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Running Issues: Collegiate Athletes Sounding The Alarm About Abusive Coaches

Published by
DyeStat.com   Mar 30th 2021, 8:14pm
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Current And Former Athletes At  Loyola Marymount Are The Latest To Push Back Against Toxic Culture

By Elizabeth Carey for DyeStat

After the mass shooting at a Boulder, Colo. supermarket last week, Rosie Cruz felt compelled to speak out.

Watching news reports of the carnage inside a store that she has frequented while she studies and trains remotely from her home campus at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Cruz decided it was time to act. On social media, she made a public complaint against her coach with the hope that somebody might listen. 

Cruz, an LMU cross country/track athlete who is graduating in May, felt one last sting of neglect when her coach didn’t check in to see if she was OK. 

“Finally I was like I can’t do this anymore,” she told me over the phone a couple days ago. “I’ve seen way too much. I’ve heard way too much.”

So, on March 25, she tweeted about her experience as a student-athlete at LMU, alleging psychological abuse from veteran head coach Scott Guerrero.

She posted on Instagram, too.

At least four other former and current LMU athletes have posted statements online about their own experiences. I spoke with three and texted with another. Their stories shared a common theme.

Cruz told me she experienced injuries, gaslighting, and even punishment for advocating for herself and teammates throughout four years with the program. 

Cruz was inspired by other collegiate athletes who have turned to social media and digital channels to air grievances and demand change. In the past year, cross country and track athletes from University of Alabama-Birmingham, Bradley University, Wesleyan University and University of Arizona have spoken out.

This uprising has gained momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic, which provided space and perspective for athletes away from campus and coaches. It pushes back on decades’ worth of exploitative coaching methods, including psychological abuse, over-training, body shaming, and fostering or ignoring eating disorders and other mental health issues. These methods have serious consequences for developing athlete-humans, especially as they are learning to navigate the real world. The physical and mental toll of these negative experiences stay with athletes long term. Plus, this approach hurts performance. 

I called and texted Guerrero, who has coached at LMU for 23 years, and requested an interview.

I wanted to ask him whether he has any regrets about how he has treated athletes under his charge, particularly on the women’s cross country and track team. 

I wanted to ask: Are you open or willing to change? 

He declined my request. 

LMU Athletic Director Craig Pintens, Deputy Athletic Director Ashley Armstrong, and Title IX Coordinator Sara Trivedi didn’t respond to interview requests, either.

But then the university crafted a statement that says it has turned the matter over to the Human Resources department to investigate the claims made by athletes. 

To be clear, not all abuse is sexual in nature or even illegal. But emotional and verbal abuse is detrimental. So is dismissing someone’s heartfelt concern. 

For Cruz, it began when she saw teammates struggling with eating disorders, including a top runner.

“I went to my coach thinking maybe he would do something. He looked me in the eyes and said I didn’t understand what it took to become pro,” she said.

Cruz also raised her concerns with athletic trainers about her teammates’ struggles, hoping they’d provide information about psychological services. 

One of these teammates, who asked to remain anonymous, has attempted suicide. Twice

Hannah Wohlenberg, who now runs for St. Mary’s as a graduate student-athlete and graduated from LMU in May 2020, said the team should have had a conversation about eating disorders and mental health, even if it meant bringing an outside expert in, like the LMU physiology professor and registered dietician nutritionist who’d spoken to the team once at the beginning of each year.

“Just an honest admission that this was happening on our team (would have been a start),” she said. 

After her third injury at LMU, Wohlenberg started to push back. “I’ve tried your program three times, and three times I have gotten injured. So why wouldn’t I ask for something else?” she said. “You have to be healthy to be competitive.”

When she arrived at LMU, Cruz jumped from 30-35 miles per week in high school to 50-60 regularly, with hard workouts, doubles, and 100-minute runs. She has suffered two stress fractures, two stress reactions in her back and two bulging discs. 

Cruz alleges the coach told her that stress fractures were “normal” during her freshman year and encouraged her to come back to running on a timeline faster than the advice of her doctor and athletic trainer.  

Pressed into action, Cruz says Guerrero entered her in a 10,000-meter race before her foot was ready. She broke her foot in that race at Mt. SAC. 

“It crushed me. I didn’t understand what was happening,” she said.

Cruz is finding out that she isn’t alone. After posting the details behind her frustration, she heard from others caught in a cycle of confusion, despair and anger, from all over the country. 

To be fair, the coach at Loyola Marymount has supporters.

John Pickhaver, 30, who ran for LMU as a grad student in 2013-14 and then was a volunteer assistant coach for two years, told me the stories he read online don’t line up with his experience. He has only positive things to say about Guerrero and counts him as a friend. 

