Reply to Whitman Teacher and Crew Coach Arrested

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a former competitive rower (D1 and clubs after college), it's an incredibly intense sport.  If you want to be competitive, you have to train very, very hard.  And if you buy into that culture, that aspect of what Shipley did would be a feature, not a bug.  I'm honestly not sure I want my kids rowing in HS, if they express any interest, because of how intense it is--I worry it would be too much for young kids.

As for the parents who claim they didn't see it: most parents don't want to believe something like this could happen to their kids.  Many don't have any kind of experience, personally or professionally, with sexual predators.  And plenty are SO horrified by the thought that they bury their heads in the sand rather than learn the signs.  Couple that with the uber-competitive nature of many parents in this area, and, yeah, it's easy to see how it happened.

People seem to be making the assumption that parents who push their kids into the "best" academics and the most competitive sports are caring, observant parents, but usually, they're doing so out of their own self-interest.[/quote]
Thanks for the insights, PP.  Maybe you could help answer a question I think many of us have: why would anyone put this much time into a sport in HS unless they were gunning for an admissions boost or college scholarship or had Olympic dreams? One of my kids plays a D1 sport now, and I felt like the amount of time he spent training in HS was borderline unbalanced, but it sounds like these girls were spending twice as much time on rowing per week throughout the year, if not more. It really does sound almost cult-like both in terms of training to the exclusion of almost all else and the control exerted over the kids by a single charismatic individual. When you were in HS did you have one very powerful coach like this who controlled all aspects of the program?

I do understand that a lot of people fall in love with a sport and put a lot of time into it in the pursuit of excellence, and I understand the camaraderie that develops on teams.  But there should be limits on how much training or competing time a coach can ask of HS kids in a HS-affiliated club sport, the same way there are for JV and Varsity HS sports and in college.  If there are currently no rules established by the school or county re training time for club teams, that should change going forward. That’s just one of the structural problems that made it easier for Shipley to isolate these kids, but it seems like one of the easiest problems to fix.  [/quote]

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