He’s a predator, no doubt.
He stalks a victim, grooms a victim, lures a victim. He’s a master of charm, deception, distraction.
Hey, look over here. A championship. A scholarship. Golly, would ya look at that. It’s a seat on the national team. A shot at Olympic glory.
Nothing else to see here. Just a string of winners.
Bring those kids, parents. Give ‘em to me. I’ve got what it takes to get ‘em to the top.
Pay no attention to the sick son of a bitch behind the curtain.
A guy you’ve never heard of made headlines last month:
https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/a-coach-accused-again-and-again/
His name is Conal Groom. He’s 50. He made a career coaching rowing in Seattle.
When Groom’s behavior was too much for the venerable George Pocock Rowing Center, where he had screeched and cursed and abused his way to the Director spot, he bailed and started his own club.
A few years later, when it got too hot for him in the Seattle rowing community, he bailed again and resurfaced in California.
And he kept putting out top end athletes. So he said. Or maybe not. Maybe he just excelled at managing his own reputation, until an alleged sexual assault earned him a suspension.
Sensing a familiar pattern here?
Abusive coach. A reputation for elite results. Athletes groomed to follow their coach from club to club regardless of their own mental and emotional shambles, too scared and too desperate to see what’s happening to them. Starry-eyed parents, groomed for obedience right along with their precious children. Complaints to the national body, deferred or ignored for years. And finally the coach steps too far, his fiefdom collapses, and those who used to idolize him claim they knew it all along.
Investigative journalist Irv Muchnick, quoted here on this site four years ago, knows this scene. “Parents will deny everything, deny, deny. Then, when the worst happens to their own child, they become the most vituperative reform advocate without any memory of who they were just ten minutes earlier.”
A former county prosecutor, a guy who knows things about these things, read the stories and said to me, “50-year-old single man, holding the futures of a bunch of sweaty teenagers in his hand. What could go wrong?”
But this isn’t about Conal Groom. It’s about enablers.
Abusers, rapists, predators are everywhere. Our children are supposed to be protected from them. So how does a guy go nearly twenty years in a career, stake a reputation as an absolute ass who screams at teenage girls calling them c**ts in the middle of Lake Union, and retain stature as an elite coach at the national level?
It’s a team effort.
Andy King was a serial pedophile who coached swimmers here on my island over 25 years ago. He left town – that familiar story again – when people questioned why he cuddled 13-year-old girls on his lap at practices and swim meets. He left the next club, and the next, and finally got caught after molesting adolescent girls for over 20 years. Years later, I ran into a guy who had coached another club in the region when King was here in my town. He enlightened me:
“Sure, we all knew. We called him Perv Andy.”
Let’s understand what he was saying. Pacific Northwest Swimming, with its dozens of clubs and thousands of swimmers, did nothing to discipline King or put a stop to his blatant public behavior, while his coaching peers made light of it and put a nickname on him for it. But no colleague and no PNS official ever called him out.
Back home on the pool deck, King rallied a power structure of minion parents to shield him from criticism. Any detractor who questioned his behavior was shushed with reminders of medals and championships and berths at nationals. If complaints continued, top people circled the wagons and booted the offending family from the team. King’s victims, if they spoke up or fell out of favor, got branded sluts by the inner circle. Sluts. At 14. By adults, desperate to stay at the top of the club’s social heap. Adults who loved to talk crap about other people’s children.
In Groom’s case, hindsight shows how he got to slide for so long. A local police officer says he once excoriated the coach and threatened to arrest him for the way he treated young teenagers. When the cop called around to local clubs to find out who Groom was, everyone knew him and how he acted. But nobody did anything about it.
Nobody, that is, except one courageous coach from another club. She made a formal complaint over Groom’s behavior to USRowing, generating an investigation and a 198-page formal report. But Groom was promoted to Jr. National team coach, by people with full knowledge of the accusations against him, and the report was promptly buried. Buried, even though the report alleged that Groom put kids’ lives in danger.
Look at all those medals, sweetie. Go on back to what you were doing.