“It hurt to read those statements, tweets, posts about someone I know in a different way,” he said, describing Guerrero as a kind person and detail-oriented coach who would prescribe planned days off or cross-training for runners who were doing high mileage. 

Pickhaver acknowledges that his experience as a male with a male coach could differ from a female experience with a male coach.

“I’m all for due process and think it should be investigated. Knowing the person that I know, I think the investigation will have a positive outcome for him and the program,” he said.  

At Wesleyan, after a letter signed by 36 alumni, a timeline, and 24 testimonies were published, the school held its own investigation. It found the accused coach had violated no rules, and reinstated him, tasking him with overhauling “team culture.” According to news reports, he retired instead

At UAB, athletes didn’t know where to turn after talking to athletic staff. Marielle Lewis, 22, a former cross country/track athlete who graduated from UAB in 2020, posted a petition on Change.org about alleged abuse, sexism and racism from former head cross country and associate head track and field coach Matt Esche.

“I’m a pretty private person. I’m not someone who just jumps to social media. I had tried to handle it privately with administration, with my head coach…I felt like it got swept under the rug,” Lewis said. 

Esche is no longer at UAB.

“So many athletes have reached out to me with similar stories and none of us know how to get in contact with the NCAA. We’ve never once been privy to how to contact the NCAA. We can look up emails but that doesn’t do much for you. When you’re trying to file a complaint, there’s no real clear path,” she said. 

“I feel for us (justice) has been served. But it’s bigger than us at the end of the day. This behavior is going to be planted at another university with another team of girls. It doesn’t mean the sport itself has gotten the justice that it deserves,” Lewis said. “You get a bad feeling in your stomach that this wasn’t recorded in the record that these were the reasons he had to resign.”

Athletes are calling for reform across the sports landscape and want the institutions charged with overseeing them, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to do more, or at least better.

Bad actors should be fired, yes. But the problem is rooting them out in a deep-seated culture of silence.  

“It’s very hard to speak out about these issues because you’re scared,” Cruz said. “You’re scared about your scholarship and what the repercussions are. It’s very hard for me to say anything because there was always this culture of ‘hush-hush.”

But in this volatile year, Cruz felt the support of teammates and Lewis, the UAB grad. She also felt angry, especially after the mass shooting. 

She had to do something, despite the risks and consequences — including backlash from teammates and supporters of coaches. 

Cruz pushed a button that my generation and the ones before us lacked: Social media. 

The power of a tweet, a post or link, is that it applies pressure to the institutions that for too long have enabled abuse. See: NCAA, conferences, school athletic administrations. 

Take, for example, the NCAA, which did not respond to multiple interview requests. It calls itself “a member-led organization dedicated to the well-being and lifelong success of college athletes,” provides best practices and resources on health and safety. It tests coaches on their knowledge of the minutiae of eligibility and recruiting rules, but requires no continuing education or standard coaching certification. 

It recently argued that it has no legal obligation to protect student-atheltes from sexual abuse or harassment. 

That was in response to a class-action complaint filed by a trio of athletes, including Olympian Erin Aldrich, who allege long-time high jump coach John Rembao of sexual harassment and sexual abuse during collegiate recruitment and coaching in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

The suit filed against NCAA in U.S. District Court in California alleges that NCAA put athletes in harm’s way, permitted coaches accused of sexual abuse to move between NCAA institutions, and perpetuated a cycle of sexual abuse by not incentivizing schools to report abuse.

SafeSport, the organization tasked with investigating claims of abuse for the USA Track & Field and other Olympic governing bodies, lists an interim suspension for the coach, due to “allegations of misconduct” as of December 2019. Neither criminal nor civil statutes of limitations apply to reporting a SafeSport complaint. 

Of the 19 USATF-associated coaches listed in the discipline database since January 2020, four have been associated with collegiate programs, including NAIA and NCAA Division I and III schools. Several involve disciplinary action against coaches who’ve been previously charged or convicted of crimes. https://safesport.i-sight.com/published 

One person who has submitted testimony in an on-going investigation of another cross country/track coach, and who wishes to remain anonymous, said that investigation is in its fourth year. 

Cruz, Lewis and a growing list of others in the college system, are done waiting.

 

The SafeSport Helpline provides 24/7, anonymous crisis intervention, referrals, and emotional support for athletes and staff affected by sexual violence: https://www.safesporthelpline.org/

Report a concern here: https://uscenterforsafesport.org/report-a-concern/ 

National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673, https://www.rainn.org/

National Eating Disorder Helpline: 1-800-931-2237, https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/help-support/contact-helpline

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255, https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/



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