Consider This from NPR - Report on Pervasive Culture of Abuse in Women's Pro Soccer Incudes Youth Sports

Episode Date: October 8, 2022

Over the past few years, we've heard shocking allegations from women athletes about experiencing sexual harassment and abuse. And earlier this week a report was released outlining a pervasive culture of abuse among coaches in the National Women's Soccer League. Elite women soccer players were subjected to a range of abuse - from belittling comments to sexual advances.Sally Yates, former Acting Attorney General, led the investigation – which was a response to allegations made last year against coaches by a number of women players. Many of the charges had been reported in the past but never acted upon. Host Michel Martin speaks with Steph Yang, staff writer for The Athletic who covers women's soccer and Julie DiCaro author of the book "Sidelined: Sports, Culture and Being a Woman in America".In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation. Working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. My coaches and USA Gymnastics turned the sport I fell in love with as a kid into my personal living hell. A prominent male coach is accused of coercing players into having sex. Inappropriate touching, verbal and mental abuse. Young women have alleged a culture in Team USA Gymnastics of abuse. Over the past few years, we've heard shocking allegations from some of the country's top female athletes in sports like gymnastics and swimming about abusive behavior

they've endured from coaches, team doctors, and other staff. So it's still shocking, but perhaps not altogether surprising, that this week brought yet more disturbing news, this time about women's soccer. Systemic abuse and misconduct in women's soccer by coaches in a game's top tier. After a year-long investigation, a team led by veteran prosecutor Sally Yates found evidence of widespread sexual misconduct and emotional abuse directed at players in the National Women's Soccer League. The sexual misconduct varies here from really inappropriate misogynistic type comments to unwanted sexual advances to actual coercion by coaches. Yates, a former acting attorney general, was asked to lead

the investigation after allegations made last year by a number of women's soccer players became public. Many of them complaints that the athletes had reported through the designated channels but were never acted upon. We called Julie DeCaro for her thoughts about this. She's a senior writer and editor for Deadspin and author of the book Sidelined, Sport, Culture, and Being a Woman in America. I was really glad to see how comprehensive Sally Yates' report was, just in cataloging all the times that players have gone to U.S. soccer, to their coach and the U.S. women's national team, to other people in their own organizations with their own teams, to try to get someone to stop this. So it feels like the NWSL really needed sort of a shaming to just let people know how much of this they have ignored. DeCaro says the problem of abuse goes way beyond women's soccer.

We saw how many young women went and complained about Larry Nassar and saw nothing done there. We've seen people in figure skating complain about this. We've seen women in speed skating complain about this, in U.S. swimming. And she says it's not just women in professional sports. While it may get less media coverage, stories of abusive coaches are all too common for women in almost any sport at almost any level. Every woman has got a story of some horrible coach that was completely, probably verbally and emotionally abusive. And then there are all those who have stories of coaches that are sexually inappropriate. I mean, I think if you ask most women, do you think that in the WNBA

there's abusive behavior by coaches? Probably. Do you think in figure skating? Yes. Do you think in women's hockey? Of course. It just seems to be par for the course for being a woman in sports in the United States. Consider this. We've heard about it before, and many of us have experienced it before, and promises have been made before. So why does abuse in women's sports go on and on and on? That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin.

It's Saturday, October 8th. He opened the door. He's standing behind the door and he said, come in. He quickly shut the door behind me and I saw that he was just in his underwear. That's soccer player Mana Shim speaking with ESPN about just one of the horrible encounters with Paul Riley, then head coach of the Portland Thorns. Shim played with the Thorns for two years. He told me to get on his bed and watch film, but there was no film pulled up. And at that moment, I was just planning my exit. I was terrified. After this incident, Shim confronted Riley. He responded by reducing her playing time. In 2015, she filed a formal complaint to her team about his behavior.

