Ex-Hamilton coach Belles on hazing scandal: 'I'm the captain. I'm responsible'

azcentral sports
Steve Belles was interviewed by Brad Cesmat on May 24, 2017.

Steve Belles, for the first time in decades, will spend Friday nights away from the football field after the former Chandler Hamilton High School coach was 'reassigned' in the wake of a hazing scandal that has grown into a criminal investigation. 

Belles, who's won five state championships at Hamilton since 2006, sat down with Sports360AZ host Brad Cesmat on Wednesday for the first full-length interview he's offered since his suspension. 

Belles told Cesmat that, as the team's head coach, he was ultimately responsible for what took place among his players, but also said the actions of a few kids shouldn't color the whole program.

Belles and Cesmat talked for 15 minutes and the entire interview is available here

Related:What we know about the Hamilton hazing case

Some highlights

Belles said, as the coach, he's ultimately responsible.

“I was the captain of the ship. I’m the one being held responsible. That’s just the way it goes when you’re the guy in charge.”

Other coaches recognize that the same thing could happen in just about any program.

“Everybody knows that this could be my school this happened to," Belles said. “Because what you just said earlier, we are not around kids 24/7 but it seems we’re responsible for them 24/7 and you got to make good decisions as head coaches. Some of those decisions are real tough.

"I don’t know what I would have done different, because we didn’t know. I can firmly say that at night, when I put my head on the pillow, that if we would’ve known what was going on — and remember this is a few, this is a very few kids doing this where the other 98 percent of our kids are fantastic— but you can see what a little infection can do not to a whole football program but to a whole community."

Cesmat asked Belles how a head coach could have been in the dark about this sort of activity taking place in his team's locker room.

"It’s a fair question. I think if we would have known, we would have taken action, there’s no question. We would not have swept something like this under the rug. We would’ve taken immediate action. But if you don’t know and you have asked the questions to the people some of the people it actually might have happened to…when you get ‘no, no, no’ you think this must be a lot of heresay.

“Nothing was concrete and there wasn’t any indication there was anything going on.”

Belles said he was first made aware of an investigation when officers appeared on the Hamilton High School campus. 

"There were little hints of something going on," Belles said. "That day there was an arrest it was totally a surprise, we had no idea that was going on...(it was) I think disbelief. I couldn’t believe it because we thought really the case had been shut because we didn’t think there was anything there."

Some changes will have to be made to locker rooms, either in their construction or the how players are monitored in there.

"If all of these things happened in the locker room it definitely would be a problem. The set-up is not conducive to monitoring all the time.

“We still don’t know where all this took place. It could have been in the weight room. It could have been in the locker room.”

“You can’t have cameras in the locker room so either you plant a coach in there full time or you have time limits on how long people can be in there.”

Bordow:If Hamilton allegations prove true, how can Belles keep his job?

Obert:High school sports a balancing act more than ever

More Hamilton:Belles will not coach Hamilton football next season