COACHING THREAT

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, May/Jun 2004 by Willmsen, Christine

Abuse of female athletes often covered up, ignored

When an 11-inch story about a coach charged with sexual misconduct ran at the bottom of the local section, few expected it to be the impetus for an investigative series.

But when The Seattle Times discovered the coach threatened to ruin a teenage girl's chances of getting a college basketball scholarship if she didn't have sex with him and that parents knew about the man's past victims but continued to pay him to coach their daughters, we knew there was more to explore.

Immediate questions arose. Are other coaches using scholarships as a bargaining chip for sex? Are coaches taking advantage of their positions of authority and popularity to harass and sexually abuse female athletes? How prevalent is the problem and why are they often allowed to continue to coach despite their tainted past?

Sensing the potential for a larger story, Maureen O'Hagan and I teamed up to answer those questions and investigate the wider implications. It turned into a 14-month investigation involving 260 interviews and 110 public record requests.

The series "Coaches Who Prey" was the first investigation in the nation to document this problem quantitatively. Other newspapers have reported a specific incident or coach, but none has been able to address the systemic problems associated with coaching.

The Times found in the growing world of girls' sports, 159 coaches have been reprimanded or fired for sexual misconduct in the past decade, and that 98 of them continued to coach or teach as the schools, the state and even some parents looked the other way.

Records kept secret

Before we reached these and other alarming findings, however, we hit several roadblocks along the way. The first step was filing public record requests with dozens of school districts and the state education office, asking for sexual misconduct records. The struggle began immediately, when many schools proved reluctant to reveal how they handled investigations and the history of their coaches. The state teachers' union quickly jumped into the mix, hitting us with several lawsuits filed on behalf of more than 30 teachers and coaches trying to prevent the schools from releasing their sexual misconduct files. In most of the cases, the judge sided with the Times and ordered the schools to release the records. The newspaper is appealing the cases it lost.

The Times spent a small fortune in legal costs, and the lawsuits consumed months of the reporters' time.

But the fight turned out to be worthwhile. We got the state database on teachers investigated for sexual misconduct and thousands of pages of documents from schools, which helped us unearth a number of problems that have perpetuated the abuse of female athletes. With the help of computer-assisted reporting specialist Justin Mayo, we built an internal database to track the coaches. We gathered information from police reports, civil and criminal court records, the state public school employee database, the state education office's investigation database, club coaching lists and other documents.

We discovered school officials often failed to investigate coaches when faced with complaints and sometimes ignored a law requiring them to report suspected abuse to police and the state education office.

Once coaches got caught, many were allowed to continue coaching because school officials promised to keep their disciplinary records secret if the coaches simply left. Documents revealed the districts paid tens of thousands of dollars to get coaches to leave, while other districts hired coaches they knew had histories of sexual misconduct.

Besides encountering resistance from the schools, we also faced challenges trying to tell the human side of the story. Locating the victims alone was a major hurdle. Because the names of students, including victims, were redacted from records, we used yearbooks and Web sites such as classmates.com to contact former students who then connected us with victims.

This was a story in which no one wanted to talk to us; the victims were embarrassed and ashamed, the coaches were angry and school officials didn't want their shoddy investigations to become public.

If school officials did report the case to the state education office, which can take action against a teacher's license, that agency took, on average, two years to investigate. By obtaining copies of individual files, the Times showed in some cases that the state didn't even conduct a interview with a victim, coach or school official before dropping the case - and leaving the accused coach with a seemingly clean record.

But the story wasn't just about coaches in schools. We found in the growing field of private club teams, coaches receive almost no oversight, and the athletes are even more vulnerable. Later we discovered felons convicted of murder, incest and delivering drugs were coaching in the Amateur Athletic Union in Washington and Idaho.

As part of the series, the Times, with the help of our online and new media staff, developed a database of coaches and schools. Anyone can search online by plugging in a coach's name or a school district. The "coach misconduct database" summarized the case against the coach and linked to scanned documents that gave the reader a better understanding of the allegations, investigation and outcome. Readers can see intimate letters, discipline records and secret negotiations between schools and coaches that would allow them to keep the misconduct secret.