Riley's contract was terminated by the Thorns, but the team didn't disclose why he was let go. And in 2016, Riley went on to coach women's soccer with the Western New York Flash, which relocated to North Carolina and was renamed the North Carolina Courage. Here's Julie DeCaro again. This is his workplace. This is her workplace. And so you have to really put it in that context and sort of remind people this is what these people do for a living. And it's a workplace just like any other. Being a

coach is putting you in a position of power. And having power over a bunch of young women is probably something that is really appealing to a lot of men, whether they're sexual predators or not. The incidents that led to last week's report were sparked by 2021 allegations made against coach Paul Reilly. Yes, the same coach Reilly who was reported by Mana Shim back in 2015 and other coaches in the National Women's Soccer League. And like Shim, other players across the league had raised concerns and filed complaints about coaches for years. I think that there is a problem with people inherently believing that women are unreliable, right? That women are not credible, that women make too much out of a small

thing, or they misinterpret something and they're easily offended. DeCaro says another reason abuse plagues women's sports is that there's a certain dynamic between coaches and athletes that starts very early. You listen to your coach. Just listen to your coach. We sort of make it so that we insinuate to children at a very young age that their coach is sort of infallible. And whatever the coach says is what you do. And there are consequences to that kind of conditioning. So the youth sports angle is a big part of it where the players are conditioned to accept that, you know, abuse is not abuse. That's Steph Yang, a staff writer covering women's soccer for The Athletic.

She says there's research to back up the idea that the negative effects of early abusive coaching can follow an athlete. If you look at the Yates report, there's a point about how the Chicago Red Stars brought in a sports psychologist to do anonymous interviews with the players, and the psychologist said 70% of interviewed players described abusive behavior, but not all of them were able to identify it. By the time they get to the pro level, it's too late. Coming up. I think the reports just kept rolling in and people realized how systemic it truly was, and they just couldn't ignore it anymore. That's after the break. You know, U.S. Soccer realized they just couldn't let it go or say it was one bad apple,

because clearly it was many bad apples. So yeah, they independently commissioned Sally Q. Yates, who's down at King & Spalding in Atlanta, and said, go for it. Steph Yang reports on women's soccer for The Athletic. The news outlet has been covering the abuse allegations about Paul Reilly and published its findings last year. And so, after a year of investigation, a 172-page report showing abuse of conduct on a number of teams, and the firing of a number of coaches and administrators, I asked Steph Yang if anything has really changed. I mean, immediately the coaches being gone right away does create some relief. So in that sense, things are better.

And obviously we've got the Yates report now. U.S. Soccer is promising, you know, immediate action where they're allowed to act immediately and then where they need things like more systemic support from their organization members. They'll have kind of ongoing task forces to, you know, analyze things and make recommendations to implement them because it's truly systemic. I think something important to note here is the Yates report pointed out a lot of this abuse starts at the youth level. Pro players don't suddenly start accepting being screamed at and

yelled at and abused and just think, oh, that's just how pro sports are. A lot of it is being conditioned from the youth level to think, that's just tough coaching. That's how it is. I have to suck it up. I have to deal with it to be a pro. And so U.S. soccer is the governing body of soccer in the United States is also going to have to figure out how do we do something systemic that we can spread throughout the enormous youth soccer system in this country, which is millions of youth players. I'm glad you raised that because that's something I wanted to talk to you about. And I want to take this sort of piece by piece. While Sally Yates's report and the scale of research done has clearly been impactful and impressive. But on the flip side of this, did it take a 172-page report to validate what these women have been saying for many years about inappropriate behavior from coaches?

I do have to point out that a number of these women did complain. This is not a situation where no one said anything. Yes and no. I mean, one is maybe some of the names that come up repeatedly in the report at U.S. Soccer, such as former President Sunil Gulati or CEO Dan Flynn or General Counsel Lydia Walke or her predecessor, Lisa Levine. You know, the report says time and again, they forwarded the report to somebody else. But I think that's the yes and no part of the question, because it illustrates that U.S. Soccer and NWSL are both kind of scattershot organizations where people are able to kind of push things and be like, this is your department. It's not my department. So I did my job.

