Lucas Sanchez called it "Cup Check Tuesday," and all the freshmen of the Las Vegas Robertson football team had to be ready, or else.

This was his indoctrination to Cardinals football when he was a freshman in 2002. Every Tuesday, Sanchez and his fellow ninth-grade peers made sure they were wearing their athletic cup when they hit the practice field because the seniors were sure to check.

"The seniors would come by and slap you there (in the groin)," Sanchez recalls.

That was the extent of what he would call "hazing" within the program during his four years there under head coaches Art Abreu Sr. and Chad Roanhaus. In fact, Sanchez never considered it hazing.

"It wasn't anything really to that extent," Sanchez says. "It was just a couple of stupid pranks done in front of the coaches."

But cup checks do not compare to what the program and the school is facing now, with allegations of hazing that includes assault, battery, false imprisonment and molestation or rape. They stem from an incident at a football camp the team took at Western Life Canyon in Gallinas Canyon, 15 miles northwest of Las Vegas, N.M., in mid-August.

The Las Vegas City Schools district is holding hearings Tuesday to determine whether six former players, who are accused of hazing will be expelled from the school.

The Las Vegas district attorney's office handed over the criminal case to Santa Fe District Attorney Henry Valdez last week because of conflicts of interests within the department. At least three employees have relatives who are involved in the case.

Sanchez calls the incident "an embarrassment," and believes it could tarnish the program's recent success. Sanchez was the starting quarterback of the Cardinals' Class AAA state championship team in 2005, the first the school's history. Robertson won a second title in 2006 and finished runner-up to St. Michael's in 2007.

Sanchez takes it personally because he says hazing was non-existent in the program.

"It's really embarrassing because I've had people asking me if I was a part this," Sanchez says. "Everything we did and worked hard for is completely gone now."

Former teammates Justin Montoya and Adam Martinez, who also were on the 2005 team, said Roanhaus made it very clear what his expectations were, and that included no hazing.

"Coach Roanhaus felt the kids were there to play football," Montoya says. "The younger kids weren't there to be hazed by the older kids. If Chad was there now, it wouldn't have happened."

Martinez said the coaching staff, which numbered about seven, was always around in the locker room and on the field, which limited hazing opportunities. But Martinez felt the upperclassmen set the tone in the locker room with a nurturing atmosphere.

"The upperclassmen were there to help the younger guys get further ahead," Martinez says. "They learned their roles and then when they were juniors and seniors, they would take those roles and teach them to the other underclassmen. And our feeling was that if we weren't hazed as freshmen, then they don't need to be hazed."

Martinez said he didn't see any kind of hazing when he was a freshman under Abreu Sr., whom he said had a very strict and disciplined philosophy. Sanchez said the seniors back
then often had the freshmen doing tasks they didn't want to do, like cleaning up the locker room and the field or moving furniture and equipment, but the behavior never escalated beyond that.

The former teammates agreed that the image they tried to build has taken a backseat to the current turmoil.

They hope that it won't be forgotten.

"We wanted the first thing people thought about Robertson to be about what happened on the field," Montoya says. "Now, it seems like Robertson is the school that was (allegedly) sodomizing kids. It doesn't hurt, but it's disappointing to hear."