Deadspin's investigation into Toledo's cross country coach

In my continuing effort to carpet bomb the J-board with journalism topics from a variety of sources, I offer up this piece of investigative reporting by Doug Brown of Deadspin (he's an investigative reporter for the site, specializing in public documents, according to his website) where he digs up the dirt on a messy situation at Toledo where the cross country coach was apparently sleeping with and sexually harassing various members of his team.

http://deadspin.com/5983592/im-down-for-drinks-laughs-sex-the-sexual-harassment-claims-that-brought-down-toledos-running-coach

A good job here getting various people to talk about what a creep this guy is/was, and show text messages, since the school was apparently trying to just make it all go away quietly. The only thing that gave me pause was the line about he might have had a kid with a student earlier in his career. I feel like there could have/should have been a line in there about looking for court documents to see if his name had ever appeared in a file in connection with that (child support payments, name listed as the father on a birth certificate, etc). Otherwise, it comes off a bit too much like a rumor. Oh yeah, he had a kid with someone too, I think.

Obviously not as fascinating as the Te'o stuff, but more social good was done here, as hopefully it means no one will hire this creep again.

 

Dude!

 

What gave me pause was "Andrea" conducting these long, drawn-out text conversations -- where her goal seems to be to prolong Hadsell's participation in them -- out of nothing more than common conversation, before claiming, in December, that she'd finally had enough of his pressure and pleading. I see more buried intent in the texts than that. Maybe I'm just seeing it, but I did go through the first half of the story thinking she was setting him up.

Not that I would have a problem with her reeling in the coach and taking him down. But her responses were almost uniformly short and seemingly designed to pull more out of the coach.

That either makes her a creepy, foolish gossip up until she realized what she'd done, or it makes her a smooth one. I lean toward the latter.

 

I saw this yesterday on the Deadspin site when I clicked it at work.. The "If I fuck her I am fucked" large font headline kind of made it NSFW ..

 

Fuckk.

 

I don't know. She sounded like a college girl trying to play it cool to me. Seems like she was flattered by the attention a bit, but I thought overall the story did a good job of explaining the way you don't know what to expect at 18 or 19 and you don't realize how inappropriate a guy like this is until you gain a little maturity and wisdom.

Having dated a college athlete way back in the day, I recognized a lot here in the weird way male coaches weild power over their players. Sadly, I think this happens more than we know.

 

Man

 

Am I missing the joke here with these one word responses, or are people genuinely reacting to the gross factor of this coach?

 

oopsies!

 

Dude

 

You're very much missing the joke that this guy apparently was a college coach and had the communication skills of Ronnie the Limo Driver.

 

We're all referring to his texting style, DD.