Conflicted Jill Chasson Departs As Chair of USA Swimming’s National Board of Review

by Irvin Muchnick

 
Jill Chasson, whose marriage to one prominent coach and adolescent relationship with another seriously compromised her ability to adjudicate a backlog of sexual misconduct cases, has resigned as chair of USA Swimming’s National Board of Review.

The swimming news site SwimSwam.com reports:

“There’s no indication if the move was related, but Chasson had come under pressure lately from watchdogs like Concussion Inc. to recuse herself in the case of former University of Utah coach Greg Winslow. Winslow was accused of sexually abusing a minor while coaching at Sun Devil Aquatics: a club whose president is Chasson’s husband Mike. She told them in May that she would recuse herself from any NBOR action involving Winslow, though it’s not clear if Winslow’s case even made it that far before her resignation.” http://swimswam.com/pylitt-replaces-jill-chasson-as-chair-of-usa-swimming-national-board-of-review/

What SwimSwam doesn’t say is that the marriage to Mike Chasson was only half of it. In April we reported that Jill Chasson, née Johnson, was, at age 15, the openly known girlfriend of John Cadigan, aide de camp to the North Baltimore Aquatic Club’s Murray Stephens and, currently, to Bob Bowman, the coach of Michael Phelps and other Olympians. And there’s a raft of emotional and physical safety issues at NBAC for the review board to sift through right now.

More broadly, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Sports parents, and in particular women, own a large piece of the swimming sex-abuse problem — through lookaway passes at best, and rationalization of their own ambiguous histories at worst. Coaches have no damn business consorting with their athletes, period, for multiple reasons.