‘A fear based system’: How the structure of sports protects abusers of power

Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2021. View the full list.

The National Women’s Soccer League is in a wave of crisis. 

On July 9, Gotham FC fired general manager Alyse LaHue after the league conducted an investigation per their anti-harassment policy. LaHue denied the allegations. On Aug. 11 The Washington Post published allegations of racist language and verbal abuse against Washington Spirit head coach Richie Burke. Burke was eventually terminated for cause on Sept. 28 after NWSL initiated a third-party investigation into the allegations. 

Then came Racing Louisville’s sudden announcement on Aug. 31 that head coach Christy Holly’s contract had been terminated for cause. Local news WDRB reported that players complained about a “toxic environment.” Then came the latest disgrace: a September 30 report from The Athletic detailing multiple allegations of sexual coercion against North Carolina head coach Paul Riley, which Riley denied. The Courage announced Riley’s termination the same day. And that same evening, another name was added to the list, as The Washington Post revealed that former head coach Farid Benstiti was asked to resign by OL Reign CEO Bill Predmore after the team investigated a player complaint against Benstiti for “inappropriate comments.” 

Let’s not forget that in Sept. 2020, Utah Royals head coach Craig Harrington was placed on a leave of absence and ultimately had his contract terminated after reports that he made inappropriate comments to staff, which he disputed.

This, clearly, is about much more than just a few bad coaches or administrators — it’s about a system that hires them, protects (or doesn’t punish) them, and allows them to move on without public consequences while discouraging players from speaking through a culture of secrecy, shame, and personal and professional fear. According to experts, it’s a problem that is baked into the hierarchy and cultural mindsets around American sports at every level, from youth teams to the pros. 

How abusive coaches operate

Dr. Michelle Bartlett, an associate professor of sports and exercise science at West Texas A&M University who has researched abuse and trauma in sports, told The Athletic that often when we consider someone a great coach, what this coach was actually able to do was keep their players “in a perpetual state of adolescence.”

“Meaning that they create this paternalistic environment where the athletes are taught essentially to not ever question those in charge, to do whatever it takes to stay in good graces with, basically, the gatekeeper to their athletic success,” said Bartlett.

By way of example, Bartlett points out that things which are acceptable in sports, such as touching someone’s body during training, wouldn’t be permissible in a different environment, such as a regular school classroom or an office. 

“And then over time it’s just sort of slowly chipped away, chipped away, chipped away until the boundary is crossed,” she said. “It’s just sort of this gradual thing where you’re in it and you don’t even realize how you got there.”

That chipping away of boundaries can also be characterized as “grooming,” which RAINN defines as “manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.” In an article discussing adult grooming in sports, Joanne Pell of the Ann Craft Trust, a program based at the University of Nottingham that works in safeguarding, listed four steps abusers commonly take with victims in a sports context:

1. Target a potential victim
2. Build trust and friendship
3. Develop isolation, control, and loyalty
4. Initiate abuse and secure secrecy

According to Pell, a coach or other authority figure may first get a feel for the athlete’s susceptibility to praise, how willing they are to keep secrets, and if they’re open to friendship off the field. Then they will work on building up the athlete through praise, gifts, one-on-one time, or other attention designed to build up trust or a deeper emotional connection. After they have trust or a bond, the abuser may start exerting control over the athlete, such as making or encouraging them to “prove” their commitment or loyalty to the abuser while also isolating them from their support networks and making them doubt themselves so that they crave praise and attention. And finally, the abuser may initiate sexual abuse thorugh progressive touching, leveraging all the “help” they’ve given the athlete, making them feel guilty, shaming them through secrecy, or outright threatening them or their career. 

In youth sports

Many adult professional athletes who are abused are already entering their careers with lowered boundaries, because that process often starts at the youth level. Two major tenets of sports participation — unquestioningly accepting authority and relentlessly pursuing winning — lower the barriers to resisting inappropriate behavior or even recognizing that it is inappropriate in the first place. 

American athletes are commonly socialized into this mentality, which University of Colorado sociologists Robert Hughes and Jay Coakley called the “sport ethic” in a 1991 paper analyzing behavior among athletes. The sport ethic is a mindset that athletes internalize as defining what it means to be a real athlete: making sacrifices for the game, striving for distinction, accepting risks, playing through pain, and refusing to accept limits. Problems arise, Hughes and Coakley write, when athletes “overconform” (meaning they accept this value system too deeply) or when someone with power leverages this mentality in order to control the athlete. As Hughes and Coakley wrote, “Owners, managers, sponsors, and coaches — all of whom exercise control within sport — often benefit when athletes overaccept and overconform to the sport ethic.”

