Clark County School District officials say they are unaware of even minor hazing incidents in local schools, much less anything as serious as this month's alleged attack on a high school basketball player.

But former student athletes from 10 high schools across the district paint a different picture of the prevalence of hazing.

In interviews last week, former players for teams at Basic, Bonanza, Centennial, Chaparral, Cimarron-Memorial, Clark, Durango, Las Vegas, Sierra Vista and Valley high schools detailed their experiences hazing underclassmen.

And although hazing is illegal in Nevada and banned in schools, the graduates defended the practice as a positive rite of passage deeply rooted in sports tradition.

"It's humorous, and a little cruel, but you think, hey, you know what, they (the seniors) did the same thing to me a couple years ago," said former Centennial wrestler Chris Fletcher, 20, who acknowledged throwing clothed, younger wrestlers into showers and duct-taping others to chairs.

Whether they pummeled younger athletes, forced them to perform chores, or embarrassed them by pulling down their pants or some other prank, the graduates maintained that their behavior only temporarily hurt their targets.

"They didn't enjoy it while it was happening, but they enjoyed it when they were varsity players and got to do it," said Ronald Tekpho, 20, who played football and ran track for Valley before graduating in 2003.

Many of the former athletes expressed disgust with allegations surrounding a Feb. 3 incident at Sierra Vista that has left six basketball players facing expulsion and felony charges.

The players are accused of pinning down a younger teammate while at least one of them penetrated his rectum with fingers.

"Hazing is supposed to be fun," Tekpho said, "not a violation of somebody."

Asked to elaborate on "fun" types of hazing, Tekpho described spraying a locker with a water hose while a junior varsity player was trapped inside.

"He was screaming, 'It's cold, it's cold! Let me out of here!' " said a chuckling Tekpho, a Community College of Southern Nevada student who aspires to be a police officer. "We let him out. We weren't going to let him die in there."

Playing varsity football for Chaparral in the late 1990s, Steve Puterski and his teammates had one rule after randomly choosing a younger athlete to haze.

"There was no hitting in the face or the groin," said Puterski, now a 25-year-old journalist in Greeley, Colo. "We just basically beat them in the arms and legs, so they'd be sore but not seriously hurt."

Puterski says he was similarly hazed years earlier as a junior varsity player.

"They all just kind of took a turn. It was like a senior's privilege," he said. "Maybe 10 or 15 guys would come and give you three or four licks each, then they'd help you up, and one of them would give you a ride home. It was just a tradition."

Basic High School varsity players had a method for choosing hazing targets, using dates of birth as a guide for when to drub younger players.

"My sophomore year the varsity players gave me a birthday beatdown. It was a tradition," says former Basic football player Ruben Carrillo, who graduated in 2002.

At Valley, juniors and seniors on the baseball team patterned their hazing by tracking underclassmen's mistakes on the field.

"They weren't beatings, just initiation. They all got to punch you once for every error you made," says Keith Nicholson, 20, Valley class of '04.

Cameron Johnson, now an outfielder for CCSN's baseball team, said he and other underclassmen at Las Vegas were tied to bleachers and trees and then released five or 10 minutes later.

"They tied us up and stuff just for fun. They were just messing around," he said. "Nothing was ever done to hurt kids or anything like that, though."

CCSN freshman pitcher Mike McClaren went to Sierra Vista his first three years of high school. There, he says he witnessed players getting "swirlies," where a person's head is dunked into a toilet that is then flushed.

"It only happened one year and I got out of it," he said.

CCSN freshman outfielder Brandon Trodick said he was hazed as a freshman at Cimarron-Memorial, then hazed others as an upperclassmen on the Spartans baseball team.

On the team's first road trip his freshman year, he and other first-year players were forced into a bathroom and had buckets of ice cold water thrown on them. Trodick also had his clothes taken from his room and thrown into the pool on the trip.

"I knew it was going to happen. I was just waiting for it," he said. "It was all good."

As a senior, Trodick said he shaved the heads of underclassmen, and he also willingly had his own head shaved.

Interviews with seven former female athletes indicate girls might be less likely to engage in hazing.

When asked about hazing, the girls described practical jokes they played on schoolmates. But the tricks usually targeted male athletes their own age rather than their younger, female counterparts on junior varsity teams.

"There was some hazing going on, but it wasn't anything dangerous," says Jenny Lenhart, 20, a UNLV nursing student who ran cross-country for Durango before graduating in 2004. "We feathered this one athlete's car and rubbed peanut butter all over this one guy's truck."

Knowledge of the experiences the male players described appears not to have traveled far.

The district's athletic director, Bill Garis, said he could not recall a single allegation of hazing the past three years.

Five school board trustees said they've not received complaints of even minor hazing during their tenures, some of which span 12 years.

If hazing is happening, district leaders said, no one is reporting it.

"My guess is that the person who has been hazed and ridiculed is usually too ashamed to bring something like that forward or make it public," said Trustee Larry Mason.

District police, who are tasked with investigating crimes on campus, also said they were unaware of any hazing reports.

Echoing other players, Puterski said the hazing he took part in was outside the presence of coaches.

"The coaches would just let us go change, and they'd go in their office," he said.

But after a freshman complained to his parents about a beating, Chaparral freshmen coach Marshall Hanson took a hard-line stance against hazing.

"He just came in and said, 'This is going to stop. We're going to have a coach in the locker room now. Do it again, and the principal will find out and you'll be suspended for a game,' " Puterski recounted.

Several longtime local coaches and administrators said they've encountered few hazing incidents in Southern Nevada but probably because most aren't reported.

"In my career, I didn't see any outwardly blatant hazing incidents, but that doesn't mean they didn't happen," said Larry McKay, former school district athletic director who retired recently after 30 years working in local high school sports.

"If this one student at Sierra Vista didn't step up and report it, it might have gone unnoticed there."

Longtime Durango basketball coach Al LaRocque said he doesn't view the Sierra Vista allegations as hazing.

"It's more like sexual misconduct. Hazing is making the underclassmen carry the balls."

Review-Journal staff writer Antonio Planas contributed to this report.