‘My coach failed me.’ A former swimmer copes with the lasting trauma of abuse.
By Cindy Boren
Updated June 29, 2023 at 4:52 p.m. EDT| Published June 29, 2023 at 8:21 a.m. EDT
Katherine Touhey says she was emotionally abused by her college swimming coach, which led her to eventually quit the sport she loved and left lasting trauma. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Even decades later, the news that her college swimming coach had been fired struck a visceral blow to Katherine Touhey, who was only beginning to understand the abuse she endured as an elite athlete.
Touhey was part of Teri McKeever’s storied program at the University of California for two years beginning in 2000, during which time McKeever, according to a heavily redacted outside report commissioned by the university, allegedly bullied and verbally abused athletes in violation of university policy, discriminating against them on the basis of race (including using the n-word), national origin and disability.
McKeever, the most successful female coach in the sport’s history and a decorated coach of the U.S. Olympic team, was fired in late January after the report was released, but the experience of former athletes such as Touhey illustrates how a coach’s methods can change the trajectory of a person’s life and leave ripples for decades.
“My knees buckled, and I fell to the ground,” Touhey, 41, said of the impact of hearing McKeever was fired. “The hardest part was that my husband was out of town, and I quickly had to turn around for my sons. One of them asked, ‘Mommy, why are you crying?’ The only thing I could say to them was that someone was very mean to me a long time ago, and it hurt me a lot. Being a mom, I had to quickly stand up, take a deep breath, push it aside and be there. I’m really good at putting a mask on.”
From February: Decorated Olympic swimming coach fired for bullying, harassment
Touhey and 17 other former Bears swimmers filed a lawsuit against the university’s regents in May, hoping for what Touhey calls “accountability” as she, like the others, struggles to come to terms with the long-range effects of swimming for McKeever.
The school announced in March it was taking steps to address the issues raised in the report, though it declined to detail those steps to the Orange County Register at the time, and it has made no further announcements. Allegations contained in the lawsuit include “incessant” verbal abuse, “psychological exploitation,” “torturous workouts” that left Touhey even to this day with a fear of drowning, “an obsession with image,” threats to revoke scholarships amid a fear of retaliation and the creation of an “environment of fear and intimidation.”
In a statement she released after she was fired, McKeever, who is not a defendant in the lawsuit, said: “I deny and unequivocally refute all conclusions that I abused or bullied any athlete and deny any suggestion I discriminated against any athlete on the basis of race, disability or sexual orientation. There were and should be consequences for violating team rules, not showing up for scheduled appointments, misusing resources, not giving an honest effort and behavior that was not congruent with their individual or our team goals. But those consequences were not applied because of who someone was, only for what they did or didn’t do that hurt the team and the culture we were working hard to sustain.”
But, according to Touhey, “The more time you spent with her, the more you realized that her wrath is so irrational that you lived in this constant state of fear and dread.”
Katherine Touhey was a decorated swimmer as a youth in Northern Virginia before she chose to attend the University of California. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Immediate challenges
Touhey, then Katherine McAdoo, was a Virginia state champion at what was then known as T.C. Williams High in Alexandria. She was a record holder in the 100-yard butterfly and 200-yard freestyle events, and she competed at the 2000 Olympic trials. She was recruited to California mostly by an assistant coach, but Touhey knew McKeever by her stellar reputation, and the school seemed like a natural fit despite her limited access to her future coach.
“Our only one-on-one time was sitting at the airport Sunday morning before I was about to get on the plane to fly home [from my recruiting visit] and her asking me if I was okay earning my spot and coming in as the third butterflier,” Touhey recalled.
“I had just had an amazing weekend in California, and I’m like, ‘Heck, yeah, I want to earn that spot.’ You’re giving me the opportunity to go to school here and pursue this dream of mine that I’ve had since I was 13 when I qualified for junior nationals. I was like, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’ I was hungry.”
But Touhey didn’t realize the two had different ideas about what that entailed. It became apparent at her first practice after she joined the program, a dryland workout on a volleyball court. As she waited for practice to begin, Touhey, who had been a multisport athlete, grabbed a basketball and dribbled.
Touhey recalled that McKeever told her to stop in a “harsh” tone, singling her out in front of her teammates. “That began to be the rest of my experience with her,” Touhey said. “You constantly had to be on watch that what you were doing would not be a potential distraction, that what you were doing was in line with her expectations.”
From that moment on, she felt targeted. If Touhey arrived for practice in a happy mood, she says McKeever singled her out for seeming cocky. “I was like: ‘I’m going to come in humble. We’re going to try that one.’ Humble and subservient, if you want to use that word. ‘I’m just going to put my head down and show her that I can do that,’ ” Touhey said. “At the end of the day, she wanted you to show up authentic but authentic on her terms, and you never knew what that meant. It was an unrealistic expectation for an 18-year-old. That’s why you have coaches, mentors. That’s why you’re at a big university — you’re not supposed to have it all figured out at 18.”
Compounding the disconnect with McKeever was a chronic knee condition, a meniscal cyst, that caused Touhey and previous coaches to adjust her breaststroke technique. “That didn’t work” for McKeever, Touhey said, recalling the coach told her to “ ‘do what everyone else does.’ So I did as I was told, and my meniscus was being slowly, slowly worn until it popped,” requiring surgical repair over the summer. When she returned in the fall of 2001, Touhey, who had not been medically cleared to do flip turns, was doing a modified version she says prompted McKeever to kick her out of practice. She tore her meniscus again that fall and underwent another surgery.
“This is where you’re treated subhuman,” she said. “If you’re not producing for her, then you’re disposable.”
Three semesters into her college career, she decided to leave the team, and she says McKeever told Touhey’s parents she did not have room in the lanes to rehab Katherine. When she told McKeever of her decision, Touhey said the coach “never once asked if this could be difficult for me,” only whether she needed to purchase a ticket for Touhey to compete with the team in Hawaii.
She had been “in and out of the water” that fall but realized that, while she wasn’t done swimming, she “was done swimming for her. And that meant I was done swimming and feeling like my career didn’t end on my terms.”
Touhey went on to attend classes in a blur, isolating herself from her former teammates, who went their separate ways and have only recently gotten in touch with one another again. She earned her degree, specializing in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, but has no fond memories of college. Her experience with McKeever left her adrift academically because she “didn’t know how to establish a relationship” with her thesis professor. Her diploma “is in a bin in our attic,” and she has not set foot on campus since she graduated. “I don’t wear any Cal gear, and the few friendships that I had, I let go, and they did, too. It’s the body’s way, a defense mechanism to protect you. But the problem is if you begin to dissociate long enough, it’s almost as if you didn’t go to college.”
The abuse she suffered during her college swimming career left physical and emotional effects on Katherine Touhey in the decades that followed. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Lasting trauma
In the ensuing years, the experience continued to manifest — in flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety, depression and irritable bowel syndrome. Swimming was “literally painful,” psychologically and physically, so Touhey found other outlets — some extreme — for her elite athleticism.
“I ran the Marine Corps Marathon, and then I continued to push it further,” Touhey said. “It got to the point where unless I was doing something extreme, a marathon, an Ironman or ending up in the medical tent, it wasn’t worth doing. I ended up in a medical tent twice with hyponatremia [low sodium levels in her blood]. When I qualified for [the] Boston [Marathon], I was literally, like, counting down the minutes, the miles, the last six miles, and I said: ‘You know what? If worst comes to worst, I end up in the medical tent. No big deal.’ ”
Disassociation became “a habit,” Touhey said, along with an “ability to deny my experience. I’m very good at that.”
That began after graduation, when, with few job prospects or contacts and admitting, “I’m lost,” she headed for Europe. She returned to Virginia, then found a paid internship through a family friend in Washington. She got married and had three boys, and when asked, she would say her “normal go-to story was I swam in college and I got injured. My body failed me then. That’s the story I would tell. My body failed me — which is so false. If my body failed me, why did I continue to run marathons and do an Ironman and qualify for Boston? My body didn’t fail me; my coach failed me.”
“This kind of abuse can happen to anyone, in any sport, on any kind of team at any level,” Katherine Touhey said. “My hope is that others who’ve been victimized can hear my story and start their own healing journey.” (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Her intensity never flagged. She took up CrossFit and, when she was “so done with being pregnant” with one son, she said she “went to a workout to induce labor.” Years after her experience at Cal, she says she is “able to look back at examples like that and realize that’s not normal,” so she began a “deep dive into trauma and what that looks like … how the body holds trauma and processes it.”
Her journey back from her college experience took a quantum leap forward when an Orange County Register story detailed McKeever’s abuses in May 2022. Touhey read it as she watched one of her sons in swim practice, an unnerving confluence of events. “I was, like, ‘What is the universe telling me here?’ It took me three times to get through the story, and the line that will forever stick in my brain is how she targeted one or two athletes. It wasn’t until then that I was able to make the association that that was me.”
Touhey began contacting others who had swum for McKeever and, like her, had closed the door on the experience and their relationship with one another. Realizing their experience was shared, they decided to sue regents at the university. According to the Register’s story last year, allegations were reported to school and athletic department officials, including Athletic Director Jim Knowlton, multiple times since 2010. (The law firm representing the university in the former swimmers’ lawsuit has not responded to requests for comment.) Touhey says one purpose of the lawsuit is to get redacted material in the outside report unsealed. Many of the former swimmers in the lawsuit were unaware of the extent of the alleged abuse until the report’s findings were revealed and McKeever was fired.
“Sure, this is my experience as a woman on an elite college swim team,” Touhey said, “but this kind of abuse can happen to anyone, in any sport, on any kind of team at any level. My hope is that others who’ve been victimized can hear my story and start their own healing journey. And that we as a society can move toward a place where psychological abuse of athletes is no longer tolerated or ignored.”
As the lawsuit proceeds, each plaintiff is dealing with what it means when an athletic career ends because of traumatic experiences rather than injury or choice.
“Now that I’m a mom of three kids and I’m married and I have this life that is not defined by sport, I can recognize all the amazing things about myself, that I am who I am because of that. It’s made me stronger and resilient and it’s made me … healthy and fit,” Touhey said tearfully. “ … It’s not the end-all, be-all, and I think for so long that’s the agenda that has been pushed, that if you compete at this elite level, you’re going to be fine — and that’s not the case. I’m still understanding how the trauma shows up, how the body remembers, and unpacking decisions I made in the past. I’m still grieving the loss of opportunity, but I can move away from it defining me.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2 ... nal-abuse/
Banned or Disciplined coaches
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different sport another major problem A coach accused, again and again
A coach accused, again and again
Former Olympian and national team coach Conal Groom was accused of abusing young rowers. Colleagues, parents and regulators failed to act.
By Gus Garcia-Roberts
July 13, 2023 at 12:08 p.m. EDT
SANTA YNEZ, CALIF. — In 2019, Conal Groom, a former Olympic rower and U.S. national team coach, dropped seismic news on his Seattle-area junior athletes and their parents: He was leaving town.
“I will give you a moment to breathe and collect your thoughts,” Groom wrote in an email. “The mark we have left on rowing in this region will not be erased anytime soon.”
Groom had become the top junior coach in the city, using intense, Soviet-inspired training methods to mold dozens of members of national teams over the previous decade-plus. He had then been handpicked to coach those teams in international competitions.
Now he was leaving Seattle, the rowing hotbed where he built that reputation. His sudden departure was made more unusual by his destination: a man-made lake in the mountains outside Santa Barbara, Calif.
A thousand miles from Seattle, Groom’s tactics only intensified. His protégés toiled on rowing machines under a grimy tent, continuing even as the coronavirus pandemic froze the world around and wildfires consumed the surrounding hills. He sprayed them down with a water hose as temperatures topped 100 degrees. He screamed and cursed, a constant of his coaching that parents appeared to accept as part of the package. And as he rebuilt his empire, living in a shipping container in his business partner’s backyard, he made little secret of his heavy drinking and problems with rage, according to emails he exchanged with a parent.
But Groom had a long record of seeing his athletes recruited by universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Princeton, and tapped for prestigious national teams. So with few exceptions, parents stuck by him, even moving to California so their children could be closer.
Then, in the summer of 2021, one of his favored athletes accused him of attempting to sexually assault her. He was 48; she was 17. That began the unraveling of Groom’s career, and with it soul-searching by some rowers and parents as to why they ignored for so long what they now see as obvious warning signs.
“We are kicking ourselves for a lot of different reasons looking backwards, when it all kind of seems so clear what was going on,” the father of Groom’s alleged victim told The Washington Post. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, what idiots we are.’ ”
An investigation by The Post revealed a years-long trail of records documenting allegations against Groom, including hundreds of pages of police reports, emails, text messages and diary entries. In those records, and in interviews, male and female athletes claimed Groom verbally and physically abused them. Two rowers he trained as underage girls, including his alleged victim in Santa Ynez, said they now believe he sexually groomed them. The results of those alleged abuses, athletes and their parents say, were devastating: suicidal ideation, persistent panic attacks and rowers abandoning a sport once central to their lives.
But the allegations against Groom were routinely ignored or downplayed, The Post found, including by regulators. When USRowing, the sport’s governing body, was confronted years ago with accusations against Groom, its lawyers produced a 198-page report that confirmed some of those claims. Yet the report was not released publicly, and the organization continued to hire Groom to lead junior athletes. And for months after Groom was accused of attempted sexual assault in 2021, regulators did not bar him from training minors.
The allegations against Groom, which have not previously been reported, provide a window into how the promise of Ivy League admission and other accolades, together with a disjointed regulatory system, combine to allow alleged abusers to thrive in the multibillion-dollar youth sports industry, despite much-touted reforms.
Groom declined to be interviewed. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office investigated the alleged molestation, and though a detective reported it was “apparent that Conal Groom committed the offense,” prosecutors declined to charge Groom. He is currently suspended from unsupervised coaching pending the results of an investigation by the U.S. Center for SafeSport. That probe has been ongoing for nearly two years.
In April, Groom’s Santa Ynez accuser sued him; his boathouse, Mission Rowing; and his business partner, Carol Nagy, claiming she and the boathouse “did nothing to protect” the girl and other minor athletes. Groom has not yet responded in court. In emails to The Post, Nagy denied knowledge of any misconduct by Groom other than the alleged molestation, which she called his “only verified transgression.” Nagy blamed the alleged victim and her parents, for allowing her to “visit her male coach in the middle of the night.”
The Post typically does not name alleged victims of sexual assault unless they ask to be identified. In an interview, Groom’s accuser, who is now 18, said she did not consider him to be an outlier in a sport that has in recent years undergone a reckoning with abusive coaches.
“It’s a great spawning ground for people that want to groom children, with highly motivated children whose parents are all-in to do it,” she said. “It serves it on a silver platter. I’m not like the only kid who’s ever wanted something so bad they would do anything for it.”
Outsiders tend to notice rowing every four years, at the Summer Olympics. But for those within the sport, it is an all-consuming world unto itself: mostly homogenous, often prohibitively expensive, and saturated with unmovable traditions in the pursuit of athletic and academic prestige. The drill sergeant-like coach, lording over brutal training sessions, is part of the sport’s lore.
Groom’s résumé fit the ideal. He was the captain of Georgetown University’s lightweight crew team in the mid-1990s and is enshrined in the university’s athletic hall of fame. He rowed at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, crediting his success to training at an intensity rarely seen on this continent. One of his Olympic coaches, Emil Kossev, was a former Bulgarian national team star.
Groom barely missed qualifying for the 2004 Summer Olympics, and injuries soon forced him from competition. He followed Kossev into coaching, helping him train the elite sculling group at Seattle’s Pocock Rowing Center and ultimately becoming director of the boathouse.
But from the beginning, his training tactics and explosive temper drowned some rowing careers in their wake. In 2007, Olympic hopeful Samantha Twardowski was training at Pocock when, she said, an incoming speedboat submerged her boat. Twardowski confronted Groom for not warning her. Groom, in response, grabbed her by her shoulders, cursed at her and threw her to the ground, as other rowers stood by and watched, Twardowski said. She left the boathouse and never returned.
In a police report she filed at the time, Twardowski described the altercation similarly, saying Groom yelled that she was a “*****” who didn’t like “playing the game.” She never heard from police again, she said, and Groom was not charged.
Given his stature in rowing, Twardowski felt perhaps she wasn’t cut out for the sport. She abandoned her Olympic dreams, too embarrassed to even tell her parents why she stopped. “I was not a quitter,” she said, “and I felt like I quit because of him.”
Pocock’s board “acknowledge[d] that the altercation occurred,” according to a draft letter to Groom obtained by The Post. But the board appeared hamstrung by Groom’s stature, said Julie McCleery, who coached at Pocock at the time and was secretary of its underlying foundation. “He was an Olympian,” McCleery said, with supporters in the sport and success as a coach. “And so there was a lot of latitude.”
The center’s plan, the letter said, was to suspend Groom without pay for two months from coaching the elite scullers. Groom, however, would remain in his paid role as director, the letter stated, adding that “it is impractical to prohibit contact with team members.”
But according to Jenn Gibbons, the current executive director of the Pocock foundation, Groom refused to take a required anger management class. “He quit,” Gibbons said, and left instead for Lake Union Crew, a boathouse a few miles away.
He brought with him a parent, Carol Nagy, who would become critical to his success — and his survival. Nagy’s daughter, Lindsay Meyer, would go on to compete in the 2008 Olympics and row for Stanford. When Groom left for Lake Union, Meyer followed, and Nagy became Groom’s assistant and novice coach, Groom recounted in an email in which he called her “the real wizard behind the curtain” of his career.
At Lake Union, not much changed. One rower there, Michael Lukas, said he endured Groom’s angry tirades and 30-to-40-hour training weeks on his way to a spot on the Harvard rowing team. When he arrived in Cambridge, though, he was diagnosed with fractured vertebrae, which he said “was directly linked to the intensity” of Groom’s training. He never rowed competitively again and dealt with pain for years. But with a Harvard degree, he said recently, “I definitely came out ahead on the bargain.”
In 2010, Groom and Nagy struck out on their own, opening the for-profit Seattle Rowing Center out of a canal warehouse. Groom said their goal was to emulate European training methods by starting rowers as young as 8 years old in small boats. Young children, Groom told The Seattle Times, “don’t believe in limits.” SRC crews dominated national championships, with Groom boasting online that the boathouse never went a year without at least one gold medal in a national competition.
His power in the sport rose. He was regularly joined on the water by kingmakers such as then-University of Washington coach Bob Ernst, former rowers said, and had a direct line to Yasmin Farooq, who coached at Stanford and then University of Washington. (Neither coach responded to requests for comment.)
Nathan Pihl, a high school rower, had trained with Groom at Lake Union but initially decided not to follow him to SRC. When he visited Harvard, though, a coach there questioned him at length about his decision, Pihl said, and a varsity rower urged him to stick with Groom, which he ultimately did.
At SRC, Nancy Miles became one of Groom’s most successful protégées. His obvious power in the sport normalized his conduct, she said.
She transferred to SRC at age 17. He named a boat after her — the “Golden Miles” — displaying a favored status that came with few boundaries. At the 2011 Youth National Championships in Tennessee, Miles said, Groom, then 38, stashed his beers in the hotel room tub where Miles, 18, was taking an ice bath in a sports bra and shorts. And during one training session, when Groom saw her mimicking his instruction to another athlete and got annoyed, she said, he “backhanded me across my face.” Groom claimed it was an accident, Miles recalled, but she said his strike caused her to fall, knocked the glasses off her face, and bruised her nose.
Still, when she achieved her dream of being accepted to Stanford, they stayed in touch. Groom sent her a necklace and told her she was “more than just another athlete,” Miles said, and visited her. While watching television together in his hotel room, she said, he put his arm around her. “I shrank away,” said Miles, who described feeling betrayed: “I thought I had a trusted adult figure who cared about me, and now he’s making it sexual.”
Yet she returned to the boathouse every summer, feeling beholden to his power over her rowing career, she said. When Miles was training with other scullers for the World Rowing Championships in 2013, Groom grew angry that they didn’t follow an instruction. Miles said Groom cornered one of the women and while screaming at her, used his hand to pound the wall beside her head.
“I remember feeling incredibly afraid,” Miles said. Groom banished the other women due to insubordination, she said, but informed Miles she could return. She faced a choice, she said: rowing alone with Groom or following the exiled rowers elsewhere. “I am inexperienced and if I fall, I’ll fall hard, meaning my college coaches will know,” reads her journal from the time.
