By: Hannah Smith
In February, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) launched an investigation into SafeSport’s hiring practices following the arrest of a former SafeSport investigator charged with sexual crimes. While I’m disturbed, given the criticism SafeSport has received since it opened in 2017, I’m not entirely surprised, and I hope that this may signal a long-overdue reckoning not only for the organization, but our athletic community.
Back in 2017, Senator Grassley proposed the “Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act” to form SafeSport, and it was supposed to be the ultimate safeguard against abusive behavior in elite and youth U.S. Olympic sports. Athletes were told that SafeSport was charged with the mission to ensure that sport-specific governing bodies, such as USA Gymnastics, could no longer turn a blind eye to coaches and trainers who abused their power, such as Larry Nassar. Since it was founded, SafeSport has struggled to fulfill this critical mandate, often yielding questionable outcomes for the athletes it was meant to protect.
Following several stories in the Washington Post, USA Today, and OC Register, the failures of SafeSport gained more public attention in 2023, when 103 affiliates from the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) penned an open letter to Congress demanding reform in three key areas. The first being the Center’s arbitrary administrative closures, wherein cases are dismissed without resolution or consequences (64.8% of cases in 2022). The second being the Center’s exclusive jurisdiction over all abuse cases, which prevented well-governed overseeing bodies, such as the NSWL, from having any jurisdiction in light of said administrative closures. And the third being the flawed process that allows Respondents (those identified as being responsible for actions worthy of investigation) to challenge decisions in arbitration even after an investigation concludes.
In response to mounting pressure, SafeSport made some changes in 2024, including appointing a staff member to train employees on trauma-sensitive practices, and a revision of the arbitration proceedings, which now do not allow any witness testimonies, including from the Respondent, themselves. Previously, Respondents had been allowed to bring in new “character witnesses” during arbitration, even if those “witnesses” were unfamiliar with the case. This was irrelevant, and also trauma-insensitive to Claimants (those identified as being targeted/victimized by the actions of Respondents). The 2024 SafeSport Code also expanded the definition of what an “Administrative Closure” could signal from the 2023 Code.
And while the reforms were important, even the co-chairs of the Congressionally-formed commission which oversaw these revisions admitted: “More needs to be done.” Two anecdotes since these changes were made highlight their insufficiency: a NWSL coach who had been sanctioned to a lifetime ban has since been removed from SafeSport’s database, and a US Bobsledding chiropractor was, in the words of his attorney, “cleared” [by SafeSport] even after reports of abuse were made by an athlete and other clients from the chiropractor’s private practice. In her studies of the NSWL and SafeSport, former Deputy Attorney General, Sally Q. Yates, found that when coaches and trainers with abusive tendencies keep their jobs, the cost is often on athletes’ careers.
Many have said, and I too initially thought, that the main issue with SafeSport is a lack of funding. This is logical—in the words of Sports Illustrated reporter Michael Rosenberg in August of 2024, “An organization with a $20 million budget and 130 employees is not equipped to handle the 9,000 reports it receives per year.” But if Congress wanted to spend more on SafeSport, they already could. In 2023, Congress allocated only $2.5 million to the organization’s budget—a mere half of the $5 million it was approved to contribute. In comparison, the government provides more than half of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s $28.5 million budget. Furthermore, money isn’t the only metric of Congress’s attention: since the beginning of 2023, the “Protection of Women and Girls in Amateur and Olympic Sports Act” (banning trans women from competing in women’s sports), has appeared on the House floor ten calendar days, while in this same time the “Safer Sports for Athletes Act” (reforming SafeSport’s code) appeared once.
The main issue is that Congress, and our athletics culture at large, is placing insufficient value on the safety and well-being of athletes—especially female athletes, women being twice as likely to experience sexual harassment and assault. Consider that 93% of athletes experience harassment or unwanted contact, yet many are too afraid to report it. Of the perpetrators of sexual violence, 91.4% are male. Within SafeSport’s practices and policies, there is still an inadequate system of victim support and damaging confidentiality policies that undermine victim’s ability to report abuse. For SafeSport to fulfill its mission to “End Abuse,” a lot more needs to change. Congress should direct its attention to the real, ongoing harm caused by a system that allows predators to operate as investigators, and to a culture that allows this abuse to persist unchallenged.
Senator Grassley’s motion to investigate SafeSport’s hiring practices is an extremely small step, and one that might be viewed with skepticism given Grassley’s history on issues regarding investigations of alleged abuse. But, it turns attention to many other reforms that SafeSport needs. As an athletic community, we need to bring as much attention to this issue as we possibly can. I advocate writing to Congressmen, but with the expectation that they will only do just so much. The greater, and likely more impactful, actions we can take are in how we treat one another day to day and the standards for participation that we hold within our own organizations.
Hannah Smith is an independent writer contributing to FasterSkier. The opinions in this Op Ed are her own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FasterSkier and its staff.
