Three safe guarding violations a day
Coaching is fast becoming a career-threatening activity for coaches.
Civil libertarians are familiar with the concept of “three felonies a day,” from Harvey Silverglate’s 2009 book of the same name. American federal criminal law is so expansive, intrusive, and vague that even the most scrupulous American commits three felonies a day.
Millions of Americans who participate in sport—particularly coaches—are facing up to the fact that, in addition to their unavoidable daily felonies, they now commit at least three “safe guarding” violations a day. The sanctions for being accused of a single safe guarding violation can include being banned from working or operating your business, and being placed on a public blacklist alongside convicted sex offenders.
The US Center for SafeSport is the national sport safe guarding organization under the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act. This legislation emerged from the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal at USA Gymnastics in the mid-2010s. President Trump signed it into law during his first term. Nominally a 501(c)3, the Center has broad, unreviewable authority to write and enforce policies that apply to over 11 million American sportspeople.
The Center recently released the results of its first National Coaches Survey. The section on “Boundary Violating Coach Behavior” shows how far the Center has deviated from its original mandate to protect youth athletes from sexual predators, and how untethered it is from the actual practice of coaching and the coach-athlete relationship.
The most common “boundary violating” behavior is “[i]nitiating a hug with an athlete.” The third-most common is “[b]ecoming close with a youth athlete’s family (if no previous friendship existed).” Further down the list are “[t]ouching an athlete’s body to adjust their athletic stance or position without asking permission,” “[g]iving gifts or special attention to an athlete,” and communicating with an athlete—youth or adult—”outside of official team channels.”
In short, coaching is a boundary violating behavior for coaches.
Dr. Paul Gamble is a coach and specialist in athlete development. His most recent book is titled Sport Parenting. He says that some of these “boundary crossing” behaviors are not just normal and mundane, but “could equally be considered best practice.”
“In youth development, we speak about the coach-athlete-parent axis as being critical. The coach should invest in building a relationship with the parents and family of the young athlete. Yet according to these guidelines, such practices are a red flag.”
Throughout Three Felonies a Day, Silverglate shows how wire fraud, mail fraud, and making a false statement to a federal official are the catch-all offenses that ensure prosecutors can conjure three felonies from anyone’s daily activities.
“Grooming” plays that role in safe guarding. Boundary violating behaviors are just that because of their “grooming potential.”
The US Center for SafeSport says grooming is:
“the process whereby a person engages in a series or pattern of behaviors with a goal of engaging in sexual misconduct. Grooming is initiated when a person seeks out a minor or vulnerable person. Once selected, offenders will then earn the person’s trust, and potentially the trust of the person’s family, guardian(s), or close personal friends.”
Hence the imprecation not to develop a relationship with the families of youth athletes.
Gift-giving is a quintessential grooming behavior in the sport safe guarding literature. Coaches and athletes who work together for years will experience many birthdays, Christmases, and life milestones together. Being invited to a graduation party or wedding is a common experience as a coach.
At one of my athlete’s weddings, I was at the “coach’s table”: she invited one of her coaches from high school, one from college, and me, from her post-collegiate athletic career.
Each of those relationships would be suspect in the eyes of the US Center for SafeSport. The college coach, though, wouldn’t stand a chance in front of a safe guarding tribunal. Like many female athletes, she babysat her coach’s kids for years—they were actually the ring-bearers at her wedding. No matter: babysitting shows up repeatedly as a sanctionable offense in safe guarding investigations.
The safe guarding industry expects coaches to suppress basic human affection and squelch deeper relationships. “The underlying assumption is that every coach is a potential predator and should be treated as such. Beyond the lack of respect for coaches is a fundamental distrust,” Gamble said.
Even statements by athletes and parents in support of an accused coach have been wielded as evidence of a Svengali-like groomer.
Such definitions and examples of grooming infuriate a former federal criminal defense attorney who has represented clients on charges of child pornography and other sex-related offenses. This attorney requested anonymity because they are involved in sport law and fear professional repercussions for speaking against the safe guarding narrative.
“It’s so insulting to those who are actually being groomed. I’ve seen grooming behavior. Sadly, I know what child pornography actually looks like. To put the same sort of labels on this sort of sport behavior insults the victims of real crime,” they said.
“I find repulsive the way people use the word ‘grooming’ because it completely devalues the term. It has a real use, but we’re losing sight of it in this unwarranted application of it to everything.”
Silverglate includes a chapter on how prosecutors manipulate federal law to go after criminal defense attorneys zealously advocating for their clients. These situations squeeze attorneys between their ethical duty to their client and the threat of prison time. As one prosecution of a defense attorney played out, Silverglate writes, “Lawyers across the country had that sinking feeling: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”
Many coaches, myself included, say the same thing and feel they are on borrowed time. Many others have already left the profession.
