What Does the Teri McKeever Suspension Mean for the Future of Coaching?

Given SwimSwam’s role in the sport, we receive multiple emails and messages every week from athletes and their parents alleging ‘abusive’ behavior from their swim coaches. These accusations at times are specific and damning, and in other cases are vague and difficult to verify.

There are different kinds of abuse that coaches can enact on an athlete. Physical and sexual abuse have a lot more ‘red lines’ and clear evidence, and are far less complex for US Center for SafeSport investigators to make determinations on.

But the highly-problematic, and probably more prevalent, ’emotional’ and ‘verbal’ forms of abuse are more complicated because the rules are harder to write and the details are harder to verify. That idea isn’t breaking any ground – we all know how difficult it is to discern between tough, discipline-oriented coaching and that which crosses the line, and further the game of telephone that can morph what was really said into what was reported.

A wave of overwhelming evidence against former Cal and US Olympic Team head coach Teri McKeever, though, broke through that gray area, and resulted in both her termination from Cal and, earlier this week, a three month suspension from the US Center for SafeSport.

I think there are many coaches who are going to view this as an assault on the profession, and I don’t blame them. The number of reports we receive about coaches makes it clear that anybody working as an authority figure with children is a potential target for abusive abuse-reporting, and this is well-documented both in coaching and outside of coaching.

Without discounting those concerns, I will tag onto it the opportunity here. Swimming is fairly-unique in that young coaches can get a lot of authority (their own training groups or even their own teams) at a much earlier stage of their careers than people in most sports can and with much less mentorship. I was the head coach of a team of 250 swimmers when I was 21 years old. Besides the obvious problems that can arrive when you are only a few years older than the youth athletes you coach, the only versions of coaching I knew were the versions I had received.

This can create a trickle-down, generational coaching trauma for young coaches that sometimes is never addressed. The faster you get results, the faster you climb the ladder, and the faster you climb the ladder, the less structure or motivation there is to seek mentorship or change a coach’s methodology – either intrinsically or extrinsically.

And we all have to acknowledge that you can get results in the pool with emotionally and verbally abusive training methods. It’s uncomfortable, but generations of swimming have borne that out. And many of today’s coaches had coaches who believed that verbal and emotional abuse was an inseparable part of athletic success.

But those training methods leave scarring on the athletes that can haunt them long after they’ve left the sport, and the new generation is less-willing to embrace those traumas for the sake of results, especially when they know there are other ways. There are plenty of coaches in modern swimming who get results without relying on abuse, and younger swimmers and their parents can now verify that on their own.

And here’s where the 3-month suspension of Teri McKeever becomes a paradigm-shifter for everyone – coaches, athletes, and parents.

So much of the Center for SafeSport’s work has revolved around massive decade-long or lifelong bans, and those bans are totally appropriate for some of the worst physical and sexual abuse perpetrators in our sport. There is no amount of mentoring or rehabilitation that makes it appropriate for those people to return to working with children.

But with the 3-month suspension, the Center has opened an alternative pathway, a more interventional pathway, that doesn’t rule out a coach who has gone sideways via a system that allowed them to do so.

We can look across the landscape of professional sports for programs that the NBA and NFL and Major League Baseball have developed to try and intervene in problematic behaviors. A recent example is in the case of basketball superstar Ja Morant, who faced escalating suspensions for his off-the-court behavior that included social media posts of him demonstratively flashing handguns in public spaces.

During his suspension, he had to adhere to certain conditions and undergo counseling to manage stress.

A 3-month suspension for Teri McKeever is the beginning of Olympic sports finding those interventions that doesn’t involve running someone away from the sport forever, but rather looking for opportunities to correct and address learned behaviors and keep coaches with potential in swimming. Besides leading to better cultural outcomes, smaller interventions can allow the US Center for Safesport to use lower burdens of proof and to reinvest the resources from months-long investigations into counseling programs, training programs, and investigating the most heinous abusers of children.

This is a system that focuses on fixing the future rather than putting every action of a past coach under a microscope.

Driving potentially good coaches out of the sport, be it with quick-trigger lifetime bans or for fear of the system designed to protect athletes, doesn’t solve the problem. The more talented coaches who leave the sport, the deeper into the pool we have to reach to find their replacements, and the deeper we reach, the more likely we are to find coaches whose problematic behaviors can’t be corrected. The problem then becomes perpetual and self-fulfilling.

Let’s embrace this opportunity to work with coaches, to create interim interventional programs, and to create a system where coaches, parents, and athletes can all feel safe and productive.