Former Boston Breakers player Rachel Wood has seen this firsthand. After retiring as a player, Wood started working with youth players to train their soccer skills and also teach them how to recognize the signs of abusive behavior.

“It starts from such a young age that you don’t even realize that you’re being gaslit or that the humiliation is not normal,” Wood said. “Because from such an early age, especially in youth club soccer and elite soccer, we normalize humiliation, threats as motivation, name calling, personalization, all of those things in an attempt to motivate, or trying to pull the best out of the athlete.”

Wood was driven to create her own soccer academy after her experiences as a private youth coach and her own personal experiences of abusive behavior in soccer. She has worked with girls ages 13 to 18 that have all experienced some form of abusive behavior from their club coaches.

“It starts in the youth game in which we normalize the abuse,” she told The Athletic. “We teach (young players) ‘you have to learn how to deal with this’ instead of standing up and saying look, no one should speak to you that way…. We normalize this sort of lack of emotional regulation in adults and then we place it back on the kid to be able to deal with.” 

The issues Wood has seen in her youth players range from name-calling and verbal abuse, with one coach calling several eighth-grade players “c—” and other players being told “they should go and die” for making mistakes, all the way to body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and self-harm. While coaches may not have single handedly caused these problems, Wood said that abusive coaches were something all the girls who manifested these issues had in common. 

“They create this void in which, when they finally do praise you, it feels so good,” Wood said of her own mental state when she was playing under an abusive coach. “It’s like a beaten dog, you keep coming back, because that satisfaction of ‘wow he doesn’t give out this praise very often,’ so when I do it makes me feel like I’m on top of the world, and it creates a completely chaotic environment in which you never know what you’re going to get.”

Former Washington Spirit player Kaiya McCullough, who went on the record about the abuse she and other players experienced under head coach Richie Burke, said something similar on a 2 Cents Sports podcast: “It became this fixation that I would hold on to every single good thing that was said about me and try to shake off any of the bad things, and that is a very, very toxic environment to be in.”

Erin Willson, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto whose research focuses on abuse in sports, told The Athletic that emotional abuse is certainly correlated with self harm and eating disorders, and that athletes who are survivors of emotional abuse can develop long-lasting anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. 

All of these factors combine to prime athletes to see abuse as the cost of getting to be elite. And that acceptance can transfer out of the sports environment, into other parts of the athlete’s life. 

“All of this doesn’t just stay in soccer,” said Wood. “It’s not an isolated incident because we don’t live our lives in a vacuum…. I can’t speak for everyone but I can speak for myself, and I was in horribly abusive relationships for the majority of my life. And I look back on all of them and I was like, oh, that all makes a lot of sense. I was used to being told that I wasn’t any good, that I was crazy, that I was this, that I was that. And so I allowed that in all of my relationships, up until I met my husband and I had done some therapy and then done the internal work to now recognize those signs.”

Bartlett named other ways the effects of abuse can manifest, including aggressively acting out while playing, substance abuse, PTSD, and complex PTSD. In a paper published in the June 2019 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology, Dr. Bartlett listed PTSD symptoms in athletes such as flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and emotional hyper-reactivity, while complex PTSD symptoms include emotional dysregulation, distorted perceptions of self, relationship difficulties, dissociation, and low-level paranoia. Some athletes may develop these symptoms, and some may never have any symptoms. 

“We also even see some guilt there of the athlete,” said Bartlett, “Believing that they in some way allowed it to happen or they in some way encouraged it to happen. And then what you have down the road is the athlete really not trusting their actions, because they didn’t realize it at the time, but it led to (the abuse).”

In the pros

With some athletes already placed in a more vulnerable state due to the normalization of abusive behavior, becoming professionals enters them into another environment whose set up allows strong control over their schedules and their bodies. Abusers are able to exploit the power differential between themselves and players, often enabled (or at least not stopped) by staff or ownership, without permanent or meaningful consequence. Coaches who win have an extra layer of protection from consequences, as their behavior may be excused or even celebrated as the reason for winning. And in NWSL in particular, the lack of a player’s union and CBA (until very recently) has placed players’ rights and livelihoods squarely in the hands of everyone except themselves, while they have lacked a formalized, anonymous way to report abuse until this season. 

Benstiti’s treatment of Lindsey Horan was well known before his hiring; she mentioned to Yahoo Sports in a May 2019 article that he had made inappropriate comments on her weight, and elaborated on it in June of the same year to the New York Times. OL Reign hired Benstiti in Jan. 2020.

