Team Bonding vs. Hazing

A big concern in athletic today is the topic of hazing.  Teams like to get to know each other by hanging out with each other with out coaches or other adult supervision.  This is great for the team because you get to see your teammates outside of the court and get to know them on a more personal level.  Sometimes, though, it can get out of control if some of the upperclassmen want the underclassmen to do something to be "initiated" as a teammember.  Now there can be some things that are alright, like on the volleyball team I work with, before a game if a good dancing song comes (ie. Party Rock Anthem) they all get in a circle and everyone dances, not just the newbies, each member gets about 10 seconds then it is on to the next.  It is when they do physical or emotional harm to the new members is when it gets out of control. 
According to the article by Robert Brooks, hazing seems to be on the rise although it is not a new practice.  Usually when we think of hazing we think of sports or Greek life but it can be seen in other groups as well, and there is a wide variety of different things that are done, the following article has a great chart of all of this Hazing.  Many athletes do not realize that the things that their other teammates make them do is hazing.  Brooks talks about the study done by Norman Pollard about hazing in colleges and found that only 12% of college students said they had been hazed, yet 80% said they were forced to do dangerous or humiliating things.  Some students just say that it is something that everyone did to be apart of the team and did not think that it was harmful at the time.  A lot of students think that if they do these things that they will be more accepted into the team when they more than likely already are.  They are better ways of being accepted then to fall into the trap of doing something that can in the long run hurt themselves or others.
The hardest part of all of this is to get the students to recognize that it is hazing and to seek out help when it is needed.  And the best way to stop hazing is to prevent it, http://www.hazingprevention.org/ is a great cite that talks about a lot of different issues and ways to prevent hazing from happening.

References
Brooks, Robert.  Hazing:Rituals of Bonding or Humiliation.  http://www.drrobertbrooks.com/writings/articles/0404.html