Since none of the many words spoken at Tuesday’s news conference at the University of Washington included “astonished,” “shamed” and “mortified,” we’ll give them a push right to the top of this column.
After reading the 49-page memo produced by an in-house panel’s six-month investigation into prescription-drug abuse in the Huskies’ women’s softball program, and to a lesser extent the football program, I am all of the above.
A “zombie” player so high she was “swimming” on the dugout floor. Narcotic painkillers given freely, without exams or prescriptions. Stolen drugs. Claims of pain-med addiction. A doped-up player falling into a coach’s arms. . . . Drugs to get on the field, drugs to get down, drugs to get up — in the same day.
. . . The episodes go on, to such an extent the memo says they are too numerous to mention.
Here’s the kicker — nobody in charge claims to have known anything untoward was going on.
This report, coupled with the Rick Neuheisel saga, the gambling-rules fiasco and athletic director Barbara Hedges’ long-running mismanagement, constitutes a failure of leadership that borders on the monumental.