The safe guarding system is “driving out any coach who is conscientious,” the former defense attorney said. “They don’t want to put themselves at risk of a public accusation, investigation, and suspension for doing what they know to be the right thing to do. But they’re also not going to perform at a subpar level as a coach because of malformed rules.
“The coaches we are going to lose are the ones who say ‘If I can’t take care of my athlete, I don’t want to coach. And I’m not going to coach if doing so puts me at risk.’”
The US Center for SafeSport is not marking out boundaries as much as it is erecting barriers.
Gamble, the sport development expert, agrees. “The consequences are profound. The risk-reward calculus no longer makes sense for coaches. We can expect more to walk away rather than risk their reputation, career and life for the sake of coaching sport.”
Athletes, of all ages and competitive levels, will bear the consequences of this attrition.
Gamble cites research that concluded “closeness is one of four key pillars of a successful and healthy coach-athlete relationship.” What “closeness” means and what is appropriate differs between youth and adult athletes. But by conflating “innocuous interactions (that would equally be argued to be examples of best practice) alongside clearcut instances of abuse,” the US Center for SafeSport is not marking out boundaries as much as it is erecting barriers.
Silverglate recognizes that lawyers, in general, and criminal defense attorneys in particular are not the most sympathetic characters. Their work “is often derided by laymen, until they find themselves in trouble and suddenly need the advice of a lawyer upon whose loyalty they can count.”
Coaches don’t suffer from lawyers’ PR problem, yet—as Gamble notes, the safe guarding industry is doing us no favors. But most people don’t know the role that coaches can play, and should be allowed to play, in their athletes’ lives. Shared hours of physically and psychologically demanding work inspires a level of trust and openness that rarely happens in a classroom, work place, or social setting.
The anti-social policies enacted during COVID made clear to many coaches that sport training is only a small part of what we do. I realized that I was the only non-family adult that some of my youth athletes regularly interacted with.
That value only emerges from the little moments in the relationship, like giving the athlete a book he might like, and picking up breakfast while giving him a ride home after practice.
Forget the daily tally: that’s three safe guarding violations before 9am.
I’ll never forget where I was when the “three safe guarding violations a day” framing came to my mind. I was sitting at the top of the steps leading to the Santa Maria in Aracoeli Basilica in Rome, just behind the Victor Emmanuele II monument, looking out over the rooftops towards St. Peter’s in the moonlight.
Two of my teenage players were in front of the basilica, taking pictures, and one was FaceTiming a family friend.
About an hour earlier, around 9 pm, I was in the lobby of the hotel our team was staying at when one of those players asked if I would chaperone her to a newsstand so she could buy an Italian women’s soccer magazine. I told her of course, just find another player to go with us. She did, we went down the street, but the nearest tabacchi was closed. So we walked a bit to the next one, also closed. We kept walking, and before long we were within sight of the Vatican walls. I asked, “Have you guys seen St. Peter’s Square yet?” “No.” “Want to?” “YES!”
Four hours of walking, pictures, gelato, pastries, browsing stores, souvenir shopping, and countless civilizational treasures later, we returned to the hotel around 1am, without ever finding the magazine. While we were out, one of the player’s dad, back at the hotel, texted her: “Where are you?” “Out with [other player] and George” “Cool”
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Sitting on those steps, I laughed at all the safe guarding rules and best practices I was violating on that trip. Not because I was violating them (well, a little), but because they—and the people who wrote them—are so insensible to the realities of coaching.
Of the two players on the late night walkabout, I had always had difficulty getting through to one of them. We didn’t conflict. We just didn’t click. Since that night, we are a team within the team.
As much as I fought this adage for much of my career, I can no longer discount it after that night: They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
More importantly, those players may not remember me a month after one of us leaves the club, and I can guarantee that years from now they won’t remember the games we played or the training sessions we had in Rome.
But they will remember that night.
Gazing over Rome, I thought to myself: If I’m to be crucified, there’s no better place for it.
When you have absolute , unsupervised authority over a group of people - 1)whose livelihood sits in a rare rights loophole, and 2)accepting cases, holding and eventually processing complaints is an institution’s sole means of revenue, relevance and sustainability- this is exactly what you get. This is a very well worn dynamic in history, and completely foreseeable. You can only cloak yourself in - but « we are safeguarding » for so long until someone steps up to responsibly take an important and meaningful look under the hood. SafeSport has given congress multiple alarming reasons to do this. They play CEO and board member musical chairs, trumpet empty changes and then simply double down on their fine print and status quo. When you deprive people of their rights, it only ends in disaster. There is never a valid reason to strip someone of their ability to meaningfully defend themselves. And it’s usually the least powerful that are the most destroyed.