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Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Something rotten going on in USA Swimming


Are parents putting their trust in coaches and teachers that can do no wrong and thus ignoring the tell-tales signs of their children's abuse by some of these ghouls? 

Rachel Sturtz writing at OutsideOnline:
At thirteen, Anna Strzempko was nine years into her amateur career when she reached the finals of the 2008 YMCA Long Course National Championship, swimming for the Greater Holyoke YMCA Vikings in western Massachusetts. Over the past five years, only one other female Viking had made it to the individual finals at nationals, and this was a turning point, that quiet moment when Strzempko’s potential went from competitor to contender. The curly-haired middle-distance freestyler was the baby of the swim team, and in a sport where young promise follows a quick route to glory, she now had her start.

The coach was good at spotting talent, and on an August day in 2008, Strzempko says, he called her into his office and told her she had the potential to compete in the 2012 Olympic Trials, four years away. Like any athlete who has performed under a no-bullshit authority figure, she was thrilled, because nothing the coach said was said lightly.

Toward the end of their discussion, the coach asked the eighth-grader where she was planning to go to high school. After she told him, he informed her that swimming came before education and that she needed to be prepared for this reality. Strzempko said education came first in her family, and this set him off. Strzempko recalls him saying “Not this again” and then slapping her face. Next, she says, he ordered her into a storage room adjoining his office.

There, according to an account she would give years later to her parents and police, her coach anally and vaginally raped her. Strzempko’s brain couldn’t piece together what was happening. She was unable to cry or scream. Her body bled from two orifices. When the coach was finished, she says, he left her lying faceup on the room’s cement floor.

Lightheaded and unsteady, Strzempko got to her feet and walked through the YMCA to the lobby, where her mother was waiting. Monica Strzempko, a self-described helicopter parent who was then 49, asked her subdued daughter why she wasn’t more excited about the news of her Olympic prospects. Strzempko said she was happy, just shocked.............

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