — you pursue a story like this, you’re probably spending time in Danvers knocking on doors. But COVID-19 threw a wrench in that tactic, maybe even permanently.
That’s where my conversation with Brandon starts…
Q: How did COVID-19 effect how you chase a story like this on foot? And how did you adjust?
There were so many moving parts to this story, that, to look back now and see that we accomplished a large chunk -- if not the largest chunk -- of the reporting in the middle of the first "pandemic winter" while vaccines were still being rolled out is pretty incredible. Bob and I made dozens of phone calls to multiple sources after I first got the tip in the middle of February, and as the story progressed, we had Zoom meetings with Globe editors and a couple Zoom interviews with sources. It's remarkable that we pulled this off without one Globe staff member setting foot in the newsroom on State Street. In the past, when I've written a story with a sensitive subject, I like to meet my sources in person, whether it's at their home, or at school during a practice or game. COVID made that impossible. One of our sources was actually quarantined for a while back when we interviewed them, and it was impressive that they took the time to speak to us at that moment. I think, because of the COVID curveballs and the nature of the story, phone interviews lasted a lot longer than I've been used only because there was so much detail, and I wanted to get every detail right.
Q: The details in an explosive story like this are extremely sensitive. Tell me about your process writing a powerful narrative that accurately reflected what you had on record?
There were so many details to this story that we could have approached it from multiple angles. Do we focus in-depth on the racism, homophobia, and the content of the group texts? Do we focus on how the coach was a prominent police officer in town whose own department allegedly ran cover for him? Do we focus on the contents of multiple investigations? As the story was nearing its final version in the spring and summer, it was clear this would be a story about all of those topics, but the big focus was around the fact that these racist and homophobic hazing rituals happened, students were victimized by it, high-ranking Danvers Public Schools officials knew about it, and went to great lengths to cover up these incidents and hide the severity of them from their own citizens for more than a year. The biggest story was the gross negligence by the "adults in the room."
Q: For me, seeing what was alleged being alluded to in the yearbook quotes made it all real to me. Strange, isn’t it? How do you go about corroborating details for something like this?
That one was wild. When we first received that information from a source, we couldn't believe the allusion of the rituals by 2020 senior hockey players even made it into the yearbook. They were all there on paper. Did anyone on the yearbook staff at the time know this was happening? I'm not speculating on that, but that's something that should have been checked on by advisers at the time. I remember saying to Bob that I'd drive to the Danvers Public Library to corroborate the yearbook findings since most public libraries have a copy of the high school's recent yearbook. In the end, multiple sources confirmed the yearbook quotes to us. Those, and the group text, were big pieces of physical evidences we needed to confirm and further pursue the story.
How one coach’s hare-brained idea became another’s winning ticket
Get a load of this formation trick MassLive’s Gage Nutter captured a few weeks ago:
Wahconah Regional’s Gary Campbell, the coach behind the above formation trick, is pound for pound one of the state’s best football strategists. My favorite Campbell moment is when he beat a Shepherd Hill team with three future NFL players in the 2014 D4 state semifinal, despite being out-gained nearly 2-to-1, in what is considered one of the greatest upsets in the state tournament era of MIAA football.
He’s also something of a mad scientist. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when Campbell said he’s had this in his pocket for six years.
The play has been in the Warriors’ playbook for roughly six years. Wahconah coach Gary Campbell doesn’t know how many times his team has run it in that time, but figures you can count it on one hand.
“It is something we hold, a bit of an ace in the hole when you need it,” Campbell said after the game against West Springfield. “I knew if we got half the distance to the goal it would be an automatic first down. That helped.”
Campbell remembers watching the Naval Academy play a game on TV half a decade ago and seeing their program use the shift play to pick up a first down.
He immediately made a note about the play and installed it into the team’s playbook soon after.
And like all good ideas, it’s spreading. Forty miles down the road in Westfield, Bombers coach Rob Parent used it to secure a first-round playoff win last week over Fitchburg — and made no qualms about where he stole it from.
With less than two minutes left in the game against the Red Raiders last Friday, it was time to break the figurative glass and use it.
The Bombers led 7-6 late in the game, had the ball on their own 47-yard line and needed three yards for a first down. Fitchburg had one timeout left.
If Westfield got a first down, the game was over. Before the third down play, Fitchburg used its second timeout, giving Westfield’s coaches more time to go over the play and answer any lingering questions players on the field had about executing it.
Finally, the Bombers stepped to the line of scrimmage, executed it and drew Fitchburg offsides, giving Westfield a first down and letting the program run the clock to end the game.
“It’s a copycat league,” Parent said. “You watch high school, college, NFL ... there is always something where you look and say ‘I can get my guys to run it’. ... When you see success, you want the same success. If you see something work, use it”
Parent thanked Campbell over Twitter for the inspiring the play’s addition to Westfield’s playbook.
Campbell wrote back: “Go Bombers! Good luck next week. Keep it rolling! WMass Football!!”
That last line gets me. With all due respect to my coaching brethren in the Boston area, I can’t imagine an Eastern Mass school swiping a play from a rival and the two coaches having a fun Twitter banter about it. This is the type of gamesmanship that starts wars in the Catholic Conference.
If you’re like Picasso and believe that “all art is theft”, then you know that good ideas are worth being an open book about. The more you share your idea, the more opportunities you have to refine it, because other peoples’ perspectives will inevitably poke holes and find blind spots. That’s a good thing!
Also, the next time somebody around here tries this, they’re going to find Gage’s viral tweet about Gary’s neat trick. And probably every time after. Which only adds to the Wahconah mystique. What else do they got up their sleeve?
Stop worrying about who was first in line for the show and just enjoy the show. Don’t be a plagiarist. But definitely keep your “swipe file” fresh.