I think what the Yates report really lays out in horrifying detail is how unconnected the system was. Because if it had had some kind of like truly, you know, together oversight, someone could have put the pieces together a lot sooner. I don't want to say it's just because no one had all the information at the right time. I think some of it was affected by people like ignoring the problem. I also want to talk about something you just said earlier. I want to dig into what you said about youth sports. The report found abusive relationships between girls and their coaches. It found that some of these abusive relationships start really young. Now, you cover professional sports,

but that, I think, is one of the eye-popping findings of this report, is that it's not just at the professional level. It's at the high school level. It's at the college level, too. And that is the kind of thing that obviously is just terrifying to parents. I think if you are in soccer at any length of time, very sadly, you hear about some incident somewhere in youth sports. I've done some investigating on that level and it's pretty widespread. I think one of the elements here is that there's a lot of money in elite youth soccer, both boys and girls. You've got some clubs charging children who are 14, 15 years old,

charging their parents up to $10,000 a year for their children to compete and travel and be quote unquote elite. And they sell these parents a bill of goods and say, we'll get your kid into the pros. We'll get your kid a D1 scholarship. Your kid could be on the national team, you know? So just pay us for coaching fees, field fees, tournament fees, brand new uniforms every year, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then, you know, they grind these kids up and spit them out and the kids end up, you know, hating soccer afterwards, because they've just been turned into these machines that kick a ball for a coach who can boost their stats, and then boost their own salary with the club and, you know, pull in six figures. Well, one of the concerns, though, too, is the gender imbalance that, you know,

the female coaches at the college level is common, but that hasn't translated up to the professional ranks. I'm thinking about in football, where there's often a path to the NFL, gender does seem to play some role here. We're not really sure exactly what role it plays here, but what about that? Well, first, I want to be careful about, I've seen some suggestions that say, well, the answer is just more women in soccer. And I think that is part of the solution. But, you know, women are capable of being abusers as well. Women are capable of having a coercive sexual relationship with other women. We don't see it as much in NWSL. That doesn't mean it's not capable of happening. But I think you do have a point. There's kind of an easy answer about why you

don't see more elite female coaches. One of it is that due to Title IX, women's sports started getting more funding at the college level because it was a federal mandate. But when jobs became better paid and more prestigious, men noticed and they said, I want those jobs too. And that started kind of pushing women out of that arena. And then because your pool of coaches there becomes more and more male dominated, then who gets the next tier of jobs? If the pool is 90% men, then bing, bang, boom. And then the other one being who has access to top-level coaching. Coaching courses in the United States can be extraordinarily expensive. To get licensed by U.S. soccer to the highest levels costs thousands, if not tens of thousands

of dollars. Who has time to have a full-time job, maybe necessarily have to the highest levels costs thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. Who has time to have a full-time job, maybe necessarily have to take care of a family? So you have to think about who has access financially, time-wise, you know, energy-wise to get these sort of things. So that's the kind of system that's going on. So before we let you go, how do you, as I say, you've been reporting on this for some time now, And, you know, presumably you don't cover soccer because you just want to cover, you know, abusive relationships in soccer. You know, you love the sport. You love the game. I just wonder, do you feel like, forgive me, I am asking you for an opinion. You are reporters. So apologies for that. But do you envision a time when you can actually get back to reporting on the game? Yeah, I do. You're absolutely right. No one gets into this because they hate the game, right? No one gets into this thinking, oh, I want to destroy the very institution that has given

me so much joy in my own life. You know, I played soccer. I watched soccer, the leagues and the national team. I still love soccer even now. I love watching the National Women's Soccer League. It's my hope, especially as we move into 2023, that's also Women's World Cup year in Australia and New Zealand, that the players just get to play and we just get to ask them questions about being on the field. And we don't have to ask them to do all this terrible emotional labor just so

that they can have a safe place to exist. That was Steph Yang. She's a staff writer for The Athletic. She's been covering women's soccer for the last seven years. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, Thank you. come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.