Written by “If we go along with you and lie our asses off, the world of truth and ideals is, er, protected.” That’s a line from an old (if you think the 1970s is old) movie about NASA faking a Mars landing in order to avoid embarrassment and maintain its meaningful work – one that also helps explain why recent news about the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) failing to respond to allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment, and abusive treatment of its players, is such a common and unfortunate occurrence across all of sports.
Sports are a world where truth and ideals are supposed to matter. We love sports because they are full of hope and possibility – remind us what collective hard work and aspiration can achieve. Sports represent on their best days a meritocracy, a rare level playing field in an uneven world, where energy and effort are rewarded fairly and completely.
Too High A Price
But sports also tend to reveal our warts and weak points just as surely as they do our strengths. Because the opportunity to be on a team, in a big game, or at the starting line in a race, is so rare and fleeting, we sometimes feel the pressure to compromise objective truth and our ideals in service of protecting these fleeting opportunities. Protecting that opportunity, at the cost of truth and ideals, is too high a price to pay for the next game or any game for that matter.
The stories reported in The Athletic about the NWSL are harrowing. They represent both bad acts by some and omissions by others. Both are harmful and both undermine the true meaning and value of sports. But why, then, are stories like these so common in sports?
The Pressure of The Next
First, sports always add the pressure of time and timing into the calculus of conducting any inquiry, or more critically finishing, or not starting what could be painful inquiry. It’s the next game, the new season, the big competition, that drives us to often suspend, delay, or adjust our ethical filters.
My former Ohio University Sports Administration faculty colleague, Dr. David Ridpath has decried this as the application of “situational ethics.” The people accused of omission, in this context, aren’t bad people per se, they however have been swayed by the timing or the lure of the next contest to avoid bad news now. Situational ethics are defined as the ability to flexibly adapt principals to the circumstances, and it is often the pressure of the next, you fill in the blank____, that drives this situational decision-making in sports.
The Physical Gap Between Best Intention and Reality
Another allure of sports is that they affect their participants’ identity, status, and power. This can be both a positive and negative consequence, and that means sports lend themselves to be easily corrupted, taken in by the darker consequence. Sports also represent a trillion-dollar global business sector which means that more than a few people derive both their livelihood and their sense of self from their place in them.
Sexual misconduct, sexual assault, and abusive power dynamics exist in every setting from the workplace to our houses of worship. It is in sports where Walter Palmer, a former professional basketball player and current board member of the Centre for Sport and Human Rights, recently observed, “there exists a physical gap between our best intentions and our reality.” Sports are supposed to be the reflection of our best intentions and too often our reality falls far short of that.
Why is that? Sports are in part insulated from the number of competitive and better options that exist for us in our normal lives: to find a new partner; or a new job; or a new place to live; or pray; if we are threatened or even made uneasy by an abusive situation. It is difficult enough to escape abuse in any of these contexts, but the path to athletic success runs through an ever-narrowing passage of club, school, coach, competition, or league that leaves most behind and moves only a select few ahead. Because opportunities are so limited, acquiescence and opportunity are sometimes closely linked in sports.
Anecdotes That Prove the Problem
Several years ago, before the advent of the U.S. Center for SafeSport, I represented an extraordinary young female athlete and coach who — while serving as an assistant coach — complained to the institution that employed her of suffering an unrelenting pattern of sexual harassment, sexual grooming, and sexual abuse by her head coach (also an employee). That institution responded by removing her from her coaching role in favor of retaining the coach she had accused of abuse. She was effectively punished for her bravery in speaking out when she lost the job she loved. When she finally gathered enough confidence to make the institution aware of the extent of her abuse, the institution made that reporting process onerous and painful, and allowed her abuser to escape to another institution, at a higher level.
Stories such as this are all too common. Another successful female professional sports executive I know, once complained to her own human resources director, also a woman, about sexual discrimination by a senior leader in her organization. In response, she was told “to get a new job.”
After the NWSL story broke I heard many women on LinkedIn bravely speaking about their own experiences with sexual harassment or abuse being told “to be quiet” and remember “how lucky they were to work in sports,” or that they were “just plain wrong.”
The harm a predatory coach or leader can inflict, especially when aided by failed oversight and prevention is extraordinary. While we know this happens in other settings – most recently as brought to light by the “#Me Too” movement, it is especially pervasive in sports. We must have better mechanisms for reporting abuse, better systems for neutral investigation of abusive behavior at all levels and in all settings in sports, and finally, we need people within organizations who don’t have a financial or other investment in the upcoming game, or success of the season, and who are dedicated to doing what is right lead our organizations.
Only by having impartial oversight can we begin to close the gap between our best intentions and our often difficult reality in sports and ensure we are, in fact, the protectors of truth and ideals.