This national youth sports organization is failing to protect kids from sexual abuse

This story was originally published by ProPublica

In the competitive world of youth sports, few organizations have a reach as vast as the Amateur Athletic Union.

With 760,000 athletes and coaches nationwide, the AAU hosts competitions in dozens of sports across the country. This summer alone, hundreds of thousands of children competed in AAU events for elite young athletes: a staggering 100,000 at the world’s largest volleyball championship in Orlando, Florida; 8,000 at its storied basketball championships at Disney World; more than 15,000 at the Junior Olympics in Iowa.

To the hundreds of thousands of parents whose children play under the red, white and blue AAU badge, the organization offers more than a place to compete. The AAU promises their children will be safe — that its coaches are vetted, monitored and trained; that strict rules govern how adults interact with children; and that it responds effectively to allegations of abuse within its ranks.

But that trust is misplaced, according to an investigation from ProPublica and The Washington Post . The AAU is failing on nearly every level to adequately protect the hundreds of thousands of children in its care from sexual abuse, the investigation found, misleading the public about its prevention measures and suppressing allegations of sexual misconduct.

In doing so, the AAU is breaking many of the pledges it made in the wake of a 2011 sex abuse scandal involving its CEO and young basketball players. AAU leaders at the time said they would build a “new culture in which the overarching priority” was protecting young athletes, committing the organization to sweeping safety reforms. But they did not implement the majority of those reforms, ProPublica and The Post found, putting many children at risk. Some AAU athletes have had devastating experiences.

The AAU does not offer child abuse prevention training, though it claims to the public that it does. It does not verify whether coaches take the training it does offer, though it calls the course “mandatory” on its webpage for parents.

The AAU has become a haven for coaches suspected of abuse, ProPublica and The Post found, based on a review of public disciplinary lists and interviews with current and former executives from six national sports governing bodies and other key stakeholders. Those sports officials say the AAU has earned a reputation as a place where coaches can escape discipline and are not bound by strict safety laws, making it more difficult to protect young athletes. ProPublica and The Post identified eight coaches who continued to work with children under the AAU in the last five years after being banned or suspended by other youth sports organizations — even though the AAU pledged in 2012 that it would ban such coaches.

Serious allegations of sexual misconduct against coaches in the AAU are handled by its Board of Review, a group of four elected AAU members and a chair whose names are not made public. Asked about written guidelines for when to ban coaches, one former member who sat on the board for nearly 25 years said the group “just decided on our feelings.”

The abuse reporting hotline AAU promised to create as part of the reforms redirects to the AAU’s general office line with no option to report abuse, though callers can press 5 to reach a department for “medal orders.”

Instead of protecting children, the AAU has prioritized building an ever-bigger footprint across youth sports through cheap and easy team registrations, ProPublica and The Post found, allowing it to dramatically grow its revenue in recent years.

The scope of the consequences for young athletes nationwide is impossible to quantify, ProPublica and The Post found, because the AAU operates with a secrecy that is unusual for a nonprofit that serves children.

The AAU declined to answer questions from ProPublica and The Post over the course of more than a year, including whether the organization trains its coaches, how it investigates abuse claims, and how it enforces policies and safety rules. It would not verify if specific coaches overseeing AAU-registered teams had been authorized and background-checked by the AAU, as its rules require. While other youth sports organizations post public lists of coaches found to have abused children, the AAU does not.

In a statement, the AAU said it is “committed to protecting its athletes through comprehensive protection policies overseen by our Compliance Department.”

Athlete protection “is at the forefront of our safety measures such as a verified identity check and mandatory background screenings for all non-athlete AAU members, including coaches,” it said. The statement also cited “supplemental medical benefits” and “mandatory concussion protocols” as measures that it said prioritized the “physical well-being of its members.”

“These safety measures reflect our ongoing commitment to providing a safe, secure, supportive, and trusted environment where athletes can thrive,” the statement said.

The AAU also took action on one point raised by the news organizations. After ProPublica and The Post asked the AAU last year whether it actually mandated training for coaches, as its website claims, the organization quietly changed its website to say the training was “encouraged.”

For the first time, using thousands of pages of internal, legal and court records and interviews with key stakeholders, ProPublica and The Post were able to document how the AAU handled some child sex abuse claims in the years after it promised reform. Several years after allegations were made against a former AAU president, ProPublica and The Post found, its review board exonerated another top AAU executive accused of sexual abuse by a former player without interviewing a single witness or considering a past allegation from a different player, court records show. A current AAU official, Jim Fox, said he believed the AAU’s handling of the case was an attempt to “cover it up.”

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