After the initial allegations of abuse against Burke surfaced in 2019, the Washington Spirit replied to request for comment that they were “very pleased to receive support from numerous parents who have worked with Coach Burke throughout the years.” Burke continued to coach for the next two years, until further reporting by the Washington Post and Spirit players detailing their experiences in August of 2021 finally triggered Burke’s suspension (which itself was initially announced as a move to the front office).

Meanwhile, another Spirit staffer, assistant coach Tom Torres, whom both McCullough and another former youth player of Burke’s said witnessed Burke abusing his players but said nothing, was allowed to quietly leave the team in July of 2020 “to pursue other interests,” per the Spirit’s announcement. The Athletic later reported that Torres left after he had made inappropriate comments to players after a 2020 Challenge Cup party. 

When Harrington was dismissed from the Utah Royals in November of 2020, it only took a little over six months before he was back in a head coach role, this time as head coach of Club América in Liga MX Femenil.  

And after being dismissed from the Thorns, Riley was able to find a new job right away as the head coach of the Western New York Flash, and eventually the North Carolina Courage. Both Torres and Riley were courteously thanked for their work in official club announcements.

These are the coaches that we know about. How many abusive coaches slip through the system, go unreported, and train more coaches, who go on to perpetuate those learned bad behaviors?

“It really isn’t just, oh I had a bad coach,” said Willson. “It was that bad coach was in a system where that was okay and was probably brought up in that system where these things were the way that they were taught.” 

Burke, for example, was in an environment where team owner Steve Baldwin tended to hire his friends or people in his personal network, regardless of qualification — both Burke and club CEO Larry Best coached Baldwin’s daughter at the youth level. The Washington Post reported that the Spirit’s front office was a misogynistic work atmosphere where women were given “degrading nicknames” and were “shut out of important decisions.”

Harrington worked at a club whose owner, Dell Loy Hansen, had to sell his NWSL and MLS teams as reports emerged of a highly toxic culture in which Real Salt Lake’s chief business officer Andy Carroll frequently used misogynistic language about coworkers and Royals players, and Hansen himself made racist and sexist comments. 

When Riley coached at the Thorns, Mana Shim alleged that general manager Gavin Wilkinson reprimanded her for speaking publicly about her private life.

“It’s such a fear based system,” says Wood of her time as a player. “They held all the power. You could fuck up once and they would cut you the next day. Without say, without reason, just pack your shit and go.”

“We’ve been conditioned to think that this league could fold at any time and we have to make sacrifices to make this league work,” said Meghan Klingenberg in August. “And when you think that, and you think your dreams are going to go away, you do almost anything that your coach says or your manager wants and you’ll accept whatever contract you’re given.”

Who holds the financial power?

The mentality of abusers and the cultural factors around sports are particularly compounded in NWSL due to the league’s relative lack of player rights. The fact that all of these disclosures are happening once the players formalized their union and hired a full time executive director in lawyer Meghann Burke is instructive. 

Jonas Baer-Hoffman, general secretary of FIFPro and former New Zealand international Sarah Gregorius, FIFPro’s director of global policy and strategic relations for women’s football, pointed at the labor-employer relationship as a huge factor in the conditions specific to NWSL that created environments where abuse could happen. In NWSL, teams can waive players on 24 hours notice with no continuing obligations, can put players on discovery lists with no notice to the player, control player rights beyond the end of the contracts via the “end of season process” in their roster rules, and can hold a players’ rights in perpetuity. This results in sometimes absurd situations, like a player leaving to play in a different country, only to return to the United States and have their rights still be held by a team they never agreed to play for.

Baer-Hoffman acknowledged that organized sports by their nature create structures where inappropriate relationships and physical proximity occur. He added, “If you then create around it an environment of incredible economic dependence and incredible fragility because of the (lack of) career opportunities, because of the lack of free movement, as in the case of the NWSL, the lack of representation, the lack of proper bargaining…you just, I think, amplify the risk so tremendously, and the vulnerability of the potential survivor.” 

“The (labor power) imbalance becomes a vacuum of autonomy for the players as people in this as workers, and then you get this manifestation of these terrible situations with no access to justice or remedy, and so it’s frankly sickening,” said Gregorius, referring to the reporting of the allegations of sexual coercion against Paul Riley.

Gregorius also disagreed with the use of internal as opposed to external and independent investigations, such as the one the Thorns conducted prior to releasing Riley. “How heartbreaking to be let down by the institutions, to be betrayed by the institutions, over and over and over again, because of this ridiculous scenario where you investigate from within,” she said.

