Hazing: Being in the Haze

I am a swimmer at my school which means that when people look at me and see what my team and I do, they will judge not only our swim team but our school too. For some reason, the swim team is notorious for getting in trouble with hazing. The year before my freshman year many of the freshman at my school were taken out of the Varsity conference meet and were not allowed to swim due to the fact that they were apart of hazing. A teacher had overheard some of the swimmers talking about their senior night and because of this, many of them were not allowed to swim at Conference. Last year when I was a junior, there was a hazing incident and some swimmers had to clean up the mess that they made. It is truly disappointing that hazing happens at all. Yet it is even worse that when just a few or just one swimmer does something wrong like hazing, the whole team gets judged based off of what that one person did. This happened to me in school once with a teacher. I was dressed up getting ready for one of my first meets in my freshman year and she asked me what I was dressed up for. As soon as I said swimming she did not want to know anything about it and looked at me differently and treated me slightly different ever since I had said I was a swimmer. She had done this because she knew about all of the hazing incidents that had happened and did not support our team even though there was no way I was even apart of anything except the team because I had just joined. I couldn't have even been involved in the hazing or any incident that may have happened in the past. Treating people differently even when they have just joined a team and are just trying to find a fit in is wrong. That is how hazing begins in the first place, people feel uncomftorable so they bring others down to make themselves feel higher or better. In order to stop the cycle of people judging our team, teachers, students, and familys have to forgive what people have done in the past and accept the people who are on the team now. People should not be judged for what others have done and although this doesn't happen, the world could be a nicer place if we tried.