Crossing the line

Dennis Drown used to coach boys basketball at Kennedy High School in Silver Spring. He is now the coach of the girls’ team at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg. The game is the same, but his methods are not.

“You have to be very guarded,” Drown said. “When I coached boys, I’d use my hands for a gentle push or a nudge and not worry about where I was touching them. With girls, you can’t do that. If I need to move a girl for demonstration purposes, I’ll touch only her shirt. It’s more my concern than anyone else’s. I don’t think the girls have a problem with my showing them how to box out or demonstrating proper rebounding technique. But you have to be very cautious.”

Welcome to the world of high school and amateur athletics, where the actions of a tiny minority have had enormous repercussions, and a dirty little secret is increasingly finding daylight. Whether it’s suggestive remarks or dating, inappropriate physical contact or outright sexual abuse, improper relationships between coach and student is a significant and sensitive issue confronting everyone connected with prep and amateur sports.

“It is a very, very touchy situation,” Spingarn High School track coach Bruce Williams said, no pun intended.

Whether athletes are role models is up for debate, but no one argues if high school coaches should fulfill that responsibility. They occupy a position of trust, guidance and leadership, helping influence young, impressionable lives. If athletes can’t look up to their coaches, who can they look up to?

The vast majority of coaches are dedicated, selfless, underpaid, overworked men and women whose access to students often exceeds that of parents. Such access creates the opportunity to build special relationships. But when the relationships take a wrong turn, when the trust is violated, it cuts to the emotional core.

Stories that detail the arrest and/or firing of a coach for a sex-related incident have a devastating effect, and they seem to appear with frightening regularity. The stories emanate from towns as small as Mt. Airy, N.C., where a popular basketball coach this year was fired and charged with several crimes, including three counts of statutory rape, and in cities as large as Washington, where a part-time middle school coach was fired in February for reportedly fondling two students. As a result, the District has toughened an existing policy of requiring fingerprints for background checks from all prospective and current teachers and coaches.

Other responses have been stronger. Because of a sex-abuse case involving a figure skater named Jessica Roos, Connecticut last year passed a law making it a felony for a coach to have sexual contact with a high school athlete under 19 years of age, and with an amateur athlete outside of school under 18.

A few other states have similar laws. Nevada, for example, in 1997 made it a felony for anyone “with authority over youth” to have sex with anyone younger than 18.

“The issue of sexual exploitation by coaches and institutions is a problem that is lying beneath the surface of our communities and it needs to be addressed,” Connecticut Rep. J. Brendan Sharkey, who sponsored the legislation, told the state General Assembly last year.

Sharkey’s is hardly a lone voice.

“I think it is a major problem,” said Alan Chin, athletic director for D.C. public schools. “We need to have our coaches and anyone else who deals with students, checked out. When you come into contact with a student, it really impacts them. It impacts upon how students develop.

“You have someone you trust and someone you believe in, and all of a sudden you find out this coach is a pedophile or a child molester. It hurts the child’s psyche. Children look to the schools and they look to the teachers and coaches as someone they can believe in.”

Most coaches also teach, and criminal background checks of teachers is required almost everywhere nationwide. Coaches who do not teach, a growing number, or who come from outside the school system, are also checked. But even though Chin said running fingerprint checks on coaches has been required in D.C. public schools “for the last four or five years,” this was not always done. “It was dependent on the principal [of each school],” he said.

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