But Miles said she never considered reporting Groom, and wouldn’t have known who to report him to. “I think I just got stuck at, ‘This must be okay because everyone’s saying it’s okay,’ ” Miles said.
Adults who didn’t think Groom’s conduct was okay said they found they could do little about it. Briana Schulte, a coach at a nearby boathouse, said she was with her own rowers on Union Bay when she heard Groom yelling at four junior females in a boat that they were “******* *****.”
“To talk to high school girls like that was a hundred ways of wrong,” Schulte said. She attempted to complain to USRowing, she said, but the organization never followed up.
USRowing CEO Amanda Kraus said she didn’t know about the complaint but blamed poor record-keeping at the time: “Because I don’t have a record of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, unfortunately.”
Not all of Groom’s young athletes sought scholarships or accolades. In 2010, an introverted 14-year-old boy signed up to train at SRC. “As long as [my son] doesn’t drown, or become suicidal, homicidal or an arrogant ass, I’m fine with the results,” his father wrote to Groom.
But when Groom, apparently upset at the boy and his fellow rowers for not following instructions, sent them into perilous conditions, it led to the only serious effort in Seattle to hold the coach accountable.
It was a windy and frigid winter day on Lake Washington. Their boat began to take on water. They were so afraid that they considered climbing the ladder of a nearby bridge onto the highway overhead. Ultimately, they bailed out their boat with water bottles and returned, according to a written account he later shared with regulators.
When the boy confronted Groom, according to his account, the coach responded that his teammates did not like him and that he needed to “own his mistake” of challenging him — or leave. The boy, in tears, chose the latter.
The boy “spun downhill” without rowing, including attempting suicide, his father said. “His social life was rowing, and all of a sudden that’s jerked out from under him,” his father said.
In 2014, the boy shared his story with Margaret Christopher, a Pocock coach. Christopher, an attorney, knew Groom and said she had witnessed his inappropriate conduct with athletes. In this case, she believed his behavior could’ve been life-threatening. She interviewed other rowers and their families and filed a grievance with USRowing.
The Post reviewed a summary of the grievance that was emailed to USRowing. In it, Christopher highlighted allegations similar to those that would surface later, including that he “engages in inappropriate touching and sexually suggestive conversations” and that he doted on favorites — always underage girls — in a way that “caused alarm in parents and coaches.”
Groom, she wrote, “has done far too much damage to athletes, to the community and to the sport to allow him to remain part of competitive rowing.”
According to Nagy, the complaint is part of a “false narrative” Christopher has been spreading about her and Groom for years. Christopher has twice been suspended from practicing law, records show, in 2005 for forging her secretary’s signature and in 2016 for allegedly neglecting a client’s case. Christopher said her bar history was irrelevant but that she suffered severe, transparent consequences due to her mistakes as a lawyer. “I wish SafeSport/USRowing worked as well as the bar,” she told The Post.
USRowing hired an outside law firm to probe the allegations but continued to hire him to coach junior athletes while the firm investigated. In 2015, USRowing picked Groom to oversee a selection camp and then coach men’s quadruple sculls at the World Rowing Junior Championships in Rio de Janeiro, the fourth year in a row the organization chose him to coach a junior team.
One rower said they were contacted by an investigator on behalf of USRowing to discuss allegations they had made about Groom. The rower, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy, said they declined, given Groom’s position. “It’s insane that you’re asking me to come forward with my name when I have a horse in the race trying to make the U.S. team,” the rower recalled telling the investigator. “This person’s still in charge of ----.”
Glenn Merry, CEO of USRowing at the time, declined to comment. Kraus, the current CEO, would not discuss “the organization’s decision-making at the time,” she wrote in an email. “What I can say is that the current leadership team has zero tolerance for this sort of behavior.”
In June 2015, the law firm produced the nearly 200-page report. It found that Groom “violated USRowing’s then-current SafeSport rules,” USRowing said in a recent statement, though there “was not sufficient evidence” to substantiate allegations of sexual misconduct. USRowing said that the organization “implemented certain disciplinary and probationary protocols” but would not specify what they were.
The case had little impact on Groom’s standing. Around the same time, he and Nagy were the subjects of a fawning cover story in Rowing magazine, the sport’s glossy bible. Two years later, Groom helped coach the men’s national team at the World Championships in Florida.
The boy whose altercation with Groom sparked the grievance later lost contact with his family, his dad said, and he did not respond to attempts by The Post to reach him. In August 2015, his father wrote Merry a letter expressing his dissatisfaction with how USRowing handled the investigation.
“Given Conal’s history this failure and its implicit sanctioning of his behavior ensure you will have the opportunity to revisit the issue,” the father wrote. “The children who will inevitably be harmed in the interim are on you.”
One evening in May 2019, a 14-year-old girl used boat straps to dangle over a wall of the Montlake Cut, a section of the canal bisecting Seattle.
It’s an unofficial tradition in Seattle rowing. Each spring, just before opening day, athletes graffiti the cut with boastful slogans representing their boathouses. That year, this girl helped to do the honors for Seattle Rowing Center. She cleaned moss off the wall with a steel brush. Then she painted: “Suffer with a [smile],” with a happy face.
She had been introduced to SRC a few years earlier through her private school’s physical education program. Now the girl, short for the sport but with a powerful stroke, was Groom’s new favorite, she and other rowers said. While other athletes re-rigged a boat, he allowed her to hang around the racks, fetching things for him and eating pie, she later recalled in a written statement.
But that season would be their last together in Seattle. A couple of months earlier, Groom had emailed that he and Nagy were leaving town, blaming their departure on rising costs on the city’s waterfront. “I ask that instead of being angry, upset, and disappointed, we all take a moment and celebrate the community we have grown,” he wrote. The girl said she cried herself to sleep.
Groom and Nagy’s new base of operation was on the patchy banks of Cachuma Lake, land owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Nagy formed a nonprofit led by her and four longtime friends and supporters of Groom, public records show. They named it Mission Rowing.
They initially rented a house nearby, with Nagy on an air mattress and Groom on the floor. “Coaching wise I have set up a new standard and a new process. July, August, and half of September and never once yelled,” Groom emailed to a parent in September 2019. “I drink a ton less and every few weeks don’t drink at all.”
Rowers followed. Sophie Heywood, an Olympic hopeful from Arizona, traveled to Santa Ynez in 2020 to train for the U.S. Olympic trials. She encountered a makeshift operation in which rowers pulled machines out of a shipping container and then rowed under a tent in sweltering temperatures while Groom sprayed them down with a hose. They continued even during wildfires, as emergency aircraft scooped up water nearby.
Heywood, a former University of Wisconsin rower who had medaled in national championships, said she was stunned by the intensity. “It isn’t even productive, from a physiological standpoint,” she said.
And Groom’s plan to cut back on yelling — and drinking — didn’t last long. On her first day, Heywood said, Groom cursed out a group of rowers in what she described as a “public humiliation routine.” When she asked if that was normal, she said, the other rowers responded: “Yeah, it’s just Conal.”
But the Seattle girl missed the intensity, according to an email her mother wrote that summer to Groom. At Thanksgiving, her family joined Groom and Nagy in California. Then the girl’s parents sent her alone to California to spend winter break training with him. She stayed in his room, which she described as being decorated with toy rockets, peanut butter and a bottle of booze. He camped in the yard. Groom later moved into a shipping container in Nagy’s backyard.
The pandemic was a boon for Groom’s business, as remote school and work allowed wealthy families to relocate to Santa Ynez. Among the parents who made the move were a CEO of a publicly-traded tech company and an executive at Facebook. In the Summer of 2020, the Seattle girl’s parents rented a house in the Santa Ynez Valley, allowing her to continue training full-time with Groom. Later that year, they purchased a house there.
Groom’s close relationship with the girl was no secret. He cooked her a special meal on her 16th birthday and gifted her $800 worth of gear. But the parents said they only later read his text messages to her — and then began to understand the depth of their inappropriate relationship.
In messages reviewed by The Post, Groom wrote that she was “******** model beautiful,” called her “babe,” told her he loved her and that he was not “breaking up with [her] never ever.” He urged her to send him “modeling shots.” “Yum, yummy,” he wrote when she obliged and sent him selfies. Groom offered to buy alcohol for the girl and her underage friends. He asked if she would be a “friend that will keep secrets to let me vent,” and said she may have to lie for him but he would “make it worth [her] while.” The girl said Groom sent her even more Snapchat messages, which automatically delete, and in total messaged her more than her boyfriend.
Her mother said she didn’t think to be vigilant about Groom. “I think most parents think that if I need to watch over my kid’s social media, it’s because of their interactions with other children,” the mother said. “Not because of her 48-year-old coach who presents himself as her uncle. Looking back, it was happening in plain sight.”
The girl said Groom, “extremely drunk” and wearing a t-shirt and underwear, once berated her for hours on FaceTime for “being lazy.” On another call, she said, Groom instructed her to find her hip flexor by touching her “private parts” and then moving her hand toward her leg.
At practice, she said, he screamed that she was replaceable and would be average forever. The other rowers noticed that she developed a tendency to flinch, and one jokingly asked if she was being hit. The girl later said that the tic was a result of Groom yelling and throwing objects at her.
Heywood, the Olympic hopeful, lived for a time with the girl’s family in Santa Ynez. Groom screamed at the girl more than others and “tended to get more physical with her,” Heywood said. She recalled the girl appearing to suffer a panic attack while training on a machine. Groom, angry that she had stopped rowing, grabbed the handle out of her hand, pulled her to the side and screamed in her face, Heywood said. “I’ve never seen anything like that, really, with an athlete that’s that young,” she said.
The girl’s parents, like others, excused his behavior, Heywood said. “I think they were like, ‘Oh, well, Conal’s really tough, but that might be what it takes to get a kid up to this level,’ ” Heywood said.
As the rowing world emerged from the pandemic in 2021, athletes said, Groom acted more erratically than ever. He broached sexual topics and touched Heywood in inappropriate ways, she said, including pulling her sports bra to the side to photograph a tattoo on her rib while she rowed and drunkenly putting his hand on her upper thigh during dinner. Heywood ultimately left Mission Rowing due to what she called “the seriously problematic nature of the training environment that Conal created.”
The Seattle girl said she was making a similar realization. Before a national regatta, she was required to watch a SafeSport video on identifying abusive coaches. As she learned of the warning signs — coaches who throw objects, who are prone to unnecessary touching of their subjects, who scream, who curse — she realized she recognized Groom in every one.
But adults who could have intervened were either oblivious or unwilling to act, she said. When the girl told another coach at Mission Rowing that Groom’s verbal abuse was causing her panic attacks, that coach, Derek de Leuw, “ended the conversation by essentially telling me that he would get fired if he said anything,” the girl later recounted to police. (De Leuw did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Before a regatta, the girl said, Groom pointed out every SafeSport official at the event and told her to “act normal” around them. But when they were back alone, she said, he continued to yell at her, including that she was a “*****” and a “****.”
The girl’s parents acknowledge that they weren’t completely in the dark about Groom’s flaws; the girl’s mother said she recommended to him a psychiatrist to see about his anger problem. But she still traveled to a competition with her daughter and Groom days afterward, with all of them sharing a rented home. “I don’t think that we would have understood how crazy the environment was,” the girl’s mother explained, “because we had been manipulated by him as much as all of the other parents had.”
She was 17 that August, when it all fell apart.
Her parents were back in Seattle; she would be soon, too, starting her junior year. But before school started, she and four friends spent a couple of weeks in Santa Ynez, training with Groom.
On her last night in town, Groom messaged her on Snapchat, she said, asking her to stop by to “say goodbye in private.” Another rower who was with her when she got the message recalled the unusual request. But their whole relationship was “strange,” that rower said.
When she got to Groom’s shipping container after 10 p.m., the girl said, she found her coach “sloppy drunk.” He offered her wine, which she refused. She sat on a stool, which he moved closer to himself so that her legs were between his. When she nervously fumbled with her keys and phone, he took them and placed them on a shelf out of her reach.
Groom then placed his hands on her upper thighs, she said. He brushed his hand across her breast, knocking off the spaghetti strap of her dress. When she stood up to leave, Groom grabbed her by the arms, saying: “No, you can’t go.” He had her sit across his lap.
“This isn’t SafeSport,” the girl said she told Groom, and that he responded: “No one’s here, everyone’s asleep.”
She said Groom attempted to kiss her on the lips, but she turned her face so he kissed her on the cheek. Ultimately, after Groom hugged her multiple times and grew agitated, the girl said she was able to “break away,” get her keys and drive off.
The girl immediately texted de Leuw, the other coach. She asked him not to report it because if Groom lost his job, “it’s my fault.” But de Leuw did report the alleged assault to a child abuse hotline, a police report shows, and the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office opened an investigation. He also notified SafeSport within days, according to the girl’s mother, and the organization launched its own investigation.
A few days later Nagy sent an email to the other directors of Mission Rowing saying that she had a “long and productive conversation” with Groom about the girl’s allegations. “He owned the behavior, the drunkenness and sadly acknowledged that he’d spent most of the weekend considering committing suicide,” Nagy wrote, according to a later police report that quoted the email in full.
But Nagy didn’t appear to consider cutting ties. Instead, she detailed a plan in which Mission Rowing would temporarily curtail his involvement in junior rowing while keeping him in a central role. “I think we can find a path forward for 6-12 months where he has no contact with youth, but has plenty of productive projects,” Nagy wrote, suggesting they “be really creative and we can keep him in the Regatta Director scope of things.”
Nagy said she spoke with Groom about a plan “so he stops shooting himself in the foot.” He should limit himself to a couple of beers a night and seek therapy, she wrote, and encouraged the other directors to “reach out to him as I think he’s really lonely.”
She expressed less sympathy for his alleged victim, referring to her “manipulative behavior,” saying that she had a “daily mental breakdown,” and calling Groom an “easy target.”
Groom stayed on the water. A mother of other rowers at Mission said she continued to see Groom train minor athletes in the days following the alleged assault. Nagy told The Post that Groom “only coached a handful of times” — including one instance with junior rowers — following the allegation.
SafeSport’s code states that it is able to take temporary measures, such as suspending a coach pending a full investigation to maintain the safety of athletes. But in Groom’s case, it didn’t act for months. (SafeSport declined to comment.)
Finally, in March 2022, seven months after the girl made the allegation, USRowing stepped in, stating that it had “determined it was necessary” to take action while the SafeSport investigation was ongoing. The organization prohibited Groom from coaching minors under its purview. The following month, SafeSport temporarily suspended Groom from unsupervised coaching.
The girl and her parents initially told police that they didn’t want to pursue charges against Groom. But around the time that USRowing suspended Groom; the mother went back to police, saying they had changed their mind after learning he had previously been accused of misconduct. The department reopened its investigation.
A police report states that Groom for days ignored a detective’s attempts to contact him. When they finally connected, Groom told the detective: “I am happy to contact you, if and when, after I speak to an attorney.” Groom, the detective wrote, never called back.
The detective did interview Nagy, who described Groom as a “great guy with a hot flash temper — Irish temper.” She told the detective she had been informed that the girl came to visit Groom that night without being invited and that Groom hadn’t given her any details about what happened. The detective concluded Nagy lied on both counts, his report shows. (Nagy told The Post she does not “believe” she lied, saying her memory of her conversations about the incidents was “murky” and “disjointed.”)
In July 2022, nearly a year after the alleged sexual assault, the detective sent his report to prosecutors. “Based on the information learned during this investigation,” the detective wrote, “it is apparent that Conal Groom committed the offense” of annoying or molesting a child, an offense that in California requires those convicted to register as a sex offender.
But the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Groom. It did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
Last October, according to records reviewed by The Post, an attorney representing the girl’s family sent a letter to Nagy and another Mission Rowing board member outlining the allegations that would form the basis of her lawsuit. Two months later, Mission Rowing President Brian Bolton announced in an email that Nagy “has decided to retire.” The email made no mention of allegations against the boathouse and lauded the “intrepid” Nagy for the work she invested in “her vision for bringing rowing to Santa Barbara County.”
There would be no retirement ceremony, Bolton noted: “In typical low-key fashion, Carol has requested a minimum of fuss around this moment.”
Bolton declined an interview request, writing in an email that “we strongly believe that no athlete should ever suffer abuse at the hands of a coach, and Mission Rowing categorically condemns any such behavior.”
SafeSport, meanwhile, continues to investigate. Investigators at the notoriously short-staffed nonprofit have reached a formal resolution on only 1,877 of 12,751 complaints — roughly one out of seven — in its history, according to its most recent annual report. In March of this year, more than a year and a half into its probe, SafeSport told a witness in Groom’s case that its report on Groom is “currently under review” and that there was no timeline for its completion.
Nancy Miles, the Stanford rower, last trained with Groom in 2013. It wasn’t until years later, she said, that she began to re-examine her coach’s alleged conduct — Groom’s verbal abuse, him striking her, and his sexual advances.
The realization occurred in late 2020, while she was training to be a doctor at the University of Washington. Miles said she began suffering crippling panic attacks. The worst bouts occurred when she made a minor mistake, or when her colleagues were kind to her. Miles said she expected to be screamed at, or for ulterior motives to emerge. Miles had achieved success at top competitions around the world, including claiming silver in her category at the 2013 world championship in South Korea. But instead of pride, Miles said, she felt “a lot of shame and a lot of guilt that this sport that I thought I had been empowered in I had been abused in.”
When Miles learned there was a SafeSport complaint against Groom, she worried that f she spoke out, “no one was going to believe me, and that they were all going to say that this was normal and that I was wrong to expect anything better,” Miles said. “There was a pretty dark period where I had thoughts like, ‘It would be better off if I was dead.’ ”
Nonetheless, Miles contacted SafeSport. So did Sophie Heywood, calling Groom in a letter “emotionally unbalanced, volatile, sexually inappropriate, basically disrespectful, violent, and unprofessional.”
One day in May, with Opening Day approaching, the girl, back in Seattle, found herself once again on the Montlake Cut, scrubbing away at the moss that had grown over the slogan — “Suffer with a smile” — she had painted four years before.
She wasn’t sure how her plan to erase her former paint strokes would be received. Some rowers in town, in response to the allegations against Groom, planned to paint messages supporting victims of abuse on the cut. But the girl received pushback from some former SRC rowers, who said that if she painted over an artifact of the boathouse, she would be erasing its legacy.
“That’s not a legacy we want to support,” the girl said recently. “That’s like a legacy of abusing athletes and burning them out for some small gain of winning nationals.”
After the wall was sufficiently clean to expose her old paint, she left for the night. The next day, she rowed by and saw that her new teammates had finished the job for her, covering the area with blue paint. At the sight of the blank wall, no longer adorned with the reminder of her former coach, she surprised herself by starting to cry.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/o ... legations/
Former Olympian and national team coach Conal Groom was accused of abusing young rowers. Colleagues, parents and regulators failed to act.
By Gus Garcia-Roberts
July 13, 2023 at 12:08 p.m. EDT
SANTA YNEZ, CALIF. — In 2019, Conal Groom, a former Olympic rower and U.S. national team coach, dropped seismic news on his Seattle-area junior athletes and their parents: He was leaving town.
“I will give you a moment to breathe and collect your thoughts,” Groom wrote in an email. “The mark we have left on rowing in this region will not be erased anytime soon.”
Groom had become the top junior coach in the city, using intense, Soviet-inspired training methods to mold dozens of members of national teams over the previous decade-plus. He had then been handpicked to coach those teams in international competitions.
Now he was leaving Seattle, the rowing hotbed where he built that reputation. His sudden departure was made more unusual by his destination: a man-made lake in the mountains outside Santa Barbara, Calif.
A thousand miles from Seattle, Groom’s tactics only intensified. His protégés toiled on rowing machines under a grimy tent, continuing even as the coronavirus pandemic froze the world around and wildfires consumed the surrounding hills. He sprayed them down with a water hose as temperatures topped 100 degrees. He screamed and cursed, a constant of his coaching that parents appeared to accept as part of the package. And as he rebuilt his empire, living in a shipping container in his business partner’s backyard, he made little secret of his heavy drinking and problems with rage, according to emails he exchanged with a parent.
But Groom had a long record of seeing his athletes recruited by universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Princeton, and tapped for prestigious national teams. So with few exceptions, parents stuck by him, even moving to California so their children could be closer.
