Longtime swim coach Joe Bernal has been removed from the American Swimming Coaches Association (ASCA) Hall of Fame after being banned by USA Swimming earlier this year.
Bernal’s Hall of Fame status has been a point of contention since he was added to USA Swimming’s banned list back in May. Bernal was banned under three different articles of USA Swimming’s Code of Conduct. All three deal with sexually-oriented behavior, two of them sexual behavior towards an athlete by someone in a position of authority over that athlete. Multiple sources indicated back in May that Bernal had abruptly left the country.
Bernal coached at Fordham University, Harvard University as well as his own club, Bernal’s Gators Swim Club. He’s well known for coaching Olympians David Berkoff and Bobby Hackett.
Bernal was inducted into the ASCA Hall of Fame in the fall of 2015, before his ban became public. As soon as news of his ban broke, calls broke out for his removal from the ASCA Hall of Fame, especially when Fordham University removed Bernal from its own Hall of Fame. The ASCA said at the time that it didn’t have a policy in place to govern Hall of Fame members banned by USA Swimming, but that it would discuss a policy at the next board meeting in September of 2016.
Now, ASCA Executive Director John Leonard tells SwimSwam Bernal is officially out of the Hall of Fame, though the official policy is still in the works. Leonard says the ASCA had a plan in place to coordinate with USA Swimming’s SafeSport Division in the future. However, the U.S. Olympic Committee has its own SafeSport program in the works that will update how SafeSport programs for individual sporting federations (like USA Swimming) operate. With that in mind, Leonard says, the ASCA has to wait for the USOC SafeSport changes to shake out before they can lock in a policy with USA Swimming’s SafeSport division to gather information and make decisions in future cases of Hall of Fame coaches being banned.
For now, Leonard says, the ASCA is addressing such issues on a case-by-case basis. In the case of Bernal, the ASCA has elected to remove him from their Hall of Fame. Bernal’s name, which once appeared with the Class of 2015 on the ASCA website, has now been removed.
