On the day of Rick Curl’s USA Swimming hearing, Garrett McCaffrey catches up with Nation’s Capital Swim Team CEO Tom Ugast to discuss the highs and lows of the past year for the club formerly known as Curl Burke.
Update: USA Swimming contacted Tom Ugast after this interview to clarify that they reached out to Curl Burke, via email, on July 24th, 2012. That’s the day Amy Shipley’s article on Rick Curl was published in the Washington Post, and a year and three months after USA Swimming started their investigation according to the timeline they released last week.
In Maryland the age of consent is 16 not 18 like some other states and first Currin said it was sex at 16 which made it at the age of consent now she says 12,13,14. She has continuously changed her statements so she repeatedly liess. Neither she nor her parents went in person to any police station and filed a police report. That fact alone should make people wonder. Also she came forward to violate the NDA and lose the $150,000 because she found the atty Allard has made millions on another swim case. There is no physical proof, no witnesses just her verbal complaint is the entire case. An NDA is similar to most mediated and civil lawsuits and… Read more »
All people criticizing and trying to punish Rick Curl are very unfair. All people are innocent and presumed innocent before a conviction on physical evidence in a fair trial with a fair impartial judge and or jury. No one deserves to be accused, vilified, punished by any person, nor by any atty, accuser, nor the press, nor any former or current club persons. Anyone on this site and the mass media attacking him would not want themselves treated in this manner. He has not spoken nor presented his side and deserves the fair chance to do so. This and any dispute of any subject (sex, business, financial, relationships, marital, legal, criminal, civil, swimming, etc) should not be publicized and should… Read more »
The point of statutory rape laws is that whether or not the victim “consented” to the sex, she (or he) is below the age of consent — i.e. not adult enough to fully understand the consequences of her or his actions — and therefore not able to legally give consent. The rest doesn’t matter — if she or he is underage it is considered rape.
DAAAAAVE:
I agreed 100%. I’ve been watching Garrett do these interviews forever and he has continually become better and better. He does his homework and clearly knows what he is talking about.
Thanks Garrett for all that you do–it’s weird to think this website wasn’t around while I was in high school and college!
Ugast has been with Rick Curl for a very long time.. this is not a breath of fresh air, it’s the same stuff all over again…. a well oiled machine.. any coincidence that the re-branding goes public the day before Rick and Noah get nailed??
Ugast still sounds like he is in denial about what happened, listen around the 4:50 mark. I understand the hurry to move on in the sense of continuing to provide a place for a couple thousand kids to swim, but it doesn’t sound like they’ve made an effort to do an honest accounting of their organization.
Chris — I think most everyone in the club is still processing all of this. The timing coincided with so much — the Olympics, the big season-ending meets (Sectionals, Jrs, Open) for the senior swimmers, and with Zones or the rest period for the younger kids and their parents — that there really wasn’t much time with a normal practice period for anyone to talk about it, work through it, and really discuss the implications. I think Tom and the coaches had to move very quickly to preserve the program. I imagine, now that the new club is named/launched and the new season is getting going, that lots of people, including the coaching and administrative staffs, will have a little… Read more »
Great interview! I loved it!
Fascinating.
Among my first reactions: Garrett is a fantastic journalist. Asks tough, thoughtful questions tactfully and eloquently.
I’m trying to process the part about how the LSC assumed the apparently sole responsibility for supporting the club from a governance standpoint, and that Ugast seems to say all he got from USS was an email….not that USS’s track record is such that I think they’d have improved on the course of action the LSC and club took…but it’s one thing to “empower” local solutions and another to say “good luck, let us know how this turns out.” Especially given the profile of the coach and the club.