Given SwimSwam’s role in the sport, we receive multiple emails and messages every week from athletes and their parents alleging ‘abusive’ behavior from their swim coaches. These accusations at times are specific and damning, and in other cases are vague and difficult to verify.
There are different kinds of abuse that coaches can enact on an athlete. Physical and sexual abuse have a lot more ‘red lines’ and clear evidence, and are far less complex for US Center for SafeSport investigators to make determinations on.
But the highly-problematic, and probably more prevalent, ’emotional’ and ‘verbal’ forms of abuse are more complicated because the rules are harder to write and the details are harder to verify. That idea isn’t breaking any ground – we all know how difficult it is to discern between tough, discipline-oriented coaching and that which crosses the line, and further the game of telephone that can morph what was really said into what was reported.
A wave of overwhelming evidence against former Cal and US Olympic Team head coach Teri McKeever, though, broke through that gray area, and resulted in both her termination from Cal and, earlier this week, a three month suspension from the US Center for SafeSport.
I think there are many coaches who are going to view this as an assault on the profession, and I don’t blame them. The number of reports we receive about coaches makes it clear that anybody working as an authority figure with children is a potential target for abusive abuse-reporting, and this is well-documented both in coaching and outside of coaching.
Without discounting those concerns, I will tag onto it the opportunity here. Swimming is fairly-unique in that young coaches can get a lot of authority (their own training groups or even their own teams) at a much earlier stage of their careers than people in most sports can and with much less mentorship. I was the head coach of a team of 250 swimmers when I was 21 years old. Besides the obvious problems that can arrive when you are only a few years older than the youth athletes you coach, the only versions of coaching I knew were the versions I had received.
This can create a trickle-down, generational coaching trauma for young coaches that sometimes is never addressed. The faster you get results, the faster you climb the ladder, and the faster you climb the ladder, the less structure or motivation there is to seek mentorship or change a coach’s methodology – either intrinsically or extrinsically.
And we all have to acknowledge that you can get results in the pool with emotionally and verbally abusive training methods. It’s uncomfortable, but generations of swimming have borne that out. And many of today’s coaches had coaches who believed that verbal and emotional abuse was an inseparable part of athletic success.
But those training methods leave scarring on the athletes that can haunt them long after they’ve left the sport, and the new generation is less-willing to embrace those traumas for the sake of results, especially when they know there are other ways. There are plenty of coaches in modern swimming who get results without relying on abuse, and younger swimmers and their parents can now verify that on their own.
And here’s where the 3-month suspension of Teri McKeever becomes a paradigm-shifter for everyone – coaches, athletes, and parents.
So much of the Center for SafeSport’s work has revolved around massive decade-long or lifelong bans, and those bans are totally appropriate for some of the worst physical and sexual abuse perpetrators in our sport. There is no amount of mentoring or rehabilitation that makes it appropriate for those people to return to working with children.
But with the 3-month suspension, the Center has opened an alternative pathway, a more interventional pathway, that doesn’t rule out a coach who has gone sideways via a system that allowed them to do so.
We can look across the landscape of professional sports for programs that the NBA and NFL and Major League Baseball have developed to try and intervene in problematic behaviors. A recent example is in the case of basketball superstar Ja Morant, who faced escalating suspensions for his off-the-court behavior that included social media posts of him demonstratively flashing handguns in public spaces.
During his suspension, he had to adhere to certain conditions and undergo counseling to manage stress.
A 3-month suspension for Teri McKeever is the beginning of Olympic sports finding those interventions that doesn’t involve running someone away from the sport forever, but rather looking for opportunities to correct and address learned behaviors and keep coaches with potential in swimming. Besides leading to better cultural outcomes, smaller interventions can allow the US Center for Safesport to use lower burdens of proof and to reinvest the resources from months-long investigations into counseling programs, training programs, and investigating the most heinous abusers of children.
This is a system that focuses on fixing the future rather than putting every action of a past coach under a microscope.
Driving potentially good coaches out of the sport, be it with quick-trigger lifetime bans or for fear of the system designed to protect athletes, doesn’t solve the problem. The more talented coaches who leave the sport, the deeper into the pool we have to reach to find their replacements, and the deeper we reach, the more likely we are to find coaches whose problematic behaviors can’t be corrected. The problem then becomes perpetual and self-fulfilling.
Let’s embrace this opportunity to work with coaches, to create interim interventional programs, and to create a system where coaches, parents, and athletes can all feel safe and productive.
One of my club swimmers, who is now in college, had a bad dual meet last weekend. She was yelled at by her coach to the point where she sent me several texts saying she was going to quit. The reality is, I suspect, that because she came back to school after the summer out of shape and heavy, the coach is still holding her responsible for her failing herself and the team that way. Was the message delivered in the right way? Absolutely not! Should the swimmer be held responsible for her failure to live up to her responsibility to the team? Absolutely, yes. This is why there is a gray area in this kind of abuse.
Seems to me coach accountability for words and actions is critical. In addition, accountability should similarly apply to swim boards, athletic directors and athletic departments.
exactly … it doesn’t start and end with the coach. Boards, AD’s and administrators are enablers, especially when the coach produces good results.
As a therapist myself, I don’t think three months is enough. Life transformation can take years. Three months suspended with (maybe?) counseling isn’t enough time unless they’re sending coach to an inpatient retreat sort-of center. Three months feels insulting to the athletes who endured years of this treatment. I think it should be a longer length, but that’s just me. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the sanctions.
Seems like four years would match the abuse each swimmer endured.
“EVERY TIME WE TURN OUR HEADS THE OTHER WAY WHEN WE SEE THE LAW FLOUTED; WHEN WE TOLERATE WHAT WE KNOW TO BE WRONG; WHEN WE CLOSE OUR EYES AND EARS TO THE CORRUPT BECAUSE WE ARE TOO BUSY, OR TOO FRIGHTENED; WHEN WE FAIL TO SPEAK UP AND SPEAK OUT—WE STRIKE A BLOW AGAINST FREEDOM AND DECENCY AND JUSTICE.”
RFK
At 18,I coached a team with over 100 swimmers. Parents were allowed to watch practices. I also watched the assistant coaches and how they coached. My primary goal was to guide the swimmers to become better people through swimming,The ones that have the potential to be great will rise to the top and eventually move on to another club with other like minded swimmers.
Swimming for over 50 years, I have known two coaches that have or are still in jail for activities related to their coaching. There were also two other coaches that had rumors that probably should have ended their coaching. All these coaches had similar abusive types of coaching. Now, I watch how coaches behave around… Read more »
I don’t think Teri will change. If she coaches again it will be the same thing. I don’t hear her saying I messed up I’ll do better. I hear her saying you’re treating me unfairly because I’m a women “men do this all the time!”
In the safe sport report she admits to much of the behavior previously stated. I don’t know why anyone would want to swim for a Teri. Lots of coaches help swimmers get results without the abuse.
She will never coach again.
Tragic that the vulture David Marsh and his buddy Durden didn’t stick up for Teri.
Why?
Teri was a monster that nobody said no to who had the means to do, she has nothing to do with coaching or what it means to coaches…..
“Driving potentially good coaches out of the sport,” come on, do not blame the victims…..
PLEASE maybe write about those coaches that do the good things and not just about the same sos.med.superstars with skilled swimmers, which we all mean does not equal good coach.