Poly Prep Country Day School [has] settled a lawsuit alleging a more than 40-year cover-up of the predatory pedophilia of its legendary football coach, Philip Foglietta. The lawsuit charged that school administrators were repeatedly informed from the 1960s until his forced retirement in 1991 that Mr. Foglietta was sexually abusing boys - on campus, in his apartment and during trips. Mr. Foglietta, who died in 1998, fondled and raped dozens, if not hundreds, of children. The case raises difficult questions for a generation of Poly boys: What did we know about Coach Phil?" "What should we have done?" Coach was often a bully. Kids who had quit the team, he would suggest, deserved to be beaten up. He would talk about the "fruits" and "homos" on the male faculty. Many of us also knew that Coach Phil showered with the fifth graders. We knew that he hung around the locker room and checked that each of us had thoroughly rinsed off. Most of us knew he invited kids for car rides to Coney Island in his green Chevy Impala and for overnight stays at the apartment he shared with his mother. We knew something was going on. We joked with one another about the showers and the car rides. One of my teammates wrote on a Web site created for Coach's victims, "How is it that as a 14-year-old Poly freshman, I just knew that something was very wrong?"
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