Baer-Hoffman agreed independent investigation was important, but cautioned that without labor rights and representation, “The independence of whoever is chosen is still to a good degree at the mercy of the singular institution that has the power to appoint.”

How does change happen?

Until this season — and only at the urging of players — NWSL did not have an anti-harassment policy, nor did they have a formal mechanism for reporting that abuse. It’s not a coincidence that after the policy was implemented, including an anonymous reporting system, there was a slew of dismissals of bad actors. 

Amid all of this, the NWSL Players Association is currently negotiating their first collective bargaining agreement with the league, and player safety is on players’ minds, along with issues around compensation and players having more control over their careers. 

“Right now, the Players Association has a lot of unanswered questions about the vetting process for coaches,” NWSLPA executive director Meghann Burke said in a statement to The Athletic. “Structurally, the so-called ‘single entity’ system that NWSL claims to be does not work to address these problems in practice. Even clubs that have fully staffed HR departments cannot answer players’ questions about basic employment issues like benefits, policies, paychecks, etc., because NWSL claims that players are solely employed by the League. That’s a legal fiction. It is Club staff who players interact with day in and day out, and it is Clubs who dictate the day to day terms and conditions of their employment. But Clubs are also structurally disempowered from the employment relationship. Beyond that, ongoing training is necessary to live into the environment that the policy seeks to create. No one training is a panacea, but it needs to happen.” 

“The first step is acknowledging representation,” said Baer-Hoffman. “I think there’s a reason why something like this happens in maybe the last significant league in the United States that doesn’t have a collective bargaining environment. The fact that you suppress the players’ voice, …you deny representation, and you deny actual influence and co-decision making. And that’s where it starts.”

After The Athletic published its investigation into the allegations against Riley, the NWSLPA issued a list of demands to the league, asking that NWSL initiate a new investigation into the Riley allegations under their anti-harassment policy, any league or club staff accused of conduct that violates the policy or any mandated reporter who failed to report an alleged violation be suspended immediately, and disclosure from NWSL about how Riley was hired by another NWSL club after the Thorns investigated him for abusive conduct. 

NWSL issued an official statement attributed to then-commissioner Lisa Baird in response to the allegations against Riley, stating that as part of the actions they were taking, they would be reporting the allegations to the US Center for SafeSport and would be mandating that “league and team staff who regularly interact with players participate in training conducted by the U.S. Center for SafeSport,” among other measures like background checks and additional screening of hires.

pic.twitter.com/HJMogyALg1

— National Women’s Soccer League (@NWSL) September 30, 2021

SafeSport says itself that it has no authority over professional sports organizations, but Nancy Armour of USA Today, who has reported extensively on the organization, has said that it will take cases from organizations that are considered a “participant” in a national governing body like U.S. Soccer.

It is not yet known if the NWSL’s relationship with SafeSport will continue after Baird’s resignation, which occurred hours after she issued the official statement above. Regardless, SafeSport has been the target of recent criticism.

Gymnast Aly Raisman said, “I don’t like SafeSport” during her Sept. 15 testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the FBI’s handling of the Larry Nassar investigation. “I hear from many survivors that they report their abuse and it’s like playing hot potato, where someone else kicks it over to somebody else and they don’t hear back for a really long time,” she said. Additionally, SafeSport is funded in part by the USOPC, the very organization it is sometimes tasked to investigate. SafeSport also receives funding from U.S. Soccer, as one of the national governing bodies of sports in the United States.

The people who can actually make a difference in an organization, according to both Willson and Bartlett, are those with equal or greater power standing to abusers. 

“We need to have administrators doing that,” Bartlett said. “We need to have coaches doing that themselves, where a coach can tell another coach ‘hey, what you’re doing is inappropriate, I’m gonna report you.’ And parents, who as adults have knowledge of how systems work and who to report to.”

In other words, it means truly setting the tone for the sport or club’s culture from the top down and doing more work to educate everyone on the signs and effects of abuse while simultaneously shifting towards a healthier model of coaching. It means stronger vetting procedures with firm zero tolerance policies on what is and isn’t acceptable. And it means being willing to shift away from winning at all costs and towards valuing players’ rights and dignity.

“We often focus on all the things not to do. But let’s talk about the positives,” said Willson. “If you are empowering your athletes and you’re caring for their health and you’re caring for their overall wellbeing, not just in the sport but in everything else that they do, they’re just going to be happy, healthy athletes that are going to want to be there.”

(Photo: Streeter Lecka / Getty Images)