Survivor-led U.S. Soccer taskforce trying to address abuse

PHILADELPHIA — At the core of its response to revelations of rampant and systemic abuse throughout its sport, the U.S. Soccer Federation is developing a “safe soccer certification” program that, it hopes, will curtail coach misconduct at all levels of the game.

Following the events of Yates reportWhich detailed a vicious cycle of power imbalances and insufficient safeguards That followed the girls from youth soccer to professional soccer. the USSF assembled both a board-level committee and a sprawling “task force” that would attempt to break that cycle and protect players.

While the board committee has emphasized the importance of listening to the specific recommendations of the Yates report, which targeted the National Women’s Soccer League, the 37-member task force has focused on everything else. Its mandate is all-encompassing, from criminals that prey on children to volunteer coaches who with their actions and words unknowingly cross a boundary.

They — the criminals and the volunteers, and everybody in between — exist across the amateur soccer landscape. “We’ve got a lot of problems. We know that,” Mana Shim, the task force chair, said last week. She and her team have urgency and a willingness to discuss difficult subjects and new ideas.

They outlined some of those ideas publicly for the first time at the United Soccer Coaches Convention last week, ahead of a presentation to U.S. Soccer’s board of directors Thursday. They want to “implement safeguarding officers across the soccer landscape.” They hope to launch the “safe soccer” program, which would provide educational materials or formal training to everybody in amateur soccer, from the assistant coach to the volunteer bus driver to the parents. The U.S. Soccer database would allow the tracking of clubs and coaches who are certified.

The task force will also try to clarify what coaching is.

“In soccer, in sport, there’s a lot of gray area,” Shim said. “So, that’s the hardest thing to address.”

“I have an internal compass, and I can tell you, ‘No, this doesn’t feel right, this needs to be addressed,’” Shim later added. “That isn’t explicit across the board. And we want to make that the case.”

Participant Safety Task Force is laying the groundwork for possible solutions

Shim’s path into this role and this world was a painful one. In 2015, she was the Portland Thorns player, who was relatively ineffective. reported Paul Riley’s sexual harassment — and was largely ignored. She thought this when she retired from the sport several years later. “I really need to do something about this.” I need to “make the soccer ecosystem a safer place.”

So, she enrolled at University of Hawaii’s law school. She also took part in a variety of activities while she was studying. publicly told her storyRiley was taken down by the reckoning, and the NWSL was reconstructed.

U.S. Soccer called her in October, several months after she had graduated from law school and just weeks after the Yates Report was released. President Cindy Parlow Cone and CEO J.T. Batson wanted her as the leader of the task force and to reform the institutions she had been unable to help her.

Shim accepted the offer and went to work.

She worked with two vice chairs — former U.S. women’s national team player Shannon Boxx and Maryland youth soccer director Greg Smith — and a recently hired U.S. Soccer staffer, Emily Cosler, to guide the task force forward. This group includes active players, soccer executives, doctors, and head of schools. They began by sharing their personal experiences and investigating abuse prevention in other areas, like education and medicine.

Through outreach and listening, they identified gaps in soccer’s systems, and brainstormed solutions. Smith explained that Miro, an online whiteboard tool was used to organize all their thoughts. The ideas were then put into a shared spreadsheet, and they prioritized the desired outcomes. They are now meeting regularly as subcommittees — “Governance,” “Standards and policy,” “Education” and “Reporting and response” — to map out routes to those outcomes. The members then exchange ideas with their constituents and peers.

At a virtual forum with various stakeholders last month, “we got some tough questions,” Shim acknowledged. She and her colleagues also know that they don’t have all the answers — not yet, anyway. She spends her days and nights trying to find the answers. U.S. Soccer has what Cosler called a “staff SWAT team” coordinating the effort. They meet “almost every day,” taking input from the task force. Batson, Cosler and Cosler, both of whom have backgrounds in management and strategy consulting, meet with members of the board every other week.

They have also shared some ideas for making soccer more enjoyable.

Clubs should have safety as a competitive advantage

These goals sound lofty, and in some cases vague. They want to “develop a code of conduct for all participants” and “create a matrix/thresholds for the severity of infractions.” They want to “establish a baseline level of training for each constituent” and “educate all players” on how to report misconduct. They want to clarify who has what authority in the complicated world of youth soccer and where they have responsibilities.

“When I was playing, and really up until this point, there weren’t clear guidelines or policies for how coaches should conduct themselves — [and] refs, parents,” Shim said. “It was kind of piecemeal. While there are some policies… Okay, great, it’s nice that it’s there. But, who knows? Who is actually following those policies?

“When I stepped out [of soccer] and went to law school,” she later continued, “I realized a lot of the things that I thought were OK — the way people talked to me, the way I talked to other people — it’s not OK out in other fields.”

U.S. Soccer hopes to develop training material that will not only tell coaches what they should do, but what they should be doing. To do. They have talked about moving from a “red-light approach” to a “green-light approach” — whereby, rather than just policing bad actors, and relying on the U.S. Center for SafeSport, they’ll highlight and incentivize the certified Good Actors throughout the game

Shim made a celebratory gesture when an attendee suggested such a system at their coaches convention presentation.

“That’s exactly what we’ve been talking about,” she said. “Thank you!”

“In my mind,” Cosler added, “safety should be a competitive differentiator for clubs.” She outlined her vision for a database where parents could research a youth club or compare multiple clubs, and decide between them based on their “safeguarding practices,” or their level of “safe soccer” certification. “We see that as an opportunity to market a club,” she said. “How can we, as U.S. Soccer, as a federation, allow this to become a competitive differentiator, and something, a brand, that people are proud of and want to lean into and adopt?”

They haven’t yet said, and perhaps don’t yet know what, exactly, this “safe soccer” program will look like. But Cosler said they’d “provide updates as we build out the implementation plan,” and as they work to optimize the program for each of their many stakeholders, from recreational clubs to elite academies. They’ve set a March 31 deadline.

They also know they need to be cautious. Last week, another participant passionately stated that too many trainings or cumbersome licenses could lead to good people leaving the sport.

This is, however, not their goal. They want to have children and families. To soccer because it’s safe, and want to keep well-intentioned coaches in it.

“I think some people thought we were gonna come in and be like, ‘Punish, consequences, no, blackballed, you’re out of the game,’” Shim said. On the contrary: “There are so many coaches, and people involved in this game, who just are ignorant. We lack the skills and are not equipped to do the right things. While there are many people who aren’t malicious, they make mistakes. And we want to have a path forward for those people, we want to give them the tools, and resources, and education, make it available to everyone, so they can do the right thing the next time.”