Then, in the summer of 2021, one of his favored athletes accused him of attempting to sexually assault her. He was 48; she was 17. That began the unraveling of Groom’s career, and with it soul-searching by some rowers and parents as to why they ignored for so long what they now see as obvious warning signs.
“We are kicking ourselves for a lot of different reasons looking backwards, when it all kind of seems so clear what was going on,” the father of Groom’s alleged victim told The Washington Post. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, what idiots we are.’ ”
An investigation by The Post revealed a years-long trail of records documenting allegations against Groom, including hundreds of pages of police reports, emails, text messages and diary entries. In those records, and in interviews, male and female athletes claimed Groom verbally and physically abused them. Two rowers he trained as underage girls, including his alleged victim in Santa Ynez, said they now believe he sexually groomed them. The results of those alleged abuses, athletes and their parents say, were devastating: suicidal ideation, persistent panic attacks and rowers abandoning a sport once central to their lives.
But the allegations against Groom were routinely ignored or downplayed, The Post found, including by regulators. When USRowing, the sport’s governing body, was confronted years ago with accusations against Groom, its lawyers produced a 198-page report that confirmed some of those claims. Yet the report was not released publicly, and the organization continued to hire Groom to lead junior athletes. And for months after Groom was accused of attempted sexual assault in 2021, regulators did not bar him from training minors.
The allegations against Groom, which have not previously been reported, provide a window into how the promise of Ivy League admission and other accolades, together with a disjointed regulatory system, combine to allow alleged abusers to thrive in the multibillion-dollar youth sports industry, despite much-touted reforms.
Groom declined to be interviewed. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office investigated the alleged molestation, and though a detective reported it was “apparent that Conal Groom committed the offense,” prosecutors declined to charge Groom. He is currently suspended from unsupervised coaching pending the results of an investigation by the U.S. Center for SafeSport. That probe has been ongoing for nearly two years.
In April, Groom’s Santa Ynez accuser sued him; his boathouse, Mission Rowing; and his business partner, Carol Nagy, claiming she and the boathouse “did nothing to protect” the girl and other minor athletes. Groom has not yet responded in court. In emails to The Post, Nagy denied knowledge of any misconduct by Groom other than the alleged molestation, which she called his “only verified transgression.” Nagy blamed the alleged victim and her parents, for allowing her to “visit her male coach in the middle of the night.”
The Post typically does not name alleged victims of sexual assault unless they ask to be identified. In an interview, Groom’s accuser, who is now 18, said she did not consider him to be an outlier in a sport that has in recent years undergone a reckoning with abusive coaches.
“It’s a great spawning ground for people that want to groom children, with highly motivated children whose parents are all-in to do it,” she said. “It serves it on a silver platter. I’m not like the only kid who’s ever wanted something so bad they would do anything for it.”
Outsiders tend to notice rowing every four years, at the Summer Olympics. But for those within the sport, it is an all-consuming world unto itself: mostly homogenous, often prohibitively expensive, and saturated with unmovable traditions in the pursuit of athletic and academic prestige. The drill sergeant-like coach, lording over brutal training sessions, is part of the sport’s lore.
Groom’s résumé fit the ideal. He was the captain of Georgetown University’s lightweight crew team in the mid-1990s and is enshrined in the university’s athletic hall of fame. He rowed at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, crediting his success to training at an intensity rarely seen on this continent. One of his Olympic coaches, Emil Kossev, was a former Bulgarian national team star.
Groom barely missed qualifying for the 2004 Summer Olympics, and injuries soon forced him from competition. He followed Kossev into coaching, helping him train the elite sculling group at Seattle’s Pocock Rowing Center and ultimately becoming director of the boathouse.
But from the beginning, his training tactics and explosive temper drowned some rowing careers in their wake. In 2007, Olympic hopeful Samantha Twardowski was training at Pocock when, she said, an incoming speedboat submerged her boat. Twardowski confronted Groom for not warning her. Groom, in response, grabbed her by her shoulders, cursed at her and threw her to the ground, as other rowers stood by and watched, Twardowski said. She left the boathouse and never returned.
In a police report she filed at the time, Twardowski described the altercation similarly, saying Groom yelled that she was a “*****” who didn’t like “playing the game.” She never heard from police again, she said, and Groom was not charged.
Given his stature in rowing, Twardowski felt perhaps she wasn’t cut out for the sport. She abandoned her Olympic dreams, too embarrassed to even tell her parents why she stopped. “I was not a quitter,” she said, “and I felt like I quit because of him.”
Pocock’s board “acknowledge[d] that the altercation occurred,” according to a draft letter to Groom obtained by The Post. But the board appeared hamstrung by Groom’s stature, said Julie McCleery, who coached at Pocock at the time and was secretary of its underlying foundation. “He was an Olympian,” McCleery said, with supporters in the sport and success as a coach. “And so there was a lot of latitude.”
The center’s plan, the letter said, was to suspend Groom without pay for two months from coaching the elite scullers. Groom, however, would remain in his paid role as director, the letter stated, adding that “it is impractical to prohibit contact with team members.”
But according to Jenn Gibbons, the current executive director of the Pocock foundation, Groom refused to take a required anger management class. “He quit,” Gibbons said, and left instead for Lake Union Crew, a boathouse a few miles away.
He brought with him a parent, Carol Nagy, who would become critical to his success — and his survival. Nagy’s daughter, Lindsay Meyer, would go on to compete in the 2008 Olympics and row for Stanford. When Groom left for Lake Union, Meyer followed, and Nagy became Groom’s assistant and novice coach, Groom recounted in an email in which he called her “the real wizard behind the curtain” of his career.
At Lake Union, not much changed. One rower there, Michael Lukas, said he endured Groom’s angry tirades and 30-to-40-hour training weeks on his way to a spot on the Harvard rowing team. When he arrived in Cambridge, though, he was diagnosed with fractured vertebrae, which he said “was directly linked to the intensity” of Groom’s training. He never rowed competitively again and dealt with pain for years. But with a Harvard degree, he said recently, “I definitely came out ahead on the bargain.”
In 2010, Groom and Nagy struck out on their own, opening the for-profit Seattle Rowing Center out of a canal warehouse. Groom said their goal was to emulate European training methods by starting rowers as young as 8 years old in small boats. Young children, Groom told The Seattle Times, “don’t believe in limits.” SRC crews dominated national championships, with Groom boasting online that the boathouse never went a year without at least one gold medal in a national competition.
His power in the sport rose. He was regularly joined on the water by kingmakers such as then-University of Washington coach Bob Ernst, former rowers said, and had a direct line to Yasmin Farooq, who coached at Stanford and then University of Washington. (Neither coach responded to requests for comment.)
Nathan Pihl, a high school rower, had trained with Groom at Lake Union but initially decided not to follow him to SRC. When he visited Harvard, though, a coach there questioned him at length about his decision, Pihl said, and a varsity rower urged him to stick with Groom, which he ultimately did.
At SRC, Nancy Miles became one of Groom’s most successful protégées. His obvious power in the sport normalized his conduct, she said.
She transferred to SRC at age 17. He named a boat after her — the “Golden Miles” — displaying a favored status that came with few boundaries. At the 2011 Youth National Championships in Tennessee, Miles said, Groom, then 38, stashed his beers in the hotel room tub where Miles, 18, was taking an ice bath in a sports bra and shorts. And during one training session, when Groom saw her mimicking his instruction to another athlete and got annoyed, she said, he “backhanded me across my face.” Groom claimed it was an accident, Miles recalled, but she said his strike caused her to fall, knocked the glasses off her face, and bruised her nose.
Still, when she achieved her dream of being accepted to Stanford, they stayed in touch. Groom sent her a necklace and told her she was “more than just another athlete,” Miles said, and visited her. While watching television together in his hotel room, she said, he put his arm around her. “I shrank away,” said Miles, who described feeling betrayed: “I thought I had a trusted adult figure who cared about me, and now he’s making it sexual.”
Yet she returned to the boathouse every summer, feeling beholden to his power over her rowing career, she said. When Miles was training with other scullers for the World Rowing Championships in 2013, Groom grew angry that they didn’t follow an instruction. Miles said Groom cornered one of the women and while screaming at her, used his hand to pound the wall beside her head.
“I remember feeling incredibly afraid,” Miles said. Groom banished the other women due to insubordination, she said, but informed Miles she could return. She faced a choice, she said: rowing alone with Groom or following the exiled rowers elsewhere. “I am inexperienced and if I fall, I’ll fall hard, meaning my college coaches will know,” reads her journal from the time.
But Miles said she never considered reporting Groom, and wouldn’t have known who to report him to. “I think I just got stuck at, ‘This must be okay because everyone’s saying it’s okay,’ ” Miles said.
Adults who didn’t think Groom’s conduct was okay said they found they could do little about it. Briana Schulte, a coach at a nearby boathouse, said she was with her own rowers on Union Bay when she heard Groom yelling at four junior females in a boat that they were “******* *****.”
“To talk to high school girls like that was a hundred ways of wrong,” Schulte said. She attempted to complain to USRowing, she said, but the organization never followed up.
USRowing CEO Amanda Kraus said she didn’t know about the complaint but blamed poor record-keeping at the time: “Because I don’t have a record of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, unfortunately.”
Not all of Groom’s young athletes sought scholarships or accolades. In 2010, an introverted 14-year-old boy signed up to train at SRC. “As long as [my son] doesn’t drown, or become suicidal, homicidal or an arrogant ass, I’m fine with the results,” his father wrote to Groom.
But when Groom, apparently upset at the boy and his fellow rowers for not following instructions, sent them into perilous conditions, it led to the only serious effort in Seattle to hold the coach accountable.
It was a windy and frigid winter day on Lake Washington. Their boat began to take on water. They were so afraid that they considered climbing the ladder of a nearby bridge onto the highway overhead. Ultimately, they bailed out their boat with water bottles and returned, according to a written account he later shared with regulators.
When the boy confronted Groom, according to his account, the coach responded that his teammates did not like him and that he needed to “own his mistake” of challenging him — or leave. The boy, in tears, chose the latter.
The boy “spun downhill” without rowing, including attempting suicide, his father said. “His social life was rowing, and all of a sudden that’s jerked out from under him,” his father said.
In 2014, the boy shared his story with Margaret Christopher, a Pocock coach. Christopher, an attorney, knew Groom and said she had witnessed his inappropriate conduct with athletes. In this case, she believed his behavior could’ve been life-threatening. She interviewed other rowers and their families and filed a grievance with USRowing.
The Post reviewed a summary of the grievance that was emailed to USRowing. In it, Christopher highlighted allegations similar to those that would surface later, including that he “engages in inappropriate touching and sexually suggestive conversations” and that he doted on favorites — always underage girls — in a way that “caused alarm in parents and coaches.”
Groom, she wrote, “has done far too much damage to athletes, to the community and to the sport to allow him to remain part of competitive rowing.”
According to Nagy, the complaint is part of a “false narrative” Christopher has been spreading about her and Groom for years. Christopher has twice been suspended from practicing law, records show, in 2005 for forging her secretary’s signature and in 2016 for allegedly neglecting a client’s case. Christopher said her bar history was irrelevant but that she suffered severe, transparent consequences due to her mistakes as a lawyer. “I wish SafeSport/USRowing worked as well as the bar,” she told The Post.
USRowing hired an outside law firm to probe the allegations but continued to hire him to coach junior athletes while the firm investigated. In 2015, USRowing picked Groom to oversee a selection camp and then coach men’s quadruple sculls at the World Rowing Junior Championships in Rio de Janeiro, the fourth year in a row the organization chose him to coach a junior team.
One rower said they were contacted by an investigator on behalf of USRowing to discuss allegations they had made about Groom. The rower, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy, said they declined, given Groom’s position. “It’s insane that you’re asking me to come forward with my name when I have a horse in the race trying to make the U.S. team,” the rower recalled telling the investigator. “This person’s still in charge of ----.”
Glenn Merry, CEO of USRowing at the time, declined to comment. Kraus, the current CEO, would not discuss “the organization’s decision-making at the time,” she wrote in an email. “What I can say is that the current leadership team has zero tolerance for this sort of behavior.”
In June 2015, the law firm produced the nearly 200-page report. It found that Groom “violated USRowing’s then-current SafeSport rules,” USRowing said in a recent statement, though there “was not sufficient evidence” to substantiate allegations of sexual misconduct. USRowing said that the organization “implemented certain disciplinary and probationary protocols” but would not specify what they were.
The case had little impact on Groom’s standing. Around the same time, he and Nagy were the subjects of a fawning cover story in Rowing magazine, the sport’s glossy bible. Two years later, Groom helped coach the men’s national team at the World Championships in Florida.
The boy whose altercation with Groom sparked the grievance later lost contact with his family, his dad said, and he did not respond to attempts by The Post to reach him. In August 2015, his father wrote Merry a letter expressing his dissatisfaction with how USRowing handled the investigation.
“Given Conal’s history this failure and its implicit sanctioning of his behavior ensure you will have the opportunity to revisit the issue,” the father wrote. “The children who will inevitably be harmed in the interim are on you.”
One evening in May 2019, a 14-year-old girl used boat straps to dangle over a wall of the Montlake Cut, a section of the canal bisecting Seattle.
It’s an unofficial tradition in Seattle rowing. Each spring, just before opening day, athletes graffiti the cut with boastful slogans representing their boathouses. That year, this girl helped to do the honors for Seattle Rowing Center. She cleaned moss off the wall with a steel brush. Then she painted: “Suffer with a [smile],” with a happy face.
She had been introduced to SRC a few years earlier through her private school’s physical education program. Now the girl, short for the sport but with a powerful stroke, was Groom’s new favorite, she and other rowers said. While other athletes re-rigged a boat, he allowed her to hang around the racks, fetching things for him and eating pie, she later recalled in a written statement.
But that season would be their last together in Seattle. A couple of months earlier, Groom had emailed that he and Nagy were leaving town, blaming their departure on rising costs on the city’s waterfront. “I ask that instead of being angry, upset, and disappointed, we all take a moment and celebrate the community we have grown,” he wrote. The girl said she cried herself to sleep.
Groom and Nagy’s new base of operation was on the patchy banks of Cachuma Lake, land owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Nagy formed a nonprofit led by her and four longtime friends and supporters of Groom, public records show. They named it Mission Rowing.
They initially rented a house nearby, with Nagy on an air mattress and Groom on the floor. “Coaching wise I have set up a new standard and a new process. July, August, and half of September and never once yelled,” Groom emailed to a parent in September 2019. “I drink a ton less and every few weeks don’t drink at all.”
Rowers followed. Sophie Heywood, an Olympic hopeful from Arizona, traveled to Santa Ynez in 2020 to train for the U.S. Olympic trials. She encountered a makeshift operation in which rowers pulled machines out of a shipping container and then rowed under a tent in sweltering temperatures while Groom sprayed them down with a hose. They continued even during wildfires, as emergency aircraft scooped up water nearby.
Heywood, a former University of Wisconsin rower who had medaled in national championships, said she was stunned by the intensity. “It isn’t even productive, from a physiological standpoint,” she said.
And Groom’s plan to cut back on yelling — and drinking — didn’t last long. On her first day, Heywood said, Groom cursed out a group of rowers in what she described as a “public humiliation routine.” When she asked if that was normal, she said, the other rowers responded: “Yeah, it’s just Conal.”
But the Seattle girl missed the intensity, according to an email her mother wrote that summer to Groom. At Thanksgiving, her family joined Groom and Nagy in California. Then the girl’s parents sent her alone to California to spend winter break training with him. She stayed in his room, which she described as being decorated with toy rockets, peanut butter and a bottle of booze. He camped in the yard. Groom later moved into a shipping container in Nagy’s backyard.
The pandemic was a boon for Groom’s business, as remote school and work allowed wealthy families to relocate to Santa Ynez. Among the parents who made the move were a CEO of a publicly-traded tech company and an executive at Facebook. In the Summer of 2020, the Seattle girl’s parents rented a house in the Santa Ynez Valley, allowing her to continue training full-time with Groom. Later that year, they purchased a house there.
Groom’s close relationship with the girl was no secret. He cooked her a special meal on her 16th birthday and gifted her $800 worth of gear. But the parents said they only later read his text messages to her — and then began to understand the depth of their inappropriate relationship.
In messages reviewed by The Post, Groom wrote that she was “******** model beautiful,” called her “babe,” told her he loved her and that he was not “breaking up with [her] never ever.” He urged her to send him “modeling shots.” “Yum, yummy,” he wrote when she obliged and sent him selfies. Groom offered to buy alcohol for the girl and her underage friends. He asked if she would be a “friend that will keep secrets to let me vent,” and said she may have to lie for him but he would “make it worth [her] while.” The girl said Groom sent her even more Snapchat messages, which automatically delete, and in total messaged her more than her boyfriend.
Her mother said she didn’t think to be vigilant about Groom. “I think most parents think that if I need to watch over my kid’s social media, it’s because of their interactions with other children,” the mother said. “Not because of her 48-year-old coach who presents himself as her uncle. Looking back, it was happening in plain sight.”
The girl said Groom, “extremely drunk” and wearing a t-shirt and underwear, once berated her for hours on FaceTime for “being lazy.” On another call, she said, Groom instructed her to find her hip flexor by touching her “private parts” and then moving her hand toward her leg.
At practice, she said, he screamed that she was replaceable and would be average forever. The other rowers noticed that she developed a tendency to flinch, and one jokingly asked if she was being hit. The girl later said that the tic was a result of Groom yelling and throwing objects at her.
Heywood, the Olympic hopeful, lived for a time with the girl’s family in Santa Ynez. Groom screamed at the girl more than others and “tended to get more physical with her,” Heywood said. She recalled the girl appearing to suffer a panic attack while training on a machine. Groom, angry that she had stopped rowing, grabbed the handle out of her hand, pulled her to the side and screamed in her face, Heywood said. “I’ve never seen anything like that, really, with an athlete that’s that young,” she said.
The girl’s parents, like others, excused his behavior, Heywood said. “I think they were like, ‘Oh, well, Conal’s really tough, but that might be what it takes to get a kid up to this level,’ ” Heywood said.
As the rowing world emerged from the pandemic in 2021, athletes said, Groom acted more erratically than ever. He broached sexual topics and touched Heywood in inappropriate ways, she said, including pulling her sports bra to the side to photograph a tattoo on her rib while she rowed and drunkenly putting his hand on her upper thigh during dinner. Heywood ultimately left Mission Rowing due to what she called “the seriously problematic nature of the training environment that Conal created.”
The Seattle girl said she was making a similar realization. Before a national regatta, she was required to watch a SafeSport video on identifying abusive coaches. As she learned of the warning signs — coaches who throw objects, who are prone to unnecessary touching of their subjects, who scream, who curse — she realized she recognized Groom in every one.
But adults who could have intervened were either oblivious or unwilling to act, she said. When the girl told another coach at Mission Rowing that Groom’s verbal abuse was causing her panic attacks, that coach, Derek de Leuw, “ended the conversation by essentially telling me that he would get fired if he said anything,” the girl later recounted to police. (De Leuw did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Before a regatta, the girl said, Groom pointed out every SafeSport official at the event and told her to “act normal” around them. But when they were back alone, she said, he continued to yell at her, including that she was a “*****” and a “****.”
The girl’s parents acknowledge that they weren’t completely in the dark about Groom’s flaws; the girl’s mother said she recommended to him a psychiatrist to see about his anger problem. But she still traveled to a competition with her daughter and Groom days afterward, with all of them sharing a rented home. “I don’t think that we would have understood how crazy the environment was,” the girl’s mother explained, “because we had been manipulated by him as much as all of the other parents had.”
She was 17 that August, when it all fell apart.
Her parents were back in Seattle; she would be soon, too, starting her junior year. But before school started, she and four friends spent a couple of weeks in Santa Ynez, training with Groom.
On her last night in town, Groom messaged her on Snapchat, she said, asking her to stop by to “say goodbye in private.” Another rower who was with her when she got the message recalled the unusual request. But their whole relationship was “strange,” that rower said.
When she got to Groom’s shipping container after 10 p.m., the girl said, she found her coach “sloppy drunk.” He offered her wine, which she refused. She sat on a stool, which he moved closer to himself so that her legs were between his. When she nervously fumbled with her keys and phone, he took them and placed them on a shelf out of her reach.