Eventually, new allegations against Groom went from USRowing to the Center for SafeSport, so USRowing could say they did something about it. But the case languished for two years at SafeSport, whose mission is high minded but whose lack of funding makes it nearly impossible to take quick action. Why? Because there are too damn many punkass abusive coaches out there to keep up. The creeps are enabled by colleagues who think it’s none of their business, by a governing body who can brush offenses off in the name of international glory, and by an enforcement organization that may never get to the case anyway.
So who’s looking out for the kids? Parents are the first line of defense of their precious children, right? But parents too often are front-line enablers.
As a father of three adult children who loved and excelled at youth sports, I’ll assure you that if you’re a sports parent, it’s not your job to be giddy to the point of blindness about your kid’s coach. It’s not your job to blithely go along with whatever that coach throws at your kid. And it’s sure as hell not your job to tolerate abusive behavior in the name of championships and scholarships. It IS your job to protect your child, and sometimes that means standing up to a narcissistic, manipulative punk.
Now the Seattle Times reports there’s “soul searching” going on at the Pocock Center:
Pocock says they’ll require coaches to take a 90-minute training from SafeSport.
OK, everyone’s safe now.
Seriously, raise your hand if you think a goddamn hour and a half video would have had any impact on Conal Groom.
How hard would it be to take real action? Real, meaningful, consistent action that still produces champions, still teaches all the lessons about discipline, character, and toughness, without breaking kids?
I’m an old boomer, nearly fifty years removed from my own time in rowing, and 15 years downstream from the last youth athlete in our house. Maybe I know nothing. Still, these are simple suggestions and they all make sense.
- Make concrete rules, with consistent enforcement, not just suggestions, about verbal or physical abuse of athletes, under a strict code of conduct. Calling a teenage girl a c**t should bring immediate suspension from coaching any USRowing affiliate club, not a promotion to club director or junior national coach.
- Striking or physically endangering an athlete should earn an outright, lifetime ban.
- No coach, club official, or volunteer should ever be alone with any athlete under 18.
- Parents and athletes – as well as coaches and officials – need mandatory SafeSport training. Every one of them needs to agree, going in, that no medal, no scholarship, no shot at glory makes it worth being abused by the coach that gets you there.
- All coaches, club officials, and volunteers should be mandatory reporters of any violations. Nobody is above the rules, and nobody should feel intimidated by the reporting process.
- Clubs that tolerate or protect abusive coaches should be suspended from USRowing sanctioned events, with athletes and coaches barred from regattas, training camps, and other activities. Repeated offenses should earn a permanent ban for the club, essentially forcing dissolution.
Maybe USRowing has these things in place already. On paper. If so, that didn’t keep Conal Groom from allegedly abusing athletes, verbally, emotionally, and physically, for 20 years. Rules lacking oversight and accountability mean nothing.
More questions remain, and they may never be answered. Why did it finally take an allegation of sexual abuse to get USRowing to perk up and take action? Has it occurred to anyone there, that if they had taken previous reports seriously, the child he allegedly molested would never have been assaulted? And if Groom is suspended from coaching children due to the sex assault allegation, is he still allowed to coach, and potentially keep on abusing, adults?
Stories like Groom’s seem like an everyday thing. The same behaviors and victims and public outrage play out in gymnastics, swimming, Boy Scouts, churches. We read the articles, get infuriated, and move on to the next day’s horror story. Rarely do we rise up and burn down entire systems to prevent abusers’ access to victims. But other sports have done it. If behavior like Groom’s was allowed to fester for two decades, rowing may need to strike a match, torch everything, and build something new from the ashes.
Rowing is a grand sport, full of challenge and opportunity. Personally, it’s where I found my oldest and dearest brothers and friends. It’s not just about medals. Rowers learn to find honest glory in the toil itself. Rowing deserves accountability from participants and coaches, and relentless oversight from leadership, to hold on to that grand status.
Photo credit: Roger Daniels
Great article! I really appreciate the bulleted list of guidelines that could and should be followed for any athletic organization.