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I just found out my 5th grade teacher is a convicted child molester

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Mizzougrad96, Nov 11, 2013.

  1. Really?
    What would be the incentive to coach? Who would you attract to coaching if not parents? Pervs?
    I volunteer to coach Upward basketball this year. But if means coaching against my kid I wouldn't do it.
    Plus, who the hell would want to add an additional set of practices to their schedule?
     
  2. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    I think if someone is coaching much younger kids in any sport and they don't have a kid on the team, that has to be a red flag.
     
  3. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    Depends...

    I coached youth sports in Scottsdale, for pay, when I was in college. Some college students are summer camp counselors, but there is a line to be drawn between understandable and creepy.
     
  4. Don't stop at younger kids.
    I don't trust softball pitching coach instructors who are men working with teen and pre-teen girls.
    Sorry pervs come in all shapes and sizes .. and have an array of predilections.

    When I first started working here we have an eye doctor arrested and convicted of fondling high school kids. He had been giving physical exams to high school kids for a number of years.
    An EYE DOCTOR giving sports physicals? It never raised eyebrows?


    I don't think you need to hover over your kid for every game and practice, you just need to be aware. And look out for others.
     
  5. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    I helped coach Pop Warner in college as well. I didn't really want to, but a family friend, whose son was on the team, asked me to help out and I did, and I ended up doing a lot more than I wanted to because he had to travel and missed a few games. The kids were 12 and it was a miserable experience. Some of the parents were just complete assholes. The kids weren't that bad, but there was one dad, whose kid just clearly didn't want to be there and to make matters worse, the dad was just outraged that his son wasn't playing RB or QB.
    There was the story in Denver several years ago about the AAU coach who was sleeping with several of the female players. He ended up killing himself.
     
  6. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    When I did my own youth-coaching gig about 25 (christ, I'm getting old!) years ago, I got into it at first because I had seen two of my younger siblings coached by clowns (a dingbat know-nothing mother and, in particular one Bobby Knight/Vince Lombardi slave-driver-style dad) and when my youngest sister, fairly talented, got to sports age the pattern seemed to be repeating itself, and my parents and I all decided the best way to avoid a similar fiasco was to get the family involved into the coaching mix ourselves. My dad was older (near 60), worked a bizarro-world newspaper schedule and hadn't been involved in basketball except watching on teevee since the 1950s, so I was nominated.

    So I started coaching her teams -- as co-coach the first season then sole coach the next couple of seasons. It worked well, everybody seemed happy, nobody had problems with PT, we won a lot and all the players were well prepared for high school. In fact it worked so well that after a couple seasons, the AD asked me to also coach the boys team in her grade (in those days the girls and boys played in separate seasons) and that worked out OK as well.

    I understood as a single guy in his 20s hanging around teenage girls there could be cause for parents to be, well, "curious," so I was always VERY careful to never ever get into a situation where there could be even the slightest hint of any impropriety.

    I always made it extremely clear to all parents that practices were completely open, they were not only permitted but welcome to hang around and watch (from what I heard that was rather unusual for the time) and I always made sure to draft either a girlfriend or one of my older (younger) sisters to act as a female assistant coach/chaperone/ locker room supervisor.

    Not too many parents took me up on the offer to hang around and watch practices very often, but most did once in a while, and it turned out to be pretty cool -- the parents better understood what we were doing, why we were doing it, what roles we wanted players to play, etc etc etc. so I very rarely had to go into any remedial 'basketball-for-dummies' explanation sessions as to why we were doing certain things.

    Bottom line IMO anybody getting involved in youth coaching should take steps like these to dispel ahead of time any opportunities for 'suspicious situations,' and parents should make sure they do.

    My sister (the one I coached) now has sports-age kids of her own (she's going into coaching herself this winter) and she's already dealt with some of these situations.

    She signed up her daughter for a travel basketball team and the coach sent out an email stating 'all practices are closed to parents.'

    One quick email to the league chairman (sis is also a laywer) took care of that -- the next morning emails went out stating 'parents are welcome to attend any and all practices they wish.'
     
  7. qtlaw

    qtlaw Well-Known Member

    Funny thing is that 40 years ago, when I was a kid, those were the guys who coached our baseball teams, the "lifers", they loved baseball (well okay the coaches I had). Mr. Murray was a great guy, fundamentals all day, every day, no harsh screaming, just a glare was enough. He'd coached the same LL team for probably 20 years (his sons had long since grown up.) Well nowadays, his types would be shunned as potential pervs right? Why's he coaching?

    I've just passed through the youth sports stage and we've got our own problems, the father-son coach dynamic/scrutiny. But I don't think I could coach against my sons, ever. Doesn't make sense either, from a purely travel/time dynamic.

    There is no perfect answer other than vigilant scrutiny.

    BTW, a few years ago we had an extremely popular middle school teacher found to have been molesting a student. Unfortunately, when it first broke the community was more in the teacher/coach's camp than the victim's. Of course, once the THOUSANDS of texts were disclosed, that changed. Damn shame for everyone all around, including the molester's family who had to move.
     
  8. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Apparently, it was a similar deal with my 5th Grade teacher. When the allegations first came up, nobody believed the kid, but then three other kids came forward and that changed. Then, people accused them of being a money grab, because each of the four kids got $600K from the school district, and they split everything the teacher had, which included his condo and other real estate. They're also splitting up his pension. I have no idea how that will work after the teacher dies and heads to hell, but I'm guessing for now they're getting monthly checks.

    None of that even begins to make up for what happened to these poor kids, but it never ceases to amaze me how people see someone getting money for something like that and they assume it's a cash grab.
     
  9. wicked

    wicked Well-Known Member

    It's the same dynamic at work with Jonathan Martin. The kid gets harassed in a locker room and reacts to it, and it must be his fault. It's complete BS.
     
  10. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    I understand the immediate reaction of not believing the kid, if the thinking is that people don't want to believe that there are people out there capable of doing things like this.

    But once reality sets in, blaming the victim is not acceptable.
     
  11. Bubbler

    Bubbler Well-Known Member

    My sixth grade teacher was bizarre. He'd go on these fire-and-brimstone rants about everyone going to hell. Fundamentalist Christian screeds ... in a Catholic school. He'd also want to talk to kids "privately" for seemingly no reason. Nothing weird ever happened in my experience, but it was unsettling.

    He was fired under mysterious circumstances a year or so later. My guess is that it was for the non-Catholic dogma, but he struck me as capable of diddling someone.
     
  12. [​IMG]

    We don't diddle kids. No... We don't diddle no kids.
     
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