Groom then placed his hands on her upper thighs, she said. He brushed his hand across her breast, knocking off the spaghetti strap of her dress. When she stood up to leave, Groom grabbed her by the arms, saying: “No, you can’t go.” He had her sit across his lap.
“This isn’t SafeSport,” the girl said she told Groom, and that he responded: “No one’s here, everyone’s asleep.”
She said Groom attempted to kiss her on the lips, but she turned her face so he kissed her on the cheek. Ultimately, after Groom hugged her multiple times and grew agitated, the girl said she was able to “break away,” get her keys and drive off.
The girl immediately texted de Leuw, the other coach. She asked him not to report it because if Groom lost his job, “it’s my fault.” But de Leuw did report the alleged assault to a child abuse hotline, a police report shows, and the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office opened an investigation. He also notified SafeSport within days, according to the girl’s mother, and the organization launched its own investigation.
A few days later Nagy sent an email to the other directors of Mission Rowing saying that she had a “long and productive conversation” with Groom about the girl’s allegations. “He owned the behavior, the drunkenness and sadly acknowledged that he’d spent most of the weekend considering committing suicide,” Nagy wrote, according to a later police report that quoted the email in full.
But Nagy didn’t appear to consider cutting ties. Instead, she detailed a plan in which Mission Rowing would temporarily curtail his involvement in junior rowing while keeping him in a central role. “I think we can find a path forward for 6-12 months where he has no contact with youth, but has plenty of productive projects,” Nagy wrote, suggesting they “be really creative and we can keep him in the Regatta Director scope of things.”
Nagy said she spoke with Groom about a plan “so he stops shooting himself in the foot.” He should limit himself to a couple of beers a night and seek therapy, she wrote, and encouraged the other directors to “reach out to him as I think he’s really lonely.”
She expressed less sympathy for his alleged victim, referring to her “manipulative behavior,” saying that she had a “daily mental breakdown,” and calling Groom an “easy target.”
Groom stayed on the water. A mother of other rowers at Mission said she continued to see Groom train minor athletes in the days following the alleged assault. Nagy told The Post that Groom “only coached a handful of times” — including one instance with junior rowers — following the allegation.
SafeSport’s code states that it is able to take temporary measures, such as suspending a coach pending a full investigation to maintain the safety of athletes. But in Groom’s case, it didn’t act for months. (SafeSport declined to comment.)
Finally, in March 2022, seven months after the girl made the allegation, USRowing stepped in, stating that it had “determined it was necessary” to take action while the SafeSport investigation was ongoing. The organization prohibited Groom from coaching minors under its purview. The following month, SafeSport temporarily suspended Groom from unsupervised coaching.
The girl and her parents initially told police that they didn’t want to pursue charges against Groom. But around the time that USRowing suspended Groom; the mother went back to police, saying they had changed their mind after learning he had previously been accused of misconduct. The department reopened its investigation.
A police report states that Groom for days ignored a detective’s attempts to contact him. When they finally connected, Groom told the detective: “I am happy to contact you, if and when, after I speak to an attorney.” Groom, the detective wrote, never called back.
The detective did interview Nagy, who described Groom as a “great guy with a hot flash temper — Irish temper.” She told the detective she had been informed that the girl came to visit Groom that night without being invited and that Groom hadn’t given her any details about what happened. The detective concluded Nagy lied on both counts, his report shows. (Nagy told The Post she does not “believe” she lied, saying her memory of her conversations about the incidents was “murky” and “disjointed.”)
In July 2022, nearly a year after the alleged sexual assault, the detective sent his report to prosecutors. “Based on the information learned during this investigation,” the detective wrote, “it is apparent that Conal Groom committed the offense” of annoying or molesting a child, an offense that in California requires those convicted to register as a sex offender.
But the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Groom. It did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
Last October, according to records reviewed by The Post, an attorney representing the girl’s family sent a letter to Nagy and another Mission Rowing board member outlining the allegations that would form the basis of her lawsuit. Two months later, Mission Rowing President Brian Bolton announced in an email that Nagy “has decided to retire.” The email made no mention of allegations against the boathouse and lauded the “intrepid” Nagy for the work she invested in “her vision for bringing rowing to Santa Barbara County.”
There would be no retirement ceremony, Bolton noted: “In typical low-key fashion, Carol has requested a minimum of fuss around this moment.”
Bolton declined an interview request, writing in an email that “we strongly believe that no athlete should ever suffer abuse at the hands of a coach, and Mission Rowing categorically condemns any such behavior.”
SafeSport, meanwhile, continues to investigate. Investigators at the notoriously short-staffed nonprofit have reached a formal resolution on only 1,877 of 12,751 complaints — roughly one out of seven — in its history, according to its most recent annual report. In March of this year, more than a year and a half into its probe, SafeSport told a witness in Groom’s case that its report on Groom is “currently under review” and that there was no timeline for its completion.
Nancy Miles, the Stanford rower, last trained with Groom in 2013. It wasn’t until years later, she said, that she began to re-examine her coach’s alleged conduct — Groom’s verbal abuse, him striking her, and his sexual advances.
The realization occurred in late 2020, while she was training to be a doctor at the University of Washington. Miles said she began suffering crippling panic attacks. The worst bouts occurred when she made a minor mistake, or when her colleagues were kind to her. Miles said she expected to be screamed at, or for ulterior motives to emerge. Miles had achieved success at top competitions around the world, including claiming silver in her category at the 2013 world championship in South Korea. But instead of pride, Miles said, she felt “a lot of shame and a lot of guilt that this sport that I thought I had been empowered in I had been abused in.”
When Miles learned there was a SafeSport complaint against Groom, she worried that f she spoke out, “no one was going to believe me, and that they were all going to say that this was normal and that I was wrong to expect anything better,” Miles said. “There was a pretty dark period where I had thoughts like, ‘It would be better off if I was dead.’ ”
Nonetheless, Miles contacted SafeSport. So did Sophie Heywood, calling Groom in a letter “emotionally unbalanced, volatile, sexually inappropriate, basically disrespectful, violent, and unprofessional.”
One day in May, with Opening Day approaching, the girl, back in Seattle, found herself once again on the Montlake Cut, scrubbing away at the moss that had grown over the slogan — “Suffer with a smile” — she had painted four years before.
She wasn’t sure how her plan to erase her former paint strokes would be received. Some rowers in town, in response to the allegations against Groom, planned to paint messages supporting victims of abuse on the cut. But the girl received pushback from some former SRC rowers, who said that if she painted over an artifact of the boathouse, she would be erasing its legacy.
“That’s not a legacy we want to support,” the girl said recently. “That’s like a legacy of abusing athletes and burning them out for some small gain of winning nationals.”
After the wall was sufficiently clean to expose her old paint, she left for the night. The next day, she rowed by and saw that her new teammates had finished the job for her, covering the area with blue paint. At the sight of the blank wall, no longer adorned with the reminder of her former coach, she surprised herself by starting to cry.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/o ... legations/
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2 articles about Northwestern multiple sport problems at least 2 coaches fired
Pat Fitzgerald had to go, but coaches are just symptoms of hazing problem
Perspective by Kevin B. Blackistone
Columnist
July 12, 2023 at 5:51 a.m. EDT
After offensive lineman Jordan McNair died of heatstroke five years ago at 19 during a mid-June practice at Maryland, the university responded in the following months by dismissing the coaches it deemed responsible for McNair’s well-being, including head coach DJ Durkin. And the NCAA, which governs college sports, tightened its rules again to safeguard against such tragedies, recommending strength and conditioning coaches report to medical officers rather than the coaching staff.
The football team at Northwestern, my alma mater — which saw a player, Rashidi Wheeler, die similarly more than 20 summers ago — has avoided such a catastrophe in the years since despite the dangerous, debasing hazing events during coach Pat Fitzgerald’s tenure that an independent investigation recently uncovered. That review found the incidents were marked by sexual abuse that was confirmed by upward of a dozen players to investigators and reporters.
So Monday, the university fired Fitzgerald, the most successful football coach in school history. He’s a man whose company I’ve been in. Whom I like. Who got me to stick out my purple-adorned chest now and then. Whose teams I ventured to see at least once a year. Who had to go, absolutely. Because too many of his players were said to be degrading teammates, not just verbally but physically. Because it’s embarrassing. It’s dangerous. (Did no one on the football team know that the parents of a Northwestern women’s basketball player filed a lawsuit that said she took her life several years ago because of hazing she suffered to get into a sorority?) It’s supposed to be the 21st century, and sports is supposed to be better than this. You know, teaching values and all that.
For the institution, changing coaches is the easy solution.
And it is hardly enough.
Northwestern fires football coach Pat Fitzgerald over hazing allegations
You know what’s hard to do? What the NCAA tried by tightening the screws on football practice: changing the culture. That is what needs to happen — not just at Northwestern but beyond.
The ugly behavior uncovered in Northwestern’s football program by the school’s investigation and reporting by the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, is still far too common in college sports. This isn’t a boys-will-be-boys thing. It’s a flesh-and-blood health and welfare problem, physical and mental.
It has roots in high school sports, where every year it seems there are stories such as the one that unfolded in 2019 at Damascus High in a Maryland suburb of D.C. There, junior varsity football players attacked a teammate with a broomstick. The National Study of Student Hazing has reported that nearly half of students said they were hazed at least once in high school.
Where does hazing, or bullying, gets its imprimatur? How about from the professional ranks? Almost 10 years ago, a particularly egregious case of intra-team harassment was uncovered within the Miami Dolphins that resulted in then starting lineman Richie Incognito suspended for what is often referred to as “conduct detrimental to the team.”
But college is where sports’ admittedly harmful behavior apparently gets cultivated. This is where it metastasizes. At schools large and small. State and private. At all levels of competition. Men’s sports steeped in testosterone for the most part. But women’s sports, too. The Harvard women’s hockey team coach just resigned amid allegations of hazing on the team.
Some observers seemed shocked that such behavior could occur at institutions such as Harvard and Northwestern, where athletics are thought to be an addendum to academics rather than a core activity. But the NCAA estimated 74 percent of its athletes get hazed.
It wasn’t even an anomaly at Northwestern. Two of its other teams in the early 2000s were found guilty. It isn’t uncommon anywhere or even that infrequent. Just this year, New Mexico State basketball suffered its own hazing scandal and ended its season early.
The NCAA has guidelines on hazing, but it has clearer rules restricting overzealous end zone celebrations.
“Hazing is a matter for local law enforcement and/or university leadership to address,” an NCAA spokesperson emailed me Monday. “NCAA best practices encourage athletics administrators, coaches and student-athletes to work together to develop anti-hazing policies which promote healthy team activities and avoid practices that humiliate team members.”
But criminalizing hazing, as with criminalizing so many things, hasn’t scared everyone straight. And we don’t need to turn college students into criminals simply because they play games. It’s just that it hasn’t mattered that hazing is against the law in just about every state now, with charges rising to felonies if someone gets killed. The problem is that hazing is so baked into the team sports ethos.
‘My coach failed me.’ A former swimmer copes with the lasting trauma of abuse.
To be sure, even the athletes who suffer the brunt of being humiliated rarely speak up. Athletes aren’t as fearless as they’ve acted or as tough as we’ve celebrated. Why? Fear? Ostracization from the team? Being seen by coaches as weak and therefore not worthy of playing time?
Even players of color who have been subjected to racial harassment, as alleged in Northwestern’s case, are reluctant to point fingers. Indeed, just as the coronavirus was taking a hold of our lives, I received a screenshot from a friend. It was a message sent to football players at one of the 65 teams in that most elite plateau we call the Power Five encouraging them to be like tough field plants rather than cultivated house plants. A few Black players, who predominated the roster, took umbrage with the plantation imagery. But they refused to go public. They dreaded doing so would jeopardize their NFL aspirations.
But not coaching or not playing is ultimately what will threaten their futures in sports. Those who participated in and abetted what happened at Northwestern should face a similar fate as their coach, who said he knew nothing. Suspension of games and the paychecks they garner may be what really is needed to rein in this culture, which always seems to careen into sexual abuse and some sort of racial persecution.
Putting the coach in extended timeout should just be a start
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2 ... ge-sports/
Former Northwestern football players: Hazing culture normalized, coaches took part
By Brian Hamilton and The Athletic Staff
Jul 19, 2023
Hazing and sexual violence in the Northwestern football program became normalized because of the team’s culture, so much so that coaches participated in some of the acts, former Northwestern players said Wednesday at a news conference in Chicago.
“All of us were placed into a culture where sexual violence was rampant as a hazing practice,” said Warren Miles-Long, who played at Northwestern from 2013 to 2018. “Unfortunately for us, we were incoming freshmen. We had no reference point. That’s kind of what went into normalizing it for us.”
Miles-Long appeared with three other former players — Lloyd Yates, Simba Short and Tom Carnifax — alongside attorney Ben Crump and others Wednesday at a news conference to add more details to the allegations of hazing within the Northwestern football program. Their news conference followed another held an hour before by attorneys Patrick Salvi II and Parker Stinar in downtown Chicago. Salvi and Stiner represent an unnamed former Northwestern player suing school officials and said they will file another lawsuit on behalf of a second player. Former Northwestern athletic director and current ACC commissioner Jim Phillips will be named as a defendant in the second suit.
Crump, a civil rights attorney, and the Levin & Perconti law firm announced Monday that they’re partnering to pursue legal action against Northwestern over hazing within the football program. On Wednesday, Crump said the number of former athletes he’s retained has grown to 15 and now includes clients from the Wildcats’ football, baseball and softball programs, with the majority of them coming from the football program.
“It is clear to us that a toxic culture was rampant at Northwestern University,” Crump said. “This is not just relegated to the football program at Northwestern University. This goes into other athletic programs.”
He added that the softball program “seemed to be as toxic as the football program.”
“It really was deplorable. These were young girls who were not even of age yet,” Crump said. “And they were preyed upon from Day 1, in their words.”
Crump said he does not have a timeline yet for when the lawsuit will be filed as the law firm is still speaking with former Northwestern athletes. The lawyers have spoken to over 50 former athletes so far.
A Northwestern spokesperson said the university “does not comment on pending litigation.” In a letter to the Northwestern community Tuesday, university president Michael Schill announced two new external reviews of the athletic program. Both will be made public.
Yates, a Northwestern quarterback from 2015 to 2017, said Wednesday that hazing was “so entrenched in our culture that even some of our coaches took part in it.” Yates declined to specify how the coaches participated.
“All we wanted to do was play ball, and we were subjected to this culture,” added Short, a linebacker in the program from 2015 to 2016. “And we lived in fear.”
Northwestern began an investigation into football hazing in late 2022, following an anonymous whistleblower’s complaint. On July 7, the school released a vague executive summary and suspended football coach Pat Fitzgerald for two weeks without pay, along with new guidelines in the program. Following The Daily Northwestern’s publication of specific allegations the next day and growing public backlash, Schill fired Fitzgerald three days later. Fitzgerald has indicated potential legal action against the school. The school fired baseball coach Jim Foster on July 13 over abusive behavior.
“We start this case with the fundamental principle that no student-athlete should be enrolled in an athletic department conditioned on forced participation in extreme, ritualized sexual behavior. That’s what happened here,” said attorney Steve Levin, who appeared with Crump at the news conference. “It involved scores of athletes over a long period of time, in a very public forum. … It was passed down from class to class, from coach to coach. They just kept doing it. And no one ever stopped.”
Crump said the football coaches would have to have been “asleep at the wheel” to miss the hazing within the program.
“From all the football players we talk to, they’re saying this culture was just rampant throughout the program,” Crump said. “If the coach or coaches didn’t know, it would have to be malfeasance. It would have to be they were asleep at the wheel.”
Required reading
• ACC commissioner Jim Phillips named a defendant in second Northwestern lawsuit, lawyers say
• What’s going on at Northwestern? A timeline of accusations, investigation, findings within athletics department
• Greenberg: Pat Fitzgerald, the winningest coach in Northwestern history, lost in the end
• Fixing Northwestern’s culture is paramount, but program will struggle on the field now
https://theathletic.com/4703562/2023/07 ... ben-crump/
Perspective by Kevin B. Blackistone
Columnist
July 12, 2023 at 5:51 a.m. EDT
After offensive lineman Jordan McNair died of heatstroke five years ago at 19 during a mid-June practice at Maryland, the university responded in the following months by dismissing the coaches it deemed responsible for McNair’s well-being, including head coach DJ Durkin. And the NCAA, which governs college sports, tightened its rules again to safeguard against such tragedies, recommending strength and conditioning coaches report to medical officers rather than the coaching staff.
The football team at Northwestern, my alma mater — which saw a player, Rashidi Wheeler, die similarly more than 20 summers ago — has avoided such a catastrophe in the years since despite the dangerous, debasing hazing events during coach Pat Fitzgerald’s tenure that an independent investigation recently uncovered. That review found the incidents were marked by sexual abuse that was confirmed by upward of a dozen players to investigators and reporters.
So Monday, the university fired Fitzgerald, the most successful football coach in school history. He’s a man whose company I’ve been in. Whom I like. Who got me to stick out my purple-adorned chest now and then. Whose teams I ventured to see at least once a year. Who had to go, absolutely. Because too many of his players were said to be degrading teammates, not just verbally but physically. Because it’s embarrassing. It’s dangerous. (Did no one on the football team know that the parents of a Northwestern women’s basketball player filed a lawsuit that said she took her life several years ago because of hazing she suffered to get into a sorority?) It’s supposed to be the 21st century, and sports is supposed to be better than this. You know, teaching values and all that.
For the institution, changing coaches is the easy solution.
And it is hardly enough.
Northwestern fires football coach Pat Fitzgerald over hazing allegations
You know what’s hard to do? What the NCAA tried by tightening the screws on football practice: changing the culture. That is what needs to happen — not just at Northwestern but beyond.
The ugly behavior uncovered in Northwestern’s football program by the school’s investigation and reporting by the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, is still far too common in college sports. This isn’t a boys-will-be-boys thing. It’s a flesh-and-blood health and welfare problem, physical and mental.
It has roots in high school sports, where every year it seems there are stories such as the one that unfolded in 2019 at Damascus High in a Maryland suburb of D.C. There, junior varsity football players attacked a teammate with a broomstick. The National Study of Student Hazing has reported that nearly half of students said they were hazed at least once in high school.
Where does hazing, or bullying, gets its imprimatur? How about from the professional ranks? Almost 10 years ago, a particularly egregious case of intra-team harassment was uncovered within the Miami Dolphins that resulted in then starting lineman Richie Incognito suspended for what is often referred to as “conduct detrimental to the team.”
But college is where sports’ admittedly harmful behavior apparently gets cultivated. This is where it metastasizes. At schools large and small. State and private. At all levels of competition. Men’s sports steeped in testosterone for the most part. But women’s sports, too. The Harvard women’s hockey team coach just resigned amid allegations of hazing on the team.
Some observers seemed shocked that such behavior could occur at institutions such as Harvard and Northwestern, where athletics are thought to be an addendum to academics rather than a core activity. But the NCAA estimated 74 percent of its athletes get hazed.
It wasn’t even an anomaly at Northwestern. Two of its other teams in the early 2000s were found guilty. It isn’t uncommon anywhere or even that infrequent. Just this year, New Mexico State basketball suffered its own hazing scandal and ended its season early.
The NCAA has guidelines on hazing, but it has clearer rules restricting overzealous end zone celebrations.
“Hazing is a matter for local law enforcement and/or university leadership to address,” an NCAA spokesperson emailed me Monday. “NCAA best practices encourage athletics administrators, coaches and student-athletes to work together to develop anti-hazing policies which promote healthy team activities and avoid practices that humiliate team members.”
But criminalizing hazing, as with criminalizing so many things, hasn’t scared everyone straight. And we don’t need to turn college students into criminals simply because they play games. It’s just that it hasn’t mattered that hazing is against the law in just about every state now, with charges rising to felonies if someone gets killed. The problem is that hazing is so baked into the team sports ethos.
‘My coach failed me.’ A former swimmer copes with the lasting trauma of abuse.
To be sure, even the athletes who suffer the brunt of being humiliated rarely speak up. Athletes aren’t as fearless as they’ve acted or as tough as we’ve celebrated. Why? Fear? Ostracization from the team? Being seen by coaches as weak and therefore not worthy of playing time?
