The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (14 page)

Miller, on his knees, hunches over the ice and bows his head.

On a brilliant September afternoon in New York City, after about a half-hour of DVD to-and fro, Miller is done. Really, he needed no video prompting. He played the game. Miller had stuffed it into the file cabinet of experience and moved on, although something in his eyes hints those eight seconds never will be far away.

"Right when [Crosby] did what I didn't think he would do, I knew the puck was in," he says. "I didn't get angry. Just disappointed. [What I did] was in-between what I should have done: held my net, the safe thing. But I played the whole tournament pretty aggressive. I just thought if he got in that area, that low, I would be on top of him by the time he figured things out. I probably only watched the replay once, until now. Why should I? I lived it. But history happens. Life goes on, and things unfold. You look back too much, you go crazy."

FROM
ABONEWS.COM

A
PRIL
9, 2010—In a sex abuse scandal that some victims compare to what happened in the Catholic Church, at least 36 swimming coaches have been banned for life by the USA Swimming organization over the last 10 years because of sexual misconduct.

The coaches have molested, fondled, and abused dozens of swimmers, according to court records and interviews conducted by ABC News for reports on
World News with Diane Sawyer
and
20/20.

One coach, Brian Hindson of Kokomo, Indiana, secretly taped teenage girls he coached in two high school pool locker rooms, in one of which he directed girls to a "special" shower room where he had a hidden camera inside a locker.

"It was a sense of betrayal," Indiana swimming star Brooke Taflinger told ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross for a report to be broadcast on
20/20.

Taflinger's parents later identified Brooke for the FBI as one of the girls who was taped naked in the locker and shower area.

"I gotta tell you, it hurt," Brooke's father, Bruce Taflinger, told
20/20.
"My wife only had to look at one picture before she turned away in tears," he said.

FBI agents became aware of the pictures after a North Carolina woman bought the coach's computer on eBay and discovered a video clip of a young girl in a locker room appearing to be taped without her knowledge. A subsequent search of Hindson's home turned up more locker room footage and a large selection of child pornography.

"This had gone on for nearly 10 years, without any detection whatsoever," Lt. Don Whitehead of the Kokomo, Indiana, police department's cyber crime unit told ABC News.

Hindson was sentenced in 2008 to 33 years in federal prison. His attorney Gregg Stark did not return repeated requests for comment.

Still, another one of Hindson's victims, Sarah Rutkowski, now 21, said there are many questions left unanswered.

"I'd really like to know how he did it and where the videos have ended up, if they're on the Internet or if he put them through Limewire or if they were just sitting around for his personal use," Rutkowski, who is believed to have been 12 or 13 when she was taped, told ABC News. "That's really disturbing to me, not knowing where those videos are."

Hindson is one of the 36 coaches banned for life for sexual misconduct over the last 10 years by USA Swimming, the governing body for the sport up to and including the U.S. Olympic team.

Ken Stopkotte, named Indiana High School Boys Swimming and Diving State Coach of the Year for 2009, said the problem is pervasive and has been going on his entire 27 years in coaching.

"It's something that coaches talk about all the time," Stopkotte told ABC News.

The executive director of USA Swimming, Chuck Wielgus, acknowledged the probSem, but said, "It's not nearly as serious in USA Swimming as it might be in the rest of society."

"I don't want to be the one to sit here and say 36 is not too many, one is too many, but this is notjust a problem that's isolated to one sport," said Wielgus.

In some cases, the swimming coaches found to have been sexual predators were able to move from town to town, one step ahead of police and angry victims and their parents.

"We have a system that does not encourage the reporting," said Bob Allard, a San Jose, California, lawyer representing sex abuse victims suing USA Swimming.

A San Jose swimming coach, Andy King, 62, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in January after authorities discovered a pattern of sexual abuse that stretched over three decades up and down the West Coast and involved more than a dozen teen female victims.

"He was a monster," said Santa Clara County prosecutor Ray Mendoza. "He had almost every conceivable sex act," he said.

Mendoza said King would move out of town once parents or police began asking questions and was stopped only after a 14-year-old girl in San Jose complained to her youth pastor.

King previously worked as a swim coach in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Oak Harbor, Washington, where he was regarded as an excellent coach for aspiring Olympic team swimmers.

"He may have been a good coach, but his goal with these girls ultimately was to molest them," said prosecutor Mendoza.

King's lawyer, Jamie Harley, said some of the responsibility belongs to the swimmers' parents, whose ambition for their children blinded them to the problem.

"I think Mr. King bears enormous responsibility here. But I think the parents were not minding the store," she said. "I think had they been minding the store—had they been watching what's going on with their own children—this opportunity never could have presented itself."

In 2008, USA Swimming gave King a clean bill of health, saying his background screening had been approved.

"Congratulations," read the letter. "Your background screening has been thoroughly reviewed and meets the qualification standards set by USA Swimming."

According to USA Swimming, the organization only checks for criminal convictions and does not include background interviews or investigations with local police.

"It was willfully incomplete," said Bob Allard, a lawyer for families now suing USA Swimming. "A simple phone call to Oak Harbor, his prior stop, or to the East Bay would have revealed much about this man's propensity to abuse and molest kids."

Police later documented at least 15 victims among the teenage girl swimmers he coached over the years, including a woman who said she had an abortion after King got her pregnant at the age of 14.

"We want to have the gold standard and I think we do an awesome job," said USA Swimming executive director Chuck Wielgus. "I don't think we're perfect."

Wielgus says the local swim clubs, not the national organization, bear the responsibility to check the full backgrounds of swimming coaches they hire.

