An independent review of the US Tennis Association’s system for protecting underage athletes from abuse, such as sexual misconduct, found the group can do more to improve its safety policies and made 19 recommendations to improve them. The US Tennis Association is responsible for overseeing the sport nationally and administers the US Open Grand Slam tournament.
A 62-page report written by two attorneys — Mary Beth Hogan and David O’Neil of the Washington, D.C.-based firm Debevoise & Plimpton — was presented to the USTA Board of Directors last week and made public Thursday.
“The USTA meets all requirements of the US Center for SafeSport and has policies and procedures in place in several respects that provide more protection than the Center’s requirements. … However, we have identified several ways to increase the safety of players who the USTA should consider adopting,” Hogan and O’Neil wrote.
The 19 recommendations include:
- seven that “focus on preventing misconduct before it occurs”;
- nine involved keeping “individuals known to have engaged in misconduct” from USTA facilities and events, including by making information about them more widely known because, the report says, “one of The biggest concerns of parents and players relate to individuals who are known to have committed misconduct – whether as a result of an adverse action by the Center or a criminal prosecution – but attempt to continue participating in tennis, “including by appear” at USTA-sanctioned tournaments as spectators;
- two ‘aimed at increasing the number of individuals receiving Safe Play approval… and individuals undergoing SafeSport training, especially parents’, who are ‘often unaware of the ways in which coaches can manipulate both underage athletes and their parents , and that may well be the case. particularly difficult to identify problematic behavior when a parent hopes a coach will help promote their child’s success in sports;”
- and one that “calls for additional staff and resources” for the USTA’s Safe Play program to help adopt the recommendations.
The investigation found that the USTA has only three employees “dedicated to developing and implementing the Safe Play Program and monitoring its compliance,” and that its three player development campuses – in New York, Florida and California – “not have staff members exclusively designated to oversee the safety of athletes.”
The review included interviews with USTA employees and access to hundreds of the organization’s documents. It also included a review of protections at 51 other U.S. national sports governing bodies, Paralympic sports organizations and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, along with guidance from the U.S. Center for SafeSport.
The report states that “the Council has expressed its intention to incorporate the suggestions into the USTA Safe Play Program.
“We see this report, including recommendations from the Debevoise team, as an important step forward in our efforts to ensure a safe environment for everyone involved in the sport of tennis,” USTA CEO and Executive Director Lew Sherr said in a statement. written explanation. “We are working to implement the recommendations as thoroughly and quickly as possible.”
The report comes less than two months after a tennis player was awarded $9 million in damages by a Florida federal court jury following her accusation that the USTA failed to protect her from a coach she claims sexually abused her in one of her training centers when she was a teenager. O’Neil – former head of the Justice Department’s criminal division – and Hogan wrote that their “investigation did not include the investigation of specific incidents involving allegations of sexual misconduct, beyond assessing whether the USTA met its obligations when abuse was reported to the USTA. “
Federal law prohibits the USTA from investigating such cases separately, giving exclusive jurisdiction to the US Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit organization that specifically focuses on abuse of minors and athletes in Olympic sports, the lawyers said in their report.
“For example, we did not investigate the events leading up to a recent lawsuit against the USTA related to a 2018 case of sexual abuse of a then-19-year-old top player by a former USTA employee,” they wrote, adding that the case “involved an undisputed incident of abuse.”
They also noted that the USTA was a defendant in four other lawsuits – one of which resulted in a settlement – related to sexual abuse of tennis players over the past two decades. Hogan and O’Neill said they had reviewed the material given to them by the lawyer representing one of the claimants and had “considered the relevance of such material” in preparing their recommendations.
The attorneys said they conducted “a thorough independent review” of the USTA’s “current policies and procedures for preventing, reporting, and responding to reports of abuse, including sexual misconduct.”