Even players of color who have been subjected to racial harassment, as alleged in Northwestern’s case, are reluctant to point fingers. Indeed, just as the coronavirus was taking a hold of our lives, I received a screenshot from a friend. It was a message sent to football players at one of the 65 teams in that most elite plateau we call the Power Five encouraging them to be like tough field plants rather than cultivated house plants. A few Black players, who predominated the roster, took umbrage with the plantation imagery. But they refused to go public. They dreaded doing so would jeopardize their NFL aspirations.
But not coaching or not playing is ultimately what will threaten their futures in sports. Those who participated in and abetted what happened at Northwestern should face a similar fate as their coach, who said he knew nothing. Suspension of games and the paychecks they garner may be what really is needed to rein in this culture, which always seems to careen into sexual abuse and some sort of racial persecution.
Putting the coach in extended timeout should just be a start
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2 ... ge-sports/
Former Northwestern football players: Hazing culture normalized, coaches took part
By Brian Hamilton and The Athletic Staff
Jul 19, 2023
Hazing and sexual violence in the Northwestern football program became normalized because of the team’s culture, so much so that coaches participated in some of the acts, former Northwestern players said Wednesday at a news conference in Chicago.
“All of us were placed into a culture where sexual violence was rampant as a hazing practice,” said Warren Miles-Long, who played at Northwestern from 2013 to 2018. “Unfortunately for us, we were incoming freshmen. We had no reference point. That’s kind of what went into normalizing it for us.”
Miles-Long appeared with three other former players — Lloyd Yates, Simba Short and Tom Carnifax — alongside attorney Ben Crump and others Wednesday at a news conference to add more details to the allegations of hazing within the Northwestern football program. Their news conference followed another held an hour before by attorneys Patrick Salvi II and Parker Stinar in downtown Chicago. Salvi and Stiner represent an unnamed former Northwestern player suing school officials and said they will file another lawsuit on behalf of a second player. Former Northwestern athletic director and current ACC commissioner Jim Phillips will be named as a defendant in the second suit.
Crump, a civil rights attorney, and the Levin & Perconti law firm announced Monday that they’re partnering to pursue legal action against Northwestern over hazing within the football program. On Wednesday, Crump said the number of former athletes he’s retained has grown to 15 and now includes clients from the Wildcats’ football, baseball and softball programs, with the majority of them coming from the football program.
“It is clear to us that a toxic culture was rampant at Northwestern University,” Crump said. “This is not just relegated to the football program at Northwestern University. This goes into other athletic programs.”
He added that the softball program “seemed to be as toxic as the football program.”
“It really was deplorable. These were young girls who were not even of age yet,” Crump said. “And they were preyed upon from Day 1, in their words.”
Crump said he does not have a timeline yet for when the lawsuit will be filed as the law firm is still speaking with former Northwestern athletes. The lawyers have spoken to over 50 former athletes so far.
A Northwestern spokesperson said the university “does not comment on pending litigation.” In a letter to the Northwestern community Tuesday, university president Michael Schill announced two new external reviews of the athletic program. Both will be made public.
Yates, a Northwestern quarterback from 2015 to 2017, said Wednesday that hazing was “so entrenched in our culture that even some of our coaches took part in it.” Yates declined to specify how the coaches participated.
“All we wanted to do was play ball, and we were subjected to this culture,” added Short, a linebacker in the program from 2015 to 2016. “And we lived in fear.”
Northwestern began an investigation into football hazing in late 2022, following an anonymous whistleblower’s complaint. On July 7, the school released a vague executive summary and suspended football coach Pat Fitzgerald for two weeks without pay, along with new guidelines in the program. Following The Daily Northwestern’s publication of specific allegations the next day and growing public backlash, Schill fired Fitzgerald three days later. Fitzgerald has indicated potential legal action against the school. The school fired baseball coach Jim Foster on July 13 over abusive behavior.
“We start this case with the fundamental principle that no student-athlete should be enrolled in an athletic department conditioned on forced participation in extreme, ritualized sexual behavior. That’s what happened here,” said attorney Steve Levin, who appeared with Crump at the news conference. “It involved scores of athletes over a long period of time, in a very public forum. … It was passed down from class to class, from coach to coach. They just kept doing it. And no one ever stopped.”
Crump said the football coaches would have to have been “asleep at the wheel” to miss the hazing within the program.
“From all the football players we talk to, they’re saying this culture was just rampant throughout the program,” Crump said. “If the coach or coaches didn’t know, it would have to be malfeasance. It would have to be they were asleep at the wheel.”
Required reading
• ACC commissioner Jim Phillips named a defendant in second Northwestern lawsuit, lawyers say
• What’s going on at Northwestern? A timeline of accusations, investigation, findings within athletics department
• Greenberg: Pat Fitzgerald, the winningest coach in Northwestern history, lost in the end
• Fixing Northwestern’s culture is paramount, but program will struggle on the field now
https://theathletic.com/4703562/2023/07 ... ben-crump/
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2512
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Bowling Green State suspends coach, three players for alleged off-campus hazing incident
Bowling Green State suspends coach, three players for alleged off-campus hazing incident
BGSU coach Ty Eigner and three players have been placed on interim suspension from the team, the university announced Monday
By Trent Singer
Today at 1:59 PM
BOWLING GREEN, Ohio — Bowling Green State hockey coach Ty Eigner and three players have been placed on suspension for an alleged hazing incident that occurred off-campus, according to BGSU spokesperson Colleen Rerucha on Monday.
“Immediately upon receiving a report of alleged hazing, the university notified local law enforcement and initiated its own investigation,” the university said in a statement. “BGSU has placed three students on interim suspension from the team. Additionally, head coach Ty Eigner has been placed on administrative leave, pending a full review.”
According to BGSU, assistant coach Curtis Carr has been named interim head coach, while William Switaj, the school’s director of club sports, has been appointed to serve in an interim advisory capacity.
“Through our commitment — both on campus and across the state
— the university remains steadfast in its mission to eradicate hazing,” the statement read. “Our community continues to embrace a culture of accountability, and we continue to be grateful for those who report concerns.”
In June 2022, five BGSU students were sentenced in the hazing death of Stone Foltz, a 20-year-old sophomore from Delaware, Ohio, who was rushing the Pi Kappa Alpha International fraternity. As part of the pledging process, Foltz attended an initiation event on March 4, 2021, during which he drank a liter of Evan Williams Bourbon. Several days later, he died of fatal alcohol intoxication.
Foltz's family and the university reached a $2.9 million settlement in January, and in an ongoing mission to eradicate hazing of all forms, BGSU hosted its second Ohio Anti-Hazing Summit on Aug. 1.
“The CCHA stands behind our student-athletes and condemns any form of hazing or abuse," CCHA Commissioner Don Lucia said in a statement. "I have complete confidence in Bowling Green’s unbiased investigation and the league will withhold further comment until the investigation is complete.”
https://www.therinklive.com/mens-colleg ... g-incident
BGSU coach Ty Eigner and three players have been placed on interim suspension from the team, the university announced Monday
By Trent Singer
Today at 1:59 PM
BOWLING GREEN, Ohio — Bowling Green State hockey coach Ty Eigner and three players have been placed on suspension for an alleged hazing incident that occurred off-campus, according to BGSU spokesperson Colleen Rerucha on Monday.
“Immediately upon receiving a report of alleged hazing, the university notified local law enforcement and initiated its own investigation,” the university said in a statement. “BGSU has placed three students on interim suspension from the team. Additionally, head coach Ty Eigner has been placed on administrative leave, pending a full review.”
According to BGSU, assistant coach Curtis Carr has been named interim head coach, while William Switaj, the school’s director of club sports, has been appointed to serve in an interim advisory capacity.
“Through our commitment — both on campus and across the state
— the university remains steadfast in its mission to eradicate hazing,” the statement read. “Our community continues to embrace a culture of accountability, and we continue to be grateful for those who report concerns.”
In June 2022, five BGSU students were sentenced in the hazing death of Stone Foltz, a 20-year-old sophomore from Delaware, Ohio, who was rushing the Pi Kappa Alpha International fraternity. As part of the pledging process, Foltz attended an initiation event on March 4, 2021, during which he drank a liter of Evan Williams Bourbon. Several days later, he died of fatal alcohol intoxication.
Foltz's family and the university reached a $2.9 million settlement in January, and in an ongoing mission to eradicate hazing of all forms, BGSU hosted its second Ohio Anti-Hazing Summit on Aug. 1.
“The CCHA stands behind our student-athletes and condemns any form of hazing or abuse," CCHA Commissioner Don Lucia said in a statement. "I have complete confidence in Bowling Green’s unbiased investigation and the league will withhold further comment until the investigation is complete.”
https://www.therinklive.com/mens-colleg ... g-incident
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2512
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
A background check didn't catch a high school coach's sexual assault record. Then he did it again.
A background check didn't catch a high school coach's sexual assault record. Then he did it again.
It took Annalie Peterson and a friend a couple of dollars and a few minutes on a background check website to find what her old high school apparently had not.
Mark Kosloski — Peterson's former volleyball coach — had a criminal sexual conduct conviction in Wisconsin.
Peterson was stunned that her former school, North Lakes Academy in Forest Lake, had hired someone with that history. The details of the case, involving the statutory rape of a 16-year-old girl Kosloski coached on a basketball team, were eerily similar to her own.
Kosloski, now in prison for assaulting Peterson and another North Lakes student, clearly had a pattern.
"I think that's when I actually felt like a victim," Peterson said.
Minnesota schools' handling of background and reference checks for teachers and employees is at the center of two high-profile lawsuits, including one from Peterson alleging that North Lakes Academy didn't do enough to vet Kosloski's background to protect students from a convicted sex offender. A separate case going before the state Supreme Court on Tuesday could determine whether districts and charter schools are liable when someone with a problematic past is hired and goes on to abuse students.
The state requires criminal history background checks as part of teacher licensure, and it mandates that districts request such a check during the hiring process. The districts can either go through the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) or through a private agency contracted by the school, which is what North Lakes Academy did when hiring Kosloski.
In Minnesota, the rest of the hiring protocol is largely left up to individual school districts — many of which are scrambling to fill openings amid widespread staffing shortages.
"The whole hiring process varies from district to district and state to state," said Jimmy Adams, executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification (NASDTEC). "Each location has its own processes and procedures that should be followed, but enforcement can fluctuate.”
A case 'we lose sleep over’
At the center of the Supreme Court case are allegations that Harvest Best Academy failed to protect students in its network of north Minneapolis charter schools when it hired a teacher and coach who had been accused of sexual assault by a student at a different school.
No criminal charges were filed against Aaron Hjermstad while he worked at Excell Academy — a Brooklyn Park charter school — but he was put on administrative leave after the allegations and the school didn't renew his contract.
Not long after, Harvest Best's principal hired Hjermstad to be a physical education teacher and volunteer basketball coach. He cleared a background check, but the school didn't contact Excell or other previous employers, according to court records.
In 2020, a student reported that Hjermstad sexually assaulted him while he stayed at the teacher's home. Hjermstad is now serving a 12-year prison sentence for assaulting four pre-teen boys he coached over the span of several years and jobs, and the school is being sued for alleged negligence in failing to follow its own hiring protocols.
Molly Burke, an attorney with Jeff Anderson and Associates working on the case, added: "You ask one question: Would you hire this person again? You get a 'yes' or a 'no,' and it tells you everything you need to know.”
A call to Harvest Best was not returned. The Court of Appeals ruled that the school was not liable in the negligent hiring claim, applying statutory immunity, which can include public schools. Anderson's firm appealed that decision to the state Supreme Court.
While the appeals court said its ruling is specific to the facts in the Harvest Best case, attorney Jeff Anderson said it could be used to halt similar lawsuits against schools if it's not overturned by the Supreme Court.
"This is the kind of case we lose sleep over," Anderson said. "We've got a number of cases that we have yet to bring or have brought and they're now throwing this in our face and saying, 'There's nothing you can do legally.’ “
Another lawsuit pending
Peterson's case against North Lakes Academy is on appeal pending a Supreme Court decision. That lawsuit accuses the school of failing to require reference checks and lacking any policies for acceptable background check vendors, ignoring widely encouraged best practices in the industry for hiring people who work closely with children.
A federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publication on preventing child sexual abuse within youth-focused organizations encourages employers to go beyond background checks to call references and previous employers and ask applicants screening questions.
"Using background checks alone may give your organization a false sense of security," it says, adding that such checks "will not identify most sexual offenders because most have not been caught.”
At the time of Kosloski's hire in 2015, North Lakes Academy used a third-party vendor called Protect My Ministry, a Florida-based company that specializes in background checks of church volunteers. The "basic" package used by the school looked solely at criminal records dating back a decade, according to court records, missing Kosloski's 1999 criminal sexual conduct conviction in Wisconsin.
That case cited five minor victims. Ministry Brands, a parent company of Protect My Ministry, did not return a request for comment.
North Lakes Academy declined to comment, citing the pending case. A school official said in court depositions that staff didn't ask Kosloski for references or call his previous employers. Kosloski said he mentioned to the school's finance director that he had a past assault conviction in Wisconsin — a claim the school denies.
"She said: 'Let's just see what comes up in the report,' " read Kosloski's deposition. When the conviction didn't appear, he started working as a coach.
Peterson said she felt uncomfortable in 2017 when she realized Kosloski was paying closer attention to her than other girls on the varsity volleyball team. But at a school where she had few friends, she said, Kosloski made himself an ally.
After Peterson was kicked off the team for smoking marijuana, she said, Kosloski offered to continue training her at his home. When she felt their relationship was becoming too familiar, Peterson reasoned he was an authority figure who'd been vetted by her school.
"He had that ideal American life — a wife, two kids and lived in a suburb," she said.
Boundaries continued to blur until Kosloski initiated a sexual relationship shortly after Peterson turned 17. He was 43.
A few years later, another former North Lakes Academy student read in an article that police were investigating Kosloski for assaulting a student at the school.
That former student had a "complete breakdown," according to court records, realizing "'it happened to someone else.’"
State procedures vary The National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification keeps the only centralized database of disciplinary actions against teachers. It gets about 6,000 reports a year about action taken against the 3.5 million teachers across the country, Adams said.
Minnesota alone grants or renews 35,000 to 40,000 teacher licenses each year. The state teacher licensing board has denied, based on background checks run through the state BCA, an average of just 10 per year for the past decade. As part of the license application process, applicants must answer a 12-question conduct survey about their criminal and licensure history.
"We really do want the best, licensed individuals in the classroom with kids," said Emily Busta, a licensing supervisor with the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board.
Still, incidents have occurred that prompted state legislators to examine vetting requirements for schools. In 2017, reports surfaced that a bus driver in the Anoka-Hennepin school district pleaded guilty years earlier to child molestation but was given a stay of adjudication, which kept the charge off his record.
"Almost every year you read about someone who moved from one school to another and it didn't catch up with them until much further down the road," said former Republican Rep. Jenifer Loon.
She sponsored a bill that required stays of adjudication to be reported in BCA criminal checks and mandated that school districts request criminal checks on all employees every three years, among other changes. It didn't pass in 2017, but other states have enacted similar measures.
Missouri requires its education department to annually check all employees against registries and criminal history records, according to a memo from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Florida and Texas maintain a list of people disqualified from working in schools, and New Jersey requires schools to check employment history and contact all previous employers.
'Brushed away’
These days, Peterson spends her time training her new puppy, Waylon, and working as an environmental consultant in Wisconsin, a dream job after growing up fascinated with rocks and nature.
She still struggles to talk about what happened to her during her time at North Lakes Academy, which she's tried to do in therapy and with her boyfriend.
She also wants to know that it won't happen again.
"It's gotten to the point that without awareness," she said, "this could all be brushed away.”
A background check didn't catch a high school coach's sexual assault record. Then he did it again.
Minnesota schools' handling of reference and background checks are facing scrutiny in two lawsuits.
Read more: https://www.startribune.com/a-backgroun ... 600315677/
It took Annalie Peterson and a friend a couple of dollars and a few minutes on a background check website to find what her old high school apparently had not.
Mark Kosloski — Peterson's former volleyball coach — had a criminal sexual conduct conviction in Wisconsin.
Peterson was stunned that her former school, North Lakes Academy in Forest Lake, had hired someone with that history. The details of the case, involving the statutory rape of a 16-year-old girl Kosloski coached on a basketball team, were eerily similar to her own.
Kosloski, now in prison for assaulting Peterson and another North Lakes student, clearly had a pattern.
"I think that's when I actually felt like a victim," Peterson said.
Minnesota schools' handling of background and reference checks for teachers and employees is at the center of two high-profile lawsuits, including one from Peterson alleging that North Lakes Academy didn't do enough to vet Kosloski's background to protect students from a convicted sex offender. A separate case going before the state Supreme Court on Tuesday could determine whether districts and charter schools are liable when someone with a problematic past is hired and goes on to abuse students.
The state requires criminal history background checks as part of teacher licensure, and it mandates that districts request such a check during the hiring process. The districts can either go through the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) or through a private agency contracted by the school, which is what North Lakes Academy did when hiring Kosloski.
In Minnesota, the rest of the hiring protocol is largely left up to individual school districts — many of which are scrambling to fill openings amid widespread staffing shortages.
"The whole hiring process varies from district to district and state to state," said Jimmy Adams, executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification (NASDTEC). "Each location has its own processes and procedures that should be followed, but enforcement can fluctuate.”
A case 'we lose sleep over’
At the center of the Supreme Court case are allegations that Harvest Best Academy failed to protect students in its network of north Minneapolis charter schools when it hired a teacher and coach who had been accused of sexual assault by a student at a different school.
No criminal charges were filed against Aaron Hjermstad while he worked at Excell Academy — a Brooklyn Park charter school — but he was put on administrative leave after the allegations and the school didn't renew his contract.
Not long after, Harvest Best's principal hired Hjermstad to be a physical education teacher and volunteer basketball coach. He cleared a background check, but the school didn't contact Excell or other previous employers, according to court records.
In 2020, a student reported that Hjermstad sexually assaulted him while he stayed at the teacher's home. Hjermstad is now serving a 12-year prison sentence for assaulting four pre-teen boys he coached over the span of several years and jobs, and the school is being sued for alleged negligence in failing to follow its own hiring protocols.
Molly Burke, an attorney with Jeff Anderson and Associates working on the case, added: "You ask one question: Would you hire this person again? You get a 'yes' or a 'no,' and it tells you everything you need to know.”
A call to Harvest Best was not returned. The Court of Appeals ruled that the school was not liable in the negligent hiring claim, applying statutory immunity, which can include public schools. Anderson's firm appealed that decision to the state Supreme Court.
While the appeals court said its ruling is specific to the facts in the Harvest Best case, attorney Jeff Anderson said it could be used to halt similar lawsuits against schools if it's not overturned by the Supreme Court.
"This is the kind of case we lose sleep over," Anderson said. "We've got a number of cases that we have yet to bring or have brought and they're now throwing this in our face and saying, 'There's nothing you can do legally.’ “
Another lawsuit pending
Peterson's case against North Lakes Academy is on appeal pending a Supreme Court decision. That lawsuit accuses the school of failing to require reference checks and lacking any policies for acceptable background check vendors, ignoring widely encouraged best practices in the industry for hiring people who work closely with children.
A federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publication on preventing child sexual abuse within youth-focused organizations encourages employers to go beyond background checks to call references and previous employers and ask applicants screening questions.
"Using background checks alone may give your organization a false sense of security," it says, adding that such checks "will not identify most sexual offenders because most have not been caught.”
At the time of Kosloski's hire in 2015, North Lakes Academy used a third-party vendor called Protect My Ministry, a Florida-based company that specializes in background checks of church volunteers. The "basic" package used by the school looked solely at criminal records dating back a decade, according to court records, missing Kosloski's 1999 criminal sexual conduct conviction in Wisconsin.
That case cited five minor victims. Ministry Brands, a parent company of Protect My Ministry, did not return a request for comment.
North Lakes Academy declined to comment, citing the pending case. A school official said in court depositions that staff didn't ask Kosloski for references or call his previous employers. Kosloski said he mentioned to the school's finance director that he had a past assault conviction in Wisconsin — a claim the school denies.
"She said: 'Let's just see what comes up in the report,' " read Kosloski's deposition. When the conviction didn't appear, he started working as a coach.
Peterson said she felt uncomfortable in 2017 when she realized Kosloski was paying closer attention to her than other girls on the varsity volleyball team. But at a school where she had few friends, she said, Kosloski made himself an ally.
