More on Abusive Male Coaches

From ESPN:

Title IX has revolutionized sports and opened up a world of thrilling possibilities for women athletes, but it also has had a terrifying and underestimated side effect: sexual abuse by coaches. In the past two years, widely respected and accomplished girls' basketball coaches in Portland, Ore., Seattle, Wash., Denver, Colo., and Berkeley, Calif., have faced accusations of abuse from current or former players. A Seattle Times investigation from 2003 found 159 coaches reprimanded or fired for sexual misconduct in the past decade in Washington state alone. Of those 159, the Times reported, 98 continued to coach or teach at schools.

In the first extensive study of its kind, sociology professor Sandra Kirby of the University of Winnipeg found that 22.8 percent of respondents in a Canadian sample had sexual intercourse with a coach or other person in position of authority within their sport. The epidemic spawned from a combination of controlling coaches, enabling parents, precocious girls and a stunning lack of oversight of youth sports. "The numbers are staggering," says Kirby, who wrote her book, "The Dome of Silence," in 2000. "The coach is one of the barriers between athletes and the brass ring, and to them that's the only road. There's no other way."

The problem has worsened in the United States with the relatively new promise of fame and success in women's basketball. "We're following the men right down this road of kids playing 12 months a year, 80 to 100 games," Stanford women's basketball coach Tara VanDerveer says. "The club coaches can be powerful brokers. Girls live in a more emotional world. The chemistry, the camaraderie. So much is about being accepted. Then you have a male coach with a 14-year-old girl wanting to please this person. Girls are really motivated by being pleasers. Are they more vulnerable? Yes, I think they are."

Like I've always said, males coaching teenage females is a very bad idea.

UPDATE: On a related note, is Tara VanDerveer a sexist for saying what she said? She's only pointing out obvious female characteristics, but isn't that taboo these days. Ask Larry Summers.