In August, New Mexico was hammered with brutal allegations that its women’s soccer program was involved in some ugly preseason hazing. Coach Kit Vela was suspended for one week along with the rest of the team. The night of debauchery ended with two players in the hospital, and twins Danielle and Devin Scelsi both quit the team and withdrew from school. New Mexico is playing soccer again.

Another hazing-related earthquake hit women’s college soccer on Tuesday. Former Clemson player Haley Hunt filed a lawsuit against her former team for heinous acts she was forced to commit in the run-up to the 2011 season. You can read more about the specifics of that here.

Here’s what we know.

There are 30 principle defendants listed on the lawsuit. Fourteen of them were upperclassmen on the team, ten are unidentified Clemson employees who “were in positions which had authority to prevent and report the freshman ritual hazing tradition, and disregarded their duties,” and a handful of staffers round out the list. The most notable is head coach Eddie Radwanski, whose Tigers are off to a 5-0 start to the 2014 season.

I’ve read through the entire lawsuit document. You can do the same if you wish. The singular thread that runs through its pages is that the optics on this are horrific, at times beyond comprehension. Clemson had a longstanding history of hazing reaching back years, and if the facts of these documents are proved true, the actions taken by Radwanski and the team are disgusting at best, criminally negligent at worst.

I’ve pulled out the worst of the document for dissection, but there’s even more cringe-worthy stuff in there. I’d recommend picking through it. Remember, in many cases we’re talking about teenage girls away from the safety of home here.

Let me interject that the following is probably the most disgusting allegation of the entire document. To set the scene, Hunt had been blindfolded, put into the trunk of a car and brought to the stadium, where she’d been dizzied and told to run, blindfolded, down the field.

I’ll stop there, but as you can imagine, it continues at length. Hunt is now receiving “continuing neurological treatment” that requires daily medication and her vision is permanently damaged. She suffered what appears to have been an acute concussion and was told to sleep it off to cover up the negligence of the players and coaching staff. I cannot imagine how her call home must have sounded, but the mere thought of it rips away at your heart.

The Clemson athletic department dismissed the issue entirely without taking action, and the Clemson ethical standards board went so far as to place the team on internal disciplinary probation for a year, required the team to attend a single hazing workshop and then required the players to prepare a PowerPoint about what they learned. A wrist slap with a feather duster.

Disgusting. Outrageous. Insulting. These accusations are all those things. Whether or not hazing has reached epidemic levels in women’s college soccer isn’t an answerable question, but two flagrant abuses emerging on separate ends of the country within weeks of each other isn’t a good sign. Zealous enthusiasm for hazing is at its core an insidious psychological power grab by the mentally weak. That it is not only allowed to exist but encouraged to exist by those in power is a poor reflection of any moral standard and a horrendous miscarriage of leadership. Hazing is not a bonding exercise. It’s social and psychological terrorism.

Hunt no doubt dealt with similar issues of belonging that hundreds (thousands?) of voiceless women’s soccer hazing victims have dealt with in past years. These ideas that you’re quitting on something, that you’re responding to adversity by quitting, that you don’t have the moxie and toughness to take the abuse… they are all intoxicating social drugs. I can deal with this. It’s not so bad. I’ll be stronger as a result. This is a psychosocial fight or flight response that engages in adverse circumstances. And it isn’t healthy when it’s being repeatedly triggered on purpose by the mean-spirited.

Whether or not Hunt’s plight leads to change, we won’t know for some time. It ultimately rides on the courage and obstinance of the victims to come forward in the face of sure demonization by outed teammates. We’re told so often that soccer teams are family. If that’s the case, situations like these only prove there are far too many of the dysfunctional variety being systematically allowed to thrive.

If these allegations are true – and it’s important to note that this is merely a lawsuit, not an admission of guilt on either side – there’s zero chance Radwanski should be allowed to keep his job. Same goes for his staff. Gut it. Cut out the rotten root. College soccer should be challenging, but it cannot be abusive. An occasional occurrence of rogue hazing met with resistance from leadership is one thing. It’s entirely another for demeaning actions to be actively trumpeted by those in positions of power.

Today’s a tough day for women’s college soccer. For all the programs doing things the right way in this country, there are clearly still elements of resistance among those who would ruin the reputations of others by mere association. Time to start rooting out these rotted trees and systematically eliminating them.