After Peterson was kicked off the team for smoking marijuana, she said, Kosloski offered to continue training her at his home. When she felt their relationship was becoming too familiar, Peterson reasoned he was an authority figure who'd been vetted by her school.
"He had that ideal American life — a wife, two kids and lived in a suburb," she said.
Boundaries continued to blur until Kosloski initiated a sexual relationship shortly after Peterson turned 17. He was 43.
A few years later, another former North Lakes Academy student read in an article that police were investigating Kosloski for assaulting a student at the school.
That former student had a "complete breakdown," according to court records, realizing "'it happened to someone else.’"
State procedures vary The National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification keeps the only centralized database of disciplinary actions against teachers. It gets about 6,000 reports a year about action taken against the 3.5 million teachers across the country, Adams said.
Minnesota alone grants or renews 35,000 to 40,000 teacher licenses each year. The state teacher licensing board has denied, based on background checks run through the state BCA, an average of just 10 per year for the past decade. As part of the license application process, applicants must answer a 12-question conduct survey about their criminal and licensure history.
"We really do want the best, licensed individuals in the classroom with kids," said Emily Busta, a licensing supervisor with the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board.
Still, incidents have occurred that prompted state legislators to examine vetting requirements for schools. In 2017, reports surfaced that a bus driver in the Anoka-Hennepin school district pleaded guilty years earlier to child molestation but was given a stay of adjudication, which kept the charge off his record.
"Almost every year you read about someone who moved from one school to another and it didn't catch up with them until much further down the road," said former Republican Rep. Jenifer Loon.
She sponsored a bill that required stays of adjudication to be reported in BCA criminal checks and mandated that school districts request criminal checks on all employees every three years, among other changes. It didn't pass in 2017, but other states have enacted similar measures.
Missouri requires its education department to annually check all employees against registries and criminal history records, according to a memo from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Florida and Texas maintain a list of people disqualified from working in schools, and New Jersey requires schools to check employment history and contact all previous employers.
'Brushed away’
These days, Peterson spends her time training her new puppy, Waylon, and working as an environmental consultant in Wisconsin, a dream job after growing up fascinated with rocks and nature.
She still struggles to talk about what happened to her during her time at North Lakes Academy, which she's tried to do in therapy and with her boyfriend.
She also wants to know that it won't happen again.
"It's gotten to the point that without awareness," she said, "this could all be brushed away.”
A background check didn't catch a high school coach's sexual assault record. Then he did it again.
Minnesota schools' handling of reference and background checks are facing scrutiny in two lawsuits.
Read more: https://www.startribune.com/a-backgroun ... 600315677/
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2512
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
This article could be about any other sport from club level all the way up to any college.
This article could be about any other sport from club level all the way up to any college.
Beneath NCAA gymnastics’ glow, a familiar ‘toxic’ culture
Female gymnasts say college was supposed to offer a reprieve from intense club programs. Then they arrived on campus and found more of the same.
By Molly Hensley-Clancy and
Emily Giambalvo
Updated November 21, 2023 at 10:17 p.m. EST| Published November 20, 2023 at
10:07 a.m. EST
After everything they went through as young gymnasts, college was supposed to be a safe haven.
The viral routines, the cheering crowds, the women swarming their teammates: NCAA gymnastics, at least as viewed from their Instagram feeds, was a world apart from the elite youth version of the sport, where injury, body-shaming and verbal abuse were expected.
Instead, they found the same toxicity.
At the University of North Carolina, gymnast Raine Gordon says, her assistant head coach, Amy Smith, pitted gymnasts against one another and made her feel ashamed of her body, once saying that Gordon’s leg was bruised after a fall because it was “fat.” Smith and the head coach, Derek Galvin, made Gordon sign a contract that threatened her scholarship if she didn’t lose weight every week. Bulimia, Gordon says, “became like a team activity.”
At LSU, one of the country’s top programs, Bailey Ferrer, a former elite gymnast, says the school’s longtime coach, D-D Breaux, praised her weight loss as she spiraled into an eating disorder, then retaliated when mental health treatment prevented Ferrer from training, once pushing her from a team huddle. Ferrer, devastated, was forced to cut her once-ascendant career short, she told The Washington Post.
And at Utah’s storied program, gymnasts this year reported verbal and emotional abuse by their coach, Tom Farden. His volatility and demeaning treatment, multiple gymnasts told investigators hired by the university, included hurling objects in fits of anger during training.
In September, the university announced it would not discipline Farden after its investigators found his conduct had not been “severe, pervasive or egregious” and after a majority of his current athletes defended him. But faced with the prospect of competing for Farden again, one of the program’s most prominent athletes, Kara
Eaker, an alternate for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, said in October she had been a “victim” of his mistreatment and was quitting the sport.
Farden’s treatment of her, she said in a statement, had triggered thoughts of suicide and self-harm. Another former athlete, Kim Tessen, also came forward to criticize the university’s investigation and say she had been mistreated by Farden.
“I want to stop the cycle of abuse and the men who threaten girls and women in all sports,” Eaker wrote.
On Nov. 21, a day after this story was published, Utah announced that it had parted ways with Farden. The school’s news release announcing the change did not address the allegations of abuse.
Read more investigative reporting about sports
Women’s college gymnastics has exploded in popularity in recent years, gaining television viewers, crowds and social media followers in droves. The NCAA championships last spring drew more than 1 million viewers on ESPN, their most ever, and in the era of athletes profiting from their brands, some gymnasts rank among the highest earners in any college sport, men’s or women’s.
But for some athletes, the reality of NCAA gymnastics has been sharply at odds with the sport’s public image, an examination by The Post found. In interviews and investigative records, gymnasts described “toxic” environments in which they were targeted by coaches, ignored by institutions and ostracized by teammates for speaking up. Coaches, a dozen gymnasts told The Post, created environments in which gymnasts felt unsafe and unsupported and where their mental health degraded. Some said they were even driven from the sport because of it.
Some allegations, such as at Utah, have previously spilled into public view. At San José State, gymnasts told the Mercury News that their former coach had verbally abused and body-shamed them. The coach had been investigated in 2018, the newspaper reported, but denied the allegations and was allowed to retire with his pension and praise from the university. And at Penn State, one coach was fired and another resigned in the wake of 2016 allegations of emotional abuse and body- shaming from former gymnasts.
College gymnasts who have raised concerns in recent years about cultural issues in the sport said they hoped to join the chorus of women who spoke up about systemic sexual and emotional abuse at the elite youth clubs that fuel the powerhouse U.S. national program, including by Larry Nassar and Bela and Martha Karolyi. But change, they said, has yet to come.
In the wake of Nassar’s abuses, Congress created an oversight organization, the U.S. Center for SafeSport, to police abuse in the Olympic movement. But SafeSport does not have jurisdiction over college sports. The NCAA, meanwhile, largely gives college’s discretion over whether and how to respond to allegations of emotional abuse.
Smith, the North Carolina assistant, is now the head coach at Clemson. She did not respond to a detailed list of questions from The Post, issuing a statement saying only that “student-athlete wellbeing is incredibly important, and I am confident in our ability to provide those resources at Clemson.” UNC declined to comment.
Galvin, North Carolina’s former head coach, said he was “ashamed of myself” for asking Gordon to sign the weight loss contract, which he said he retracted shortly after presenting it on advice of the administration. “I let Raine down,” Galvin said.
Breaux did not respond to requests for comment. She retired as head coach in 2020 after 43 seasons but remains a part of the university’s athletic department. In a statement, an LSU spokesperson said the university had spoken with Breaux and Ferrer about the incident at the meet and worked to resolve it.
Investigators hired by Utah found that the majority of current athletes in the program had positive experiences with Farden and said they couldn’t corroborate many of the allegations. Incidents they had corroborated, where he made a derogatory comment or threw an object in anger, the investigators said, were “isolated” and had not violated university codes.
Farden’s attorney, Brian C. Johnson, told The Post that his client would “likely take appropriate legal action” against Eaker and Tessen, saying their public statements on social media in the wake of the school’s decision were “false statements of fact.” Asked whether Farden planned to change his coaching methods, Johnson said he did not. “He has a long history of success as a coach,” he said. “He’ll continue to do so in the fashion he’s done so.”
Shortly after a Post reporter asked a Utah spokesperson about the attorney’s comments, the university placed Farden on administrative leave, citing conduct “not related to student-athlete welfare.”
Crude awakening
After being screamed at, humiliated, body-shamed, overtrained or even — once — bitten by coaches as young girls, many gymnasts who spoke to The Post said they came to NCAA gymnastics with hope not just for something different. They hoped, they said, for something that would make the painful experiences of their early years feel worthwhile.
Some of the NCAA’s 1,200 Division I female gymnasts no doubt found that. In the wake of revelations about systemic abuse by Nassar and emotional abuse by some of the country’s most high-profile club gymnastics coaches, Katelyn Ohashi’s ebullient 2019 routines at UCLA went viral — along with her story of finding “joy” again in college gymnastics after body-shaming in the elite youth ranks almost drove her from the sport.
But others have had starkly different experiences.
Gordon arrived at UNC in 2016, hoping college would be a respite from the negative pressures of club gymnastics. Instead, she encountered Smith, then the assistant head
coach, who she said singled her out from the earliest days of her freshman year, berating her for mistakes and comparing her negatively with her teammates.
When Gordon fell short on a high-stakes skills verification test, she said, Smith forced Gordon to compare herself one-by-one with each of the team’s walk-ons, asking Gordon if she felt she “deserved” a scholarship more than them.
“It genuinely felt like no matter what I did, I was doing something wrong,” Gordon said. “I felt like they were just waiting for me to mess up.”
Galvin, the head coach at the time, described Smith as “intense” in an interview with The Post. “She brings an intensity that some student-athletes thrive under and some don’t, and she can be very — she can be very honest. Another coaching style is to be more diplomatic, maybe, is the word,” he said. “There were times where I felt like the intensity in the gym was too much, and we backed off on it.”
Smith left North Carolina for Utah State in 2017. Soon after she took over that program, athletes began to flee: Ten gymnasts left in 2019, roster records maintained by the website College Gym News show, nearly half of the team. Another seven left in 2021. Three gymnasts told The Post they left Utah State’s program in part because of Smith’s coaching, and a fourth said so publicly. Others did not respond to requests for comment.
“I was told every day I wasn’t good enough,” former Utah State gymnast Morgan Gill said in an interview, describing how Smith held her to “impossible” standards such as requiring her to perform her routines for two weeks without a single fall. Gill said she eventually developed anxiety and chest pain so intense that she was prescribed an inhaler by a Utah State doctor. But even that provoked Smith’s anger, she said.
“You never knew what would set her off, but for me, the thing that made her overwhelmingly angry — to the extent of yelling at me in front of the whole team — was my inhaler,” Gill said. When she forgot to use her inhaler before practice and instead had to step out of a conditioning circuit to use it, Gill said, Smith yelled at her for “playing games” and “failing to fully comprehend what was expected” of her.
Internally, multiple athletes raised concerns about her coaching to the university, according to three former gymnasts and emails to administrators reviewed by The Post.
“It felt like countless times that we went to the administration with anonymous complaints and issues” with Smith’s coaching, said a former Utah State athlete, Tori Loomis, who said she felt she had been “targeted” by Smith.
Glory Yoakum, another former Utah State gymnast, posted on social media in 2021 that Smith had “degraded” her and threatened her scholarship, telling her she was a “weak link” and “didn’t want to work.” But Utah State never conducted an investigation of Smith, the university said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Utah State athletic department said the school regularly reviews anonymous complaints from athletes and discusses them with
coaches. Smith was reviewed annually, the statement said, and “was in good standing at the end of her employment.”
Five of Smith’s athletes followed her to Clemson, which Utah State cited in its statement as an endorsement of her coaching. Clemson declined to make them available, and they did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Smith’s hiring, however, also prompted Gordon and two other Utah State athletes to speak up publicly, echoing the experiences that Yoakum had written about a year earlier.
They didn’t expect her to be fired, the athletes said. But they wanted a statement from Clemson that it would more closely monitor her program and an acknowledgment from the institutions that they said had failed to protect them. From Smith, some said, they hoped for something simple: an apology and a promise to do better.
The complaints reached the highest levels of Clemson’s athletic department, according to emails sent to and among administrators at the school. But publicly, the gymnasts’ stories were met with silence.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Clemson said the university’s hiring process included an “extensive amount of research into Coach Smith’s background,” during which Clemson “was not made aware of formal or informal investigations of Coach Smith from her previous institutions.”
“We take student-athlete treatment seriously and have confidence in Amy’s commitment to her student-athletes, as we’ve seen firsthand during her time at Clemson,” the university said.
Gill, for one, was unconvinced.
“It felt like everything we had gone through meant nothing to the people in charge, whether that was people from USU, people from Clemson,” Gill said. “We’d all spoken up and tried so hard to make things right, not necessarily to end her career but to have some kind of accountability.
“I’m just worried for the athletes that would go on to compete under her. I’m scared for them because I don’t want anyone else to experience that.”
Speaking out
From the outside, Kara Eaker and Kim Tessen were among Utah’s brightest stars. Tessen earned all-American honors in two events during her senior season of 2020; Eaker won two gold medals at the world championships with the U.S. team and was an alternate for the Tokyo Olympics. Utah is one of the country’s most storied programs, with 10 national championships.
But under Farden, both women experienced emotional and verbal abuse, they said in public statements in October, and struggled with a “toxic” team environment that they said was created and fostered by Farden. For Eaker, the coach’s bouts of anger and “verbal attacks” felt like “a knife ... stabbed so deep in my body that there’s no way to pull it out.”
“When a male coach suddenly erupts with anger and physically slams down mats and gets up in an athlete’s face as a tactic to intimidate them, it’s impossible to have the confidence to speak up for yourself,” Eaker wrote in her statement. She sought treatment for thoughts of suicide and self-harm because of Farden’s coaching, she wrote.
Long before she went public, Eaker said in the statement, she went to the university to raise alarms about Farden’s mistreatment. This summer, in the wake of high-profile transfers by three gymnasts, the university hired law firm Husch Blackwell to investigate Farden. But the firm’s investigators found a sharp division.
Some former gymnasts described a coach who terrified them: volatile and demeaning, targeting them with regular outbursts that they said took a toll on their self-esteem and self-worth, according to investigative records and interviews with former gymnasts and their parents. Two former Utah gymnasts were hospitalized with suicidal
ideations in part because of his coaching, their parents told The Post, allegations that were first reported by the Deseret News.
But two-thirds of the current team, investigators said, described Farden’s behavior differently: He was a “caring, passionate” coach with whom they “did not report any concerns related to the treatment of student-athletes.” He had occasionally yelled at the team, some gymnasts acknowledged, but had not targeted individuals and rarely if ever crossed a line. No athletes are named in the investigation.
Some of Farden’s former gymnasts defended him to the Deseret News. Two former Utah coaches, Megan and Greg Marsden, attributed the allegations against Farden to “disgruntled” former gymnasts, the paper reported.
“He cares so much about his athletes. But he also has a fine line to toe with, you
know, being a professional and delivering results while still caring. I think that he toes that line very well,” Sydney Soloski, who was on the team until last year, told the newspaper.
Investigators corroborated one “degrading” comment by Farden, in which he told a student that she would be a “nobody working at a gas station in her hometown” if she were not at the university. And investigators found two allegations that Farden had thrown objects — a cellphone and a stopwatch — were “more likely than not” true.
Farden denied throwing any object.
In another allegation, a gymnast told investigators she was cleaning the uneven bars when Farden “grabbed” the scraper from her and threw it at her. Three teammates
who witnessed the incident told investigators that they, too, had seen Farden throw the scraper — a toilet brush attached to a wooden stick — and that it hit their teammate.
One said she thought Farden acted “out of stress” because her teammate had been taking too long to scrape the bar; another said she thought he was in “panic mode.” But the woman’s teammates also told investigators they believed Farden had been well-intentioned and, as one put it, “did not throw it to hurt the student-athlete.”
Another said Farden had “chucked the scraper into oblivion” and that the athlete was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The investigators eventually determined Farden had not violated any policies in the incident, citing “varying and inconsistent statements.”
The university placed Farden on a performance improvement plan following the investigation, and the school’s athletic director, Mark Harlan, said in a statement at the time that he had met with Farden to “share with him my expectations moving forward.” But he said he “remain[ed] confident in Coach Farden’s ability to continue to lead our gymnastics program.”
In his announcement of Farden’s departure, Harlan said the change “provides necessary clarity and stability for our student-athletes and prevents further distraction from their upcoming season.” Harlan made reference to “an extremely challenging time for our gymnastics program” and praised Farden for his “tremendous contributions” to the team.
The division among teammates was a dynamic not isolated to Utah, multiple gymnasts told The Post. Among the things they had looked forward to the most in college gymnastics, they said, was the chance to compete as part of a team. But it was common practice in their programs, many gymnasts said, for coaches to pit athletes against each other anyway, even blaming some for team struggles.
It was a dynamic that resulted in isolation and sometimes escalated to bullying — and made it even more difficult for gymnasts to recognize and speak up against their coach’s mistreatment, they said.
Tessen and Eaker described that dynamic from their time at Utah.
“I quickly learned that the whole culture at the U of U gymnastics team was one of comparison: of each other’s skill levels, each other’s bodies, each other’s academic abilities,” she wrote in her statement. “These are clear, intentional intimidation tactics used to exert control and dominance over us.”
Some gymnasts “embraced” the dynamic created by Farden, Tessen wrote. “Those who reject it are the ones who suffer most from Tom, and even the other athletes.” Johnson, Farden’s attorney, called Tessen’s statements “false.” In the investigation, a majority of current team members and staffers “denied observing Coach Farden target particular student-athletes with negative treatment,” investigators wrote, and there was not “sufficient evidence” to establish that he had singled out athletes.
Investigators only considered conversations that could be corroborated by outside sources, they said, and relied on Farden’s denials of what had happened. In her statement, Eaker alleged Farden’s emotional abuse had often taken place in one-on- one meetings, without anyone else present.
A university spokesperson told The Post that it stood by the findings of Husch Blackwell’s investigation.
Pushed aside
Bailey Ferrer calls it the moment the “switch flipped.” As an elite gymnast, she grew up with club coaches who screamed and punished her with rope climbs for tiny mistakes, she said. But when Ferrer reached puberty, her coach filmed one of her bar routines, then paused the video as she was watching it, she said, and pointed to her body. “You’re getting too big here and here,” she said he told her. (Her former club coach said the incident “never happened.”)
Within weeks of arriving at LSU in 2019, Ferrer said, she found a culture that seemed just as obsessed with weight as elite gymnastics. “They care about our tan, our makeup, our everything,” she said. “That’s why we’re all over social media.”
LSU is one of the country’s best teams, often finishing in the top four nationwide, but it has also risen to prominence because of the online prowess of its gymnasts: Olivia Dunne, a senior, has more than 4 million followers on Instagram, making her one of the highest-valued athletes in all of college sports.
Ferrer was successful in her first year at LSU, earning a regular spot in the bars lineup, but the program’s handling of weight began to erode at her already fragile body image.
The coach at the time, D-D Breaux, had a practice of weighing in athletes on random Wednesdays, Ferrer said, rituals that were conducted in a room with the entire team present. Ferrer became anxious about the weigh-ins, she said, because Breaux and other LSU staffers sent a clear message that any amount of weight gain was unacceptable.
When, as a freshman, the scale showed she had gained three pounds, Ferrer said, she was pulled into the team nutritionist’s office for an extra body-fat scan and told her body mass index was too high. “We need to dial in on nutrition,” she said the nutritionist told her. (The nutritionist did not respond to a message seeking comment.) To Ferrer, it made no sense: “It was halfway through the season, and I was doing the best gymnastics of my life,” she said. But she began to skip dinner on Tuesdays, anticipating she might be weighed again.
“I felt nervous because I knew whatever the number on the scale was going to be, it was going to determine my mental state for that day at least,” she said.
LSU said in a statement that across all of its sports, “weight and other health-related factors are managed with the student athlete’s performance team, which includes strength and conditioning staff, nutritionists, registered dietitians, sports medicine practitioners, and other medical professionals.”
Over the summer, while healing from ankle surgery, Ferrer began to restrict her eating even more severely in anticipation of returning to LSU and to weigh-ins, she said.