He said the 36 coaches banned by the organization over the last 10 years were only a tiny fraction of the organization's 12,000 coaches in that time period.

"Thirty-six does seem like a whole lot. A hundred is even more. Five hundred is even more," he told correspondent Brian Ross.

Asked if he had apologized to any of the young teen victims, Wielgus responded, "You feel I need to apologize to them?"

He added, "I think it's unfair for you to ask me whether individually or me as the representative of an organization to apologize for something when all we are trying to do is everything we possibly can to create a safe and healthy environment for kids who are participating in our particular activity."

USA Swimming Votes "Yes" to Athlete Protection Measures After Sex Abuse Scandal

 

Five months after an ABC News investigation revealed that 36 swim coaches were quietly banned for alleged sexual misconduct with their athletes, USA Swimming has officially passed new legislation that implements athlete protection policies, expands background checks, and enacts mandatory reporting of credible information of sexual abuse.

"Our membership really stepped up today to provide their over-whelming support to this important issue," outgoing USA Swimming president Jim Wood said in a statement.

The House of Delegates, the group in charge of passing USA Swimming bylaws, voted on the new measures by overwhelming majority, which also included enacting new education efforts to inform members of USA Swimming about the issue of sexual misconduct. The measures had been put forth by the group's Board of Directors.

New athlete protection policies now prohibit rubdowns or massages by coaches, audio or visual recordings in locker rooms, and shared hotel rooms between athletes and coaches at swim meets, among others.

Effective January 1, 2011, the expanded criminal background check program will be updated on a "continual basis, to avoid any gap in information," USA Swimming announced. Previously, the checks were only updated every two years since being implemented in 2006.

In the past, the criminal background check program did not check all predators.

San Jose swimming coach Andy King, 62, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in January after authorities discovered a pattern of sexual abuse that stretched over three decades up and down the West Coast and involved more than a dozen teen female victims. Despite allegations against him and a police investigation, as he had never been charged or convicted of a crime, the USA Swimming background screening came back clean in 2008.

"Congratulations," read the letter. "Your background screening has been thoroughly reviewed and meets the qualification standards set by USA Swimming." King went on to molest a 14-year-old swimmer in San Jose, now one plaintiff in a handful of lawsuits against USA Swimming.

Now, all employees and volunteers of USA Swimming and its local affiliate clubs will be required to undergo background checks as well. And local clubs are encouraged to include further background screenings and employer checks.

Also new, the USA Swimming rulebook will now require members to report any incident regarding sexual misconduct to the organization's new Athlete Protection Officer, former competitive swimmer Susan Woessner.

"Reporting must occur when an individual has firsthand knowledge of misconduct or where specific and credible information has been received from a victim or knowledgeable third party," according to USA Swimming.

Attorney Bob Allard, who is representing multiple alleged victims of abuse by USA Swimming coaches, warned that "the policies and procedures adopted will only be as good as the enforcement and follow-through by USA Swimming."

"We are pleased that after years of neglect, the current leadership group for USA Swimming, albeit only under extreme media pressure, has finally implemented some rules and regulations to protect children from sex abuse," Allard said. "We remain highly pessimistic, however, that real and permanent change can be made with this control group."

Five lawsuits have been filed against USA Swimming, claiming the governing body of swimming in the U.S. failed to protect young swimmers from alleged sexual misconduct by coaches.

FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE

I
T'S THE NIGHT
before the 2008 Homeless Soccer USA Cup, in which teams of homeless soccer players from 13 American cities will gather for three days of competition in Washington, D.C., and only a very foolish, and very specialized, bookie would give odds on the team from New York City. Least among the team's impediments is that its seven players, all of them residents at the HELP Supportive Employment Center on Ward's Island, have so far convened for only a half-dozen or so practices and have never so much as scrimmaged together. Yet even for a jerry-built outfit like Team New York, the tournament reportedly includes a couple of easy targets: Richmond, whose goalie is said to have some sort of nerve disorder, and St. Louis, one of whose attackers is a dwarf. In any case, there's something not wholly ingenuous in speculating overmuch about which city's going to take home the trophy, as a good share of the teams are, like New York, squads contrived ad hoc at the eleventh hour for the three days of competition in the capital. The weekend's actual mission, one hears from its organizers at the nonprofit Street Soccer USA, which has orchestrated the Cup each year since 2006, is to instill in the players the virtues of teamwork and sportsmanship and to send everyone home feeling like a winner, while at the same time drumming up ink and airtime for the homelessness cause with a media spectacle too outré and amusing and swollen with human interest to resist.

At the moment, minutes before 8:00
P.M.
on Cup eve, it's looking like the weekend's going to be a nonstarter on all counts for New York, seeing as the tournament kicks off in 12 hours and the New York players and coaching staff are marooned on the shelter's parking lot in the middle of the East River because Miss Rose, a terse and stolid bureaucrat in charge of the shelter's motor pool, will release only a single Toyota minivan built for six to transport the seven players, plus driver, coach, media entourage, and gear, the five hours south.

"This is what you get," Miss Rose explains to Chris Murray, the team's coach. When Chris proposes that he shuttle three players in his own automobile, Miss Rose says that this isn't possible either. Because of legal liabilities, the shelter is permitted to release its residents exclusively to the guardianship of HELP-SEC employees, which means that any player departing the shelter grounds in the unapproved custody of Chris Murray, an unpaid volunteer, would probably return from the weekend of feeling like a winner in D.C. to find that his bed had been given away.