When she returned for her sophomore year, Breaux noticed. Breaux “came over to me and said, ‘You look really good; keep doing what you’re doing,’ ” Ferrer said. “That’s when the unhealthy habits really ramped up.”
Ferrer eventually sought help for her eating disorder from a team trainer and was put in a treatment program that saved her life, she said. But Breaux was upset that Ferrer was not able to train, Ferrer said.
When the season started, Ferrer arrived in the locker room to find her locker was empty, without any of the gear her teammates’ were filled with. Breaux was “holding them back,” Ferrer said she was told by a staffer. Her teammates rarely spoke to her, she said, and she was not allowed to dress or be on the floor for LSU’s home meets. Ferrer’s medical files at the time, portions of which were provided to The Post by Ferrer’s parents, record that Ferrer was “not given … apparel.” The records show Ferrer was initially excluded from meets partly on the recommendation of doctors, who wanted her to focus on her treatment. But when doctors said Ferrer could return to the floor, Breaux was resistant, the documents show.
Breaux told a trainer “it was a privilege not a right for someone to be on the floor during a competition,” the trainer’s notes show.
When Ferrer was finally told she could “dress out” for LSU’s meet against Alabama, she said, she was “so excited. I was excluded from the team, and I just wanted to feel like I was a part of it again.” Instead, the meet ended up being the last time Ferrer put on an LSU leotard.
As the team was going into the huddle before one of its events, Ferrer tried to join, she said. But Breaux put her hand on Ferrer’s shoulder and pushed her out of the huddle. Later, when the team was posing for a photograph with alumni who had attended the meet, Breaux told her not to get in the photo, she said. Ferrer remembers her words, she said: “I’m done with you.”
Several of Ferrer’s teammates did not return messages seeking comment. But her teammates did tell the team trainer what happened, according to Ferrer’s medical records. “D-D told everyone to come on but pointed at Bailey and said not her,” the trainer wrote.
LSU told The Post it had addressed the incident with Breaux and Ferrer but declined to provide specifics. LSU said Breaux’s departure from her coaching role in 2020 was unrelated.
Ferrer entered the transfer portal and committed to Auburn, another gymnastics powerhouse. But days before she was set to leave — her apartment in Auburn, Ala., already rented, a photograph taken of her with Auburn gear — an Auburn doctor who reviewed her medical records would not clear her transfer. She felt forced to medically retire, Ferrer said, and spent her last two years at LSU without gymnastics.
Eating disorders are common for many young women, especially college athletes. But studies consistently find female gymnasts are at a staggeringly high risk, with a 2004 study finding 42 percent of gymnasts and other elite “aesthetic sport” athletes, such as figure skaters, had disordered eating habits, compared with 16 percent in sports such as soccer and basketball.
Several gymnasts told The Post that rather than taking proactive steps to prevent eating disorders, coaches exacerbated or even created them, stoking disordered habits
and adopting practices that put weight at the forefront. Asking for help, gymnasts said, could result in ostracism and bullying from coaches — or even end their careers.
As a freshman at Utah State, Tori Loomis said she became one of Amy Smith’s “very clear targets.” Particularly painful, Loomis said, was a moment a year later when, in front of the team, Smith pulled her name off a whiteboard on which she ranked gymnasts and flung it to the floor.
When she asked a group of upperclassmen how to make Smith treat her better, Loomis said, she would never forget their answer. They told her Smith “would love you if you were anorexic.” Loomis is one of three athletes who said they believed Smith had fostered a culture of disordered eating on the team.
The upperclassmen’s comments lingered in the back of Loomis’s mind as Smith frequently told her she was “out of shape,” even when she was injured. She developed a severe eating disorder, she said. “I felt like I have this scholarship looming over my head, and if these upperclassmen are telling me to do this, then this is what I need to do.”
The experience Loomis described was similar, in some ways, to the one Gordon alleged four years earlier at UNC. After a hard fall on the beam, Gordon said, a bruise on her leg worsened until it boomed dark purple and black across most of her hamstring, according to a photo she provided. According to Gordon, Smith told her, “It looks bad because your leg is fat.”
A few moments later, Gordon said, Smith asked her, “When you look in the mirror at your body, do you like what you see?” She said she felt like there was only one answer: No.
Later, after Gordon was suspended from the team for drinking during her freshman year in 2017, she said, the head coach, Galvin, and Smith gave her an opportunity to “right her wrongs” in the form of a contract, according to a copy reviewed by The Post. But the contract did not mention drinking at all.
Instead, it required “healthy weight loss of 1-2 lbs a week.” Gordon had to agree to weekly weigh-ins and six days a week of “intense cardio.” Failure to reach those goals, the contract said, “will result in a re-evaluation of my status as a scholarship student-athlete at the University of North Carolina and may lead to my dismissal from the gymnastics team and non-renewal of my athletic grant-in-aid.”
When Galvin and Smith presented her with the contract, Gordon said, she instantly thought back to Smith’s comment about her leg. She had struggled with body image issues since her time in club gymnastics when, she said, she and her teammates had been told to run a mile for every piece of Halloween candy they ate and were prohibited from drinking water before meets.
Smith’s words were the “acknowledgment” she needed that something was wrong with her body — and the contract, Gordon said, provided a road map to “a full-blown eating disorder.” She took it.
Smith left UNC at the end of the season. But for Gordon, the scars remained, she said. “You can’t tell a freshly 18-year-old girl that her entire scholarship and athletic career rests on her weight and not expect her to develop some sort of issue,” Gordon said. By her sophomore year, she said, “I was walking around campus as a zombie. I was so dissociated the whole time. I just had no nutrients in my body.”
Galvin said he took full responsibility for giving Gordon the contract, which he called a “mistake.” He said he had “never considered [the document] a contract” and that after administrators told him it was not enforceable, he retracted it.
“I wish I had managed Raine’s student-athlete experience differently than I did,” he said. “If I could go back now to five minutes before she’s going to walk into my office, knowing what I know now, I would never have put that piece of paper on the desk.”
Gordon said she remembered Galvin revising the contract but believed she had been given a different version that still required her to lose weight, removing only a requirement to photograph her meals and send them to the team nutritionist.
UNC declined to comment. Smith did not respond to detailed questions about Gordon or any other athletes’ allegations.
To Ferrer, it is impossible to think about her experiences in NCAA gymnastics without also thinking about her childhood in elite gymnastics, too. She is working now as an orthodontist’s assistant, and she was struck recently, she said, by a conversation with a high school freshman — around the same age Ferrer was when she committed to LSU.
Sitting in the orthodontist’s chair, she said, the girl described everything she had going on in her young life: honors classes, debate, dance lessons, dreams of being a doctor or a teacher.
At that moment, Ferrer said, she thought, “I was robbed of a childhood.” And she has realized, she said, that she was “robbed” of a college experience, too. Looking back, she said, she regretted the program she chose.
“All I can think was, ‘Is this worth it?’ A part of me says yes — I do have a college education and no debt. But part of me thinks that experience was ruined,” Ferrer said. “If I could go back as that little girl in eighth grade, I think my decision might have been different.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2 ... rden-ncaa/
Beneath NCAA gymnastics’ glow, a familiar ‘toxic’ culture
Female gymnasts say college was supposed to offer a reprieve from intense club programs. Then they arrived on campus and found more of the same.
By Molly Hensley-Clancy and
Emily Giambalvo
Updated November 21, 2023 at 10:17 p.m. EST| Published November 20, 2023 at
10:07 a.m. EST
After everything they went through as young gymnasts, college was supposed to be a safe haven.
The viral routines, the cheering crowds, the women swarming their teammates: NCAA gymnastics, at least as viewed from their Instagram feeds, was a world apart from the elite youth version of the sport, where injury, body-shaming and verbal abuse were expected.
Instead, they found the same toxicity.
At the University of North Carolina, gymnast Raine Gordon says, her assistant head coach, Amy Smith, pitted gymnasts against one another and made her feel ashamed of her body, once saying that Gordon’s leg was bruised after a fall because it was “fat.” Smith and the head coach, Derek Galvin, made Gordon sign a contract that threatened her scholarship if she didn’t lose weight every week. Bulimia, Gordon says, “became like a team activity.”
At LSU, one of the country’s top programs, Bailey Ferrer, a former elite gymnast, says the school’s longtime coach, D-D Breaux, praised her weight loss as she spiraled into an eating disorder, then retaliated when mental health treatment prevented Ferrer from training, once pushing her from a team huddle. Ferrer, devastated, was forced to cut her once-ascendant career short, she told The Washington Post.
And at Utah’s storied program, gymnasts this year reported verbal and emotional abuse by their coach, Tom Farden. His volatility and demeaning treatment, multiple gymnasts told investigators hired by the university, included hurling objects in fits of anger during training.
In September, the university announced it would not discipline Farden after its investigators found his conduct had not been “severe, pervasive or egregious” and after a majority of his current athletes defended him. But faced with the prospect of competing for Farden again, one of the program’s most prominent athletes, Kara
Eaker, an alternate for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, said in October she had been a “victim” of his mistreatment and was quitting the sport.
Farden’s treatment of her, she said in a statement, had triggered thoughts of suicide and self-harm. Another former athlete, Kim Tessen, also came forward to criticize the university’s investigation and say she had been mistreated by Farden.
“I want to stop the cycle of abuse and the men who threaten girls and women in all sports,” Eaker wrote.
On Nov. 21, a day after this story was published, Utah announced that it had parted ways with Farden. The school’s news release announcing the change did not address the allegations of abuse.
Read more investigative reporting about sports
Women’s college gymnastics has exploded in popularity in recent years, gaining television viewers, crowds and social media followers in droves. The NCAA championships last spring drew more than 1 million viewers on ESPN, their most ever, and in the era of athletes profiting from their brands, some gymnasts rank among the highest earners in any college sport, men’s or women’s.
But for some athletes, the reality of NCAA gymnastics has been sharply at odds with the sport’s public image, an examination by The Post found. In interviews and investigative records, gymnasts described “toxic” environments in which they were targeted by coaches, ignored by institutions and ostracized by teammates for speaking up. Coaches, a dozen gymnasts told The Post, created environments in which gymnasts felt unsafe and unsupported and where their mental health degraded. Some said they were even driven from the sport because of it.
Some allegations, such as at Utah, have previously spilled into public view. At San José State, gymnasts told the Mercury News that their former coach had verbally abused and body-shamed them. The coach had been investigated in 2018, the newspaper reported, but denied the allegations and was allowed to retire with his pension and praise from the university. And at Penn State, one coach was fired and another resigned in the wake of 2016 allegations of emotional abuse and body- shaming from former gymnasts.
College gymnasts who have raised concerns in recent years about cultural issues in the sport said they hoped to join the chorus of women who spoke up about systemic sexual and emotional abuse at the elite youth clubs that fuel the powerhouse U.S. national program, including by Larry Nassar and Bela and Martha Karolyi. But change, they said, has yet to come.
In the wake of Nassar’s abuses, Congress created an oversight organization, the U.S. Center for SafeSport, to police abuse in the Olympic movement. But SafeSport does not have jurisdiction over college sports. The NCAA, meanwhile, largely gives college’s discretion over whether and how to respond to allegations of emotional abuse.
Smith, the North Carolina assistant, is now the head coach at Clemson. She did not respond to a detailed list of questions from The Post, issuing a statement saying only that “student-athlete wellbeing is incredibly important, and I am confident in our ability to provide those resources at Clemson.” UNC declined to comment.
Galvin, North Carolina’s former head coach, said he was “ashamed of myself” for asking Gordon to sign the weight loss contract, which he said he retracted shortly after presenting it on advice of the administration. “I let Raine down,” Galvin said.
Breaux did not respond to requests for comment. She retired as head coach in 2020 after 43 seasons but remains a part of the university’s athletic department. In a statement, an LSU spokesperson said the university had spoken with Breaux and Ferrer about the incident at the meet and worked to resolve it.
Investigators hired by Utah found that the majority of current athletes in the program had positive experiences with Farden and said they couldn’t corroborate many of the allegations. Incidents they had corroborated, where he made a derogatory comment or threw an object in anger, the investigators said, were “isolated” and had not violated university codes.
Farden’s attorney, Brian C. Johnson, told The Post that his client would “likely take appropriate legal action” against Eaker and Tessen, saying their public statements on social media in the wake of the school’s decision were “false statements of fact.” Asked whether Farden planned to change his coaching methods, Johnson said he did not. “He has a long history of success as a coach,” he said. “He’ll continue to do so in the fashion he’s done so.”
Shortly after a Post reporter asked a Utah spokesperson about the attorney’s comments, the university placed Farden on administrative leave, citing conduct “not related to student-athlete welfare.”
Crude awakening
After being screamed at, humiliated, body-shamed, overtrained or even — once — bitten by coaches as young girls, many gymnasts who spoke to The Post said they came to NCAA gymnastics with hope not just for something different. They hoped, they said, for something that would make the painful experiences of their early years feel worthwhile.
Some of the NCAA’s 1,200 Division I female gymnasts no doubt found that. In the wake of revelations about systemic abuse by Nassar and emotional abuse by some of the country’s most high-profile club gymnastics coaches, Katelyn Ohashi’s ebullient 2019 routines at UCLA went viral — along with her story of finding “joy” again in college gymnastics after body-shaming in the elite youth ranks almost drove her from the sport.
But others have had starkly different experiences.
Gordon arrived at UNC in 2016, hoping college would be a respite from the negative pressures of club gymnastics. Instead, she encountered Smith, then the assistant head
coach, who she said singled her out from the earliest days of her freshman year, berating her for mistakes and comparing her negatively with her teammates.
When Gordon fell short on a high-stakes skills verification test, she said, Smith forced Gordon to compare herself one-by-one with each of the team’s walk-ons, asking Gordon if she felt she “deserved” a scholarship more than them.
“It genuinely felt like no matter what I did, I was doing something wrong,” Gordon said. “I felt like they were just waiting for me to mess up.”
Galvin, the head coach at the time, described Smith as “intense” in an interview with The Post. “She brings an intensity that some student-athletes thrive under and some don’t, and she can be very — she can be very honest. Another coaching style is to be more diplomatic, maybe, is the word,” he said. “There were times where I felt like the intensity in the gym was too much, and we backed off on it.”
Smith left North Carolina for Utah State in 2017. Soon after she took over that program, athletes began to flee: Ten gymnasts left in 2019, roster records maintained by the website College Gym News show, nearly half of the team. Another seven left in 2021. Three gymnasts told The Post they left Utah State’s program in part because of Smith’s coaching, and a fourth said so publicly. Others did not respond to requests for comment.
“I was told every day I wasn’t good enough,” former Utah State gymnast Morgan Gill said in an interview, describing how Smith held her to “impossible” standards such as requiring her to perform her routines for two weeks without a single fall. Gill said she eventually developed anxiety and chest pain so intense that she was prescribed an inhaler by a Utah State doctor. But even that provoked Smith’s anger, she said.
“You never knew what would set her off, but for me, the thing that made her overwhelmingly angry — to the extent of yelling at me in front of the whole team — was my inhaler,” Gill said. When she forgot to use her inhaler before practice and instead had to step out of a conditioning circuit to use it, Gill said, Smith yelled at her for “playing games” and “failing to fully comprehend what was expected” of her.
Internally, multiple athletes raised concerns about her coaching to the university, according to three former gymnasts and emails to administrators reviewed by The Post.
“It felt like countless times that we went to the administration with anonymous complaints and issues” with Smith’s coaching, said a former Utah State athlete, Tori Loomis, who said she felt she had been “targeted” by Smith.
Glory Yoakum, another former Utah State gymnast, posted on social media in 2021 that Smith had “degraded” her and threatened her scholarship, telling her she was a “weak link” and “didn’t want to work.” But Utah State never conducted an investigation of Smith, the university said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Utah State athletic department said the school regularly reviews anonymous complaints from athletes and discusses them with
coaches. Smith was reviewed annually, the statement said, and “was in good standing at the end of her employment.”
Five of Smith’s athletes followed her to Clemson, which Utah State cited in its statement as an endorsement of her coaching. Clemson declined to make them available, and they did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Smith’s hiring, however, also prompted Gordon and two other Utah State athletes to speak up publicly, echoing the experiences that Yoakum had written about a year earlier.
They didn’t expect her to be fired, the athletes said. But they wanted a statement from Clemson that it would more closely monitor her program and an acknowledgment from the institutions that they said had failed to protect them. From Smith, some said, they hoped for something simple: an apology and a promise to do better.
The complaints reached the highest levels of Clemson’s athletic department, according to emails sent to and among administrators at the school. But publicly, the gymnasts’ stories were met with silence.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Clemson said the university’s hiring process included an “extensive amount of research into Coach Smith’s background,” during which Clemson “was not made aware of formal or informal investigations of Coach Smith from her previous institutions.”
“We take student-athlete treatment seriously and have confidence in Amy’s commitment to her student-athletes, as we’ve seen firsthand during her time at Clemson,” the university said.
Gill, for one, was unconvinced.
“It felt like everything we had gone through meant nothing to the people in charge, whether that was people from USU, people from Clemson,” Gill said. “We’d all spoken up and tried so hard to make things right, not necessarily to end her career but to have some kind of accountability.
“I’m just worried for the athletes that would go on to compete under her. I’m scared for them because I don’t want anyone else to experience that.”
Speaking out
From the outside, Kara Eaker and Kim Tessen were among Utah’s brightest stars. Tessen earned all-American honors in two events during her senior season of 2020; Eaker won two gold medals at the world championships with the U.S. team and was an alternate for the Tokyo Olympics. Utah is one of the country’s most storied programs, with 10 national championships.
But under Farden, both women experienced emotional and verbal abuse, they said in public statements in October, and struggled with a “toxic” team environment that they said was created and fostered by Farden. For Eaker, the coach’s bouts of anger and “verbal attacks” felt like “a knife ... stabbed so deep in my body that there’s no way to pull it out.”
“When a male coach suddenly erupts with anger and physically slams down mats and gets up in an athlete’s face as a tactic to intimidate them, it’s impossible to have the confidence to speak up for yourself,” Eaker wrote in her statement. She sought treatment for thoughts of suicide and self-harm because of Farden’s coaching, she wrote.
Long before she went public, Eaker said in the statement, she went to the university to raise alarms about Farden’s mistreatment. This summer, in the wake of high-profile transfers by three gymnasts, the university hired law firm Husch Blackwell to investigate Farden. But the firm’s investigators found a sharp division.
Some former gymnasts described a coach who terrified them: volatile and demeaning, targeting them with regular outbursts that they said took a toll on their self-esteem and self-worth, according to investigative records and interviews with former gymnasts and their parents. Two former Utah gymnasts were hospitalized with suicidal
ideations in part because of his coaching, their parents told The Post, allegations that were first reported by the Deseret News.
But two-thirds of the current team, investigators said, described Farden’s behavior differently: He was a “caring, passionate” coach with whom they “did not report any concerns related to the treatment of student-athletes.” He had occasionally yelled at the team, some gymnasts acknowledged, but had not targeted individuals and rarely if ever crossed a line. No athletes are named in the investigation.
Some of Farden’s former gymnasts defended him to the Deseret News. Two former Utah coaches, Megan and Greg Marsden, attributed the allegations against Farden to “disgruntled” former gymnasts, the paper reported.
“He cares so much about his athletes. But he also has a fine line to toe with, you
know, being a professional and delivering results while still caring. I think that he toes that line very well,” Sydney Soloski, who was on the team until last year, told the newspaper.
Investigators corroborated one “degrading” comment by Farden, in which he told a student that she would be a “nobody working at a gas station in her hometown” if she were not at the university. And investigators found two allegations that Farden had thrown objects — a cellphone and a stopwatch — were “more likely than not” true.
Farden denied throwing any object.
In another allegation, a gymnast told investigators she was cleaning the uneven bars when Farden “grabbed” the scraper from her and threw it at her. Three teammates
who witnessed the incident told investigators that they, too, had seen Farden throw the scraper — a toilet brush attached to a wooden stick — and that it hit their teammate.
One said she thought Farden acted “out of stress” because her teammate had been taking too long to scrape the bar; another said she thought he was in “panic mode.” But the woman’s teammates also told investigators they believed Farden had been well-intentioned and, as one put it, “did not throw it to hurt the student-athlete.”
Another said Farden had “chucked the scraper into oblivion” and that the athlete was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The investigators eventually determined Farden had not violated any policies in the incident, citing “varying and inconsistent statements.”
The university placed Farden on a performance improvement plan following the investigation, and the school’s athletic director, Mark Harlan, said in a statement at the time that he had met with Farden to “share with him my expectations moving forward.” But he said he “remain[ed] confident in Coach Farden’s ability to continue to lead our gymnastics program.”
In his announcement of Farden’s departure, Harlan said the change “provides necessary clarity and stability for our student-athletes and prevents further distraction from their upcoming season.” Harlan made reference to “an extremely challenging time for our gymnastics program” and praised Farden for his “tremendous contributions” to the team.
The division among teammates was a dynamic not isolated to Utah, multiple gymnasts told The Post. Among the things they had looked forward to the most in college gymnastics, they said, was the chance to compete as part of a team. But it was common practice in their programs, many gymnasts said, for coaches to pit athletes against each other anyway, even blaming some for team struggles.
It was a dynamic that resulted in isolation and sometimes escalated to bullying — and made it even more difficult for gymnasts to recognize and speak up against their coach’s mistreatment, they said.
Tessen and Eaker described that dynamic from their time at Utah.
“I quickly learned that the whole culture at the U of U gymnastics team was one of comparison: of each other’s skill levels, each other’s bodies, each other’s academic abilities,” she wrote in her statement. “These are clear, intentional intimidation tactics used to exert control and dominance over us.”
Some gymnasts “embraced” the dynamic created by Farden, Tessen wrote. “Those who reject it are the ones who suffer most from Tom, and even the other athletes.” Johnson, Farden’s attorney, called Tessen’s statements “false.” In the investigation, a majority of current team members and staffers “denied observing Coach Farden target particular student-athletes with negative treatment,” investigators wrote, and there was not “sufficient evidence” to establish that he had singled out athletes.
Investigators only considered conversations that could be corroborated by outside sources, they said, and relied on Farden’s denials of what had happened. In her statement, Eaker alleged Farden’s emotional abuse had often taken place in one-on- one meetings, without anyone else present.
A university spokesperson told The Post that it stood by the findings of Husch Blackwell’s investigation.
Pushed aside
Bailey Ferrer calls it the moment the “switch flipped.” As an elite gymnast, she grew up with club coaches who screamed and punished her with rope climbs for tiny mistakes, she said. But when Ferrer reached puberty, her coach filmed one of her bar routines, then paused the video as she was watching it, she said, and pointed to her body. “You’re getting too big here and here,” she said he told her. (Her former club coach said the incident “never happened.”)
Within weeks of arriving at LSU in 2019, Ferrer said, she found a culture that seemed just as obsessed with weight as elite gymnastics. “They care about our tan, our makeup, our everything,” she said. “That’s why we’re all over social media.”
LSU is one of the country’s best teams, often finishing in the top four nationwide, but it has also risen to prominence because of the online prowess of its gymnasts: Olivia Dunne, a senior, has more than 4 million followers on Instagram, making her one of the highest-valued athletes in all of college sports.
Ferrer was successful in her first year at LSU, earning a regular spot in the bars lineup, but the program’s handling of weight began to erode at her already fragile body image.
The coach at the time, D-D Breaux, had a practice of weighing in athletes on random Wednesdays, Ferrer said, rituals that were conducted in a room with the entire team present. Ferrer became anxious about the weigh-ins, she said, because Breaux and other LSU staffers sent a clear message that any amount of weight gain was unacceptable.
When, as a freshman, the scale showed she had gained three pounds, Ferrer said, she was pulled into the team nutritionist’s office for an extra body-fat scan and told her body mass index was too high. “We need to dial in on nutrition,” she said the nutritionist told her. (The nutritionist did not respond to a message seeking comment.) To Ferrer, it made no sense: “It was halfway through the season, and I was doing the best gymnastics of my life,” she said. But she began to skip dinner on Tuesdays, anticipating she might be weighed again.
“I felt nervous because I knew whatever the number on the scale was going to be, it was going to determine my mental state for that day at least,” she said.
LSU said in a statement that across all of its sports, “weight and other health-related factors are managed with the student athlete’s performance team, which includes strength and conditioning staff, nutritionists, registered dietitians, sports medicine practitioners, and other medical professionals.”
Over the summer, while healing from ankle surgery, Ferrer began to restrict her eating even more severely in anticipation of returning to LSU and to weigh-ins, she said.
When she returned for her sophomore year, Breaux noticed. Breaux “came over to me and said, ‘You look really good; keep doing what you’re doing,’ ” Ferrer said. “That’s when the unhealthy habits really ramped up.”
Ferrer eventually sought help for her eating disorder from a team trainer and was put in a treatment program that saved her life, she said. But Breaux was upset that Ferrer was not able to train, Ferrer said.
When the season started, Ferrer arrived in the locker room to find her locker was empty, without any of the gear her teammates’ were filled with. Breaux was “holding them back,” Ferrer said she was told by a staffer. Her teammates rarely spoke to her, she said, and she was not allowed to dress or be on the floor for LSU’s home meets. Ferrer’s medical files at the time, portions of which were provided to The Post by Ferrer’s parents, record that Ferrer was “not given … apparel.” The records show Ferrer was initially excluded from meets partly on the recommendation of doctors, who wanted her to focus on her treatment. But when doctors said Ferrer could return to the floor, Breaux was resistant, the documents show.
Breaux told a trainer “it was a privilege not a right for someone to be on the floor during a competition,” the trainer’s notes show.
When Ferrer was finally told she could “dress out” for LSU’s meet against Alabama, she said, she was “so excited. I was excluded from the team, and I just wanted to feel like I was a part of it again.” Instead, the meet ended up being the last time Ferrer put on an LSU leotard.
As the team was going into the huddle before one of its events, Ferrer tried to join, she said. But Breaux put her hand on Ferrer’s shoulder and pushed her out of the huddle. Later, when the team was posing for a photograph with alumni who had attended the meet, Breaux told her not to get in the photo, she said. Ferrer remembers her words, she said: “I’m done with you.”
Several of Ferrer’s teammates did not return messages seeking comment. But her teammates did tell the team trainer what happened, according to Ferrer’s medical records. “D-D told everyone to come on but pointed at Bailey and said not her,” the trainer wrote.
LSU told The Post it had addressed the incident with Breaux and Ferrer but declined to provide specifics. LSU said Breaux’s departure from her coaching role in 2020 was unrelated.
Ferrer entered the transfer portal and committed to Auburn, another gymnastics powerhouse. But days before she was set to leave — her apartment in Auburn, Ala., already rented, a photograph taken of her with Auburn gear — an Auburn doctor who reviewed her medical records would not clear her transfer. She felt forced to medically retire, Ferrer said, and spent her last two years at LSU without gymnastics.
Eating disorders are common for many young women, especially college athletes. But studies consistently find female gymnasts are at a staggeringly high risk, with a 2004 study finding 42 percent of gymnasts and other elite “aesthetic sport” athletes, such as figure skaters, had disordered eating habits, compared with 16 percent in sports such as soccer and basketball.
Several gymnasts told The Post that rather than taking proactive steps to prevent eating disorders, coaches exacerbated or even created them, stoking disordered habits
and adopting practices that put weight at the forefront. Asking for help, gymnasts said, could result in ostracism and bullying from coaches — or even end their careers.
As a freshman at Utah State, Tori Loomis said she became one of Amy Smith’s “very clear targets.” Particularly painful, Loomis said, was a moment a year later when, in front of the team, Smith pulled her name off a whiteboard on which she ranked gymnasts and flung it to the floor.
When she asked a group of upperclassmen how to make Smith treat her better, Loomis said, she would never forget their answer. They told her Smith “would love you if you were anorexic.” Loomis is one of three athletes who said they believed Smith had fostered a culture of disordered eating on the team.
The upperclassmen’s comments lingered in the back of Loomis’s mind as Smith frequently told her she was “out of shape,” even when she was injured. She developed a severe eating disorder, she said. “I felt like I have this scholarship looming over my head, and if these upperclassmen are telling me to do this, then this is what I need to do.”
The experience Loomis described was similar, in some ways, to the one Gordon alleged four years earlier at UNC. After a hard fall on the beam, Gordon said, a bruise on her leg worsened until it boomed dark purple and black across most of her hamstring, according to a photo she provided. According to Gordon, Smith told her, “It looks bad because your leg is fat.”
A few moments later, Gordon said, Smith asked her, “When you look in the mirror at your body, do you like what you see?” She said she felt like there was only one answer: No.
Later, after Gordon was suspended from the team for drinking during her freshman year in 2017, she said, the head coach, Galvin, and Smith gave her an opportunity to “right her wrongs” in the form of a contract, according to a copy reviewed by The Post. But the contract did not mention drinking at all.
Instead, it required “healthy weight loss of 1-2 lbs a week.” Gordon had to agree to weekly weigh-ins and six days a week of “intense cardio.” Failure to reach those goals, the contract said, “will result in a re-evaluation of my status as a scholarship student-athlete at the University of North Carolina and may lead to my dismissal from the gymnastics team and non-renewal of my athletic grant-in-aid.”
When Galvin and Smith presented her with the contract, Gordon said, she instantly thought back to Smith’s comment about her leg. She had struggled with body image issues since her time in club gymnastics when, she said, she and her teammates had been told to run a mile for every piece of Halloween candy they ate and were prohibited from drinking water before meets.
Smith’s words were the “acknowledgment” she needed that something was wrong with her body — and the contract, Gordon said, provided a road map to “a full-blown eating disorder.” She took it.
Smith left UNC at the end of the season. But for Gordon, the scars remained, she said. “You can’t tell a freshly 18-year-old girl that her entire scholarship and athletic career rests on her weight and not expect her to develop some sort of issue,” Gordon said. By her sophomore year, she said, “I was walking around campus as a zombie. I was so dissociated the whole time. I just had no nutrients in my body.”
Galvin said he took full responsibility for giving Gordon the contract, which he called a “mistake.” He said he had “never considered [the document] a contract” and that after administrators told him it was not enforceable, he retracted it.
“I wish I had managed Raine’s student-athlete experience differently than I did,” he said. “If I could go back now to five minutes before she’s going to walk into my office, knowing what I know now, I would never have put that piece of paper on the desk.”
Gordon said she remembered Galvin revising the contract but believed she had been given a different version that still required her to lose weight, removing only a requirement to photograph her meals and send them to the team nutritionist.
UNC declined to comment. Smith did not respond to detailed questions about Gordon or any other athletes’ allegations.
To Ferrer, it is impossible to think about her experiences in NCAA gymnastics without also thinking about her childhood in elite gymnastics, too. She is working now as an orthodontist’s assistant, and she was struck recently, she said, by a conversation with a high school freshman — around the same age Ferrer was when she committed to LSU.
Sitting in the orthodontist’s chair, she said, the girl described everything she had going on in her young life: honors classes, debate, dance lessons, dreams of being a doctor or a teacher.
At that moment, Ferrer said, she thought, “I was robbed of a childhood.” And she has realized, she said, that she was “robbed” of a college experience, too. Looking back, she said, she regretted the program she chose.
“All I can think was, ‘Is this worth it?’ A part of me says yes — I do have a college education and no debt. But part of me thinks that experience was ruined,” Ferrer said. “If I could go back as that little girl in eighth grade, I think my decision might have been different.”
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Canada will soon have a public list of people who are banned from participating in amateur sports
Canada will soon have a public list of people who are banned from participating in amateur sports
The Canadian government has instructed a federally funded agency to create, maintain and eventually publish a public list of people who have been banned from amateur sports organizations, sport minister Pascale St-Onge announced Thursday.
The Montreal-based Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada (SDRCC), which adjudicates sports disputes and provides arbitration services, will begin publishing the list within the next year, St-Onge said at a press conference this morning in Ottawa.
“Today's announcement is not a finality,” St-Onge said in a statement. “Rather, I see it as a way to build a foundation on which we can continue to improve and change the culture in the years ahead. "The merits and risks of such a list have been debated for months within St-Onge’s ministry.
While two people familiar with the matter told TSN there’s a public interest in maintaining a list, there have been concerns about whether coaches who are sanctioned and named might pursue legal action for an alleged violation of their privacy.
Sports organizations are expected to prepare for that possibility by adding a clause to the annual agreement coaches, officials, and athletes sign each year acknowledging that if they are sanctioned after due process, that news would become public, the people said.
Only some national sport organizations (NSOs) have historically made public the names of people who are not allowed to participate in sports. Gymnastics Canada and Athletics Canada, for instance, have maintained public lists. Other larger organizations, such as Hockey Canada and Canada Soccer, have not made such information public.
“The need for a public registry was always top of mind in the creation of the Abuse-Free Sport program,” SDRCC executive director Marie-Claude Asselin wrote TSN in an email. “Without one, individuals could evade consequences of their inappropriate behavior by moving from one organization to another and inflict further harm on sport participants. We are committed to implementing the public registry in a manner that is compliant with applicable laws in Canada and we are investing resources to achieve this result.”
Asselin wrote that a registry would likely resemble the one maintained by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an American watchdog for abuse in sports created in 2017 by the U.S. Olympic Committee with the endorsement of the U.S. Congress.
That registry lists people who have been sanctioned, their sport, the reason for their sanction, and the date they were sanctioned. Since May 1, 2023, 20 individuals have been named to the U.S. registry for offences ranging from sexual misconduct to having an intimate relationship involving a power imbalance.
News of the planned list comes following repeated calls for the government to better safeguard amateur athletes and demand accountability from publicly funded national sport organizations that have allegedly been lax in investigating allegations of abuse and also have kept secret the names of individuals who have been suspended for bad behavior.
TSN has reported extensively on the issue of abuse in amateur sports ranging from hockey, volleyball, and figure skating to gymnastics, soccer, and water polo.
St-Onge also announced Thursday that NSOs must meet a number of requirements before April 2025 in order to maintain their federal funding.
Athlete representation on boards will be mandatory before that deadline and at least 40 per cent of an NSO’s board members will be required to be independent. No staff member of an NSO will be allowed to sit on its board and no more than 60 per cent of an NSO’s board members will be allowed to be of the same gender. NSOs will be expected to develop policies for diversity on boards and board members will also not be allowed to serve more than nine years.
The annual financial statements of NSOs will be required to be audited and posted on their websites within six months of their year-end. Minutes of board meetings will also be required to be published online. Members of parliament who sit on the federal Heritage Committee have criticized both Hockey Canada and Soccer Canada for poor record keeping related to documenting their board meetings.
“Looking out for athletes’ well-being is my top priority as minister of sport,” St-Onge said. “Sport can’t only be about medals and podiums, and it is why athletes must have a greater voice at all levels of decision-making. The concrete measures I have announced today are part of a long-term shift to turn the tide on a much-needed culture change in sport. The new mandatory requirements will increase the accountability of sport organizations, improve governance practices, and prioritize athlete representation in decision-making structures.”
While a number of former athletes, advocates, and Canada’s former sports minister Kirsty Duncan have called for a national public inquiry examining the issue of abuse in sports, St-Onge has so far refused to take that step.St-Onge said she is waiting on reports from the Heritage Committee and the Status of Women Committee, both of which have heard testimony related to the subject of abuse in sports.
“To help guide our next steps, I look forward to receiving the reports from the two parliamentary committees that have heard the voices of many across the sport community over the last few months,” St-Onge said.
The government last summer opened the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC) and advised NSOs that their federal funding would be contingent on them becoming OSIC signatories.
Once an NSO signs on with the OSIC, the organization takes over the task of independently screening and investigating abuse allegations involving national team-level athletes in that sport. All NSOs have now signed on to OSIC, St-Onge said.
It’s unclear how provinces will respond to today’s announcement by St-Onge and whether their sports ministries will demand similar transparency and governance reform from provincial sport organizations.
Federal government commits to new public registry of people banned from amateur sport
Read more: https://www.tsn.ca/other-sports/federal ... -1.1959069
The Canadian government has instructed a federally funded agency to create, maintain and eventually publish a public list of people who have been banned from amateur sports organizations, sport minister Pascale St-Onge announced Thursday.
The Montreal-based Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada (SDRCC), which adjudicates sports disputes and provides arbitration services, will begin publishing the list within the next year, St-Onge said at a press conference this morning in Ottawa.
“Today's announcement is not a finality,” St-Onge said in a statement. “Rather, I see it as a way to build a foundation on which we can continue to improve and change the culture in the years ahead. "The merits and risks of such a list have been debated for months within St-Onge’s ministry.
While two people familiar with the matter told TSN there’s a public interest in maintaining a list, there have been concerns about whether coaches who are sanctioned and named might pursue legal action for an alleged violation of their privacy.
Sports organizations are expected to prepare for that possibility by adding a clause to the annual agreement coaches, officials, and athletes sign each year acknowledging that if they are sanctioned after due process, that news would become public, the people said.
Only some national sport organizations (NSOs) have historically made public the names of people who are not allowed to participate in sports. Gymnastics Canada and Athletics Canada, for instance, have maintained public lists. Other larger organizations, such as Hockey Canada and Canada Soccer, have not made such information public.
“The need for a public registry was always top of mind in the creation of the Abuse-Free Sport program,” SDRCC executive director Marie-Claude Asselin wrote TSN in an email. “Without one, individuals could evade consequences of their inappropriate behavior by moving from one organization to another and inflict further harm on sport participants. We are committed to implementing the public registry in a manner that is compliant with applicable laws in Canada and we are investing resources to achieve this result.”
Asselin wrote that a registry would likely resemble the one maintained by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an American watchdog for abuse in sports created in 2017 by the U.S. Olympic Committee with the endorsement of the U.S. Congress.
That registry lists people who have been sanctioned, their sport, the reason for their sanction, and the date they were sanctioned. Since May 1, 2023, 20 individuals have been named to the U.S. registry for offences ranging from sexual misconduct to having an intimate relationship involving a power imbalance.
News of the planned list comes following repeated calls for the government to better safeguard amateur athletes and demand accountability from publicly funded national sport organizations that have allegedly been lax in investigating allegations of abuse and also have kept secret the names of individuals who have been suspended for bad behavior.
TSN has reported extensively on the issue of abuse in amateur sports ranging from hockey, volleyball, and figure skating to gymnastics, soccer, and water polo.
St-Onge also announced Thursday that NSOs must meet a number of requirements before April 2025 in order to maintain their federal funding.
Athlete representation on boards will be mandatory before that deadline and at least 40 per cent of an NSO’s board members will be required to be independent. No staff member of an NSO will be allowed to sit on its board and no more than 60 per cent of an NSO’s board members will be allowed to be of the same gender. NSOs will be expected to develop policies for diversity on boards and board members will also not be allowed to serve more than nine years.
The annual financial statements of NSOs will be required to be audited and posted on their websites within six months of their year-end. Minutes of board meetings will also be required to be published online. Members of parliament who sit on the federal Heritage Committee have criticized both Hockey Canada and Soccer Canada for poor record keeping related to documenting their board meetings.
“Looking out for athletes’ well-being is my top priority as minister of sport,” St-Onge said. “Sport can’t only be about medals and podiums, and it is why athletes must have a greater voice at all levels of decision-making. The concrete measures I have announced today are part of a long-term shift to turn the tide on a much-needed culture change in sport. The new mandatory requirements will increase the accountability of sport organizations, improve governance practices, and prioritize athlete representation in decision-making structures.”
While a number of former athletes, advocates, and Canada’s former sports minister Kirsty Duncan have called for a national public inquiry examining the issue of abuse in sports, St-Onge has so far refused to take that step.St-Onge said she is waiting on reports from the Heritage Committee and the Status of Women Committee, both of which have heard testimony related to the subject of abuse in sports.
“To help guide our next steps, I look forward to receiving the reports from the two parliamentary committees that have heard the voices of many across the sport community over the last few months,” St-Onge said.
The government last summer opened the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC) and advised NSOs that their federal funding would be contingent on them becoming OSIC signatories.
Once an NSO signs on with the OSIC, the organization takes over the task of independently screening and investigating abuse allegations involving national team-level athletes in that sport. All NSOs have now signed on to OSIC, St-Onge said.
It’s unclear how provinces will respond to today’s announcement by St-Onge and whether their sports ministries will demand similar transparency and governance reform from provincial sport organizations.
Federal government commits to new public registry of people banned from amateur sport
Read more: https://www.tsn.ca/other-sports/federal ... -1.1959069