In Order to Take Down the Amateur Athletic Union, ProPublica / Washington Post Investigation Has to Puff Up the U.S. Center for Safe Sport. That’s the American Way.

SEE ALSO:

“Congress wanted a report on sex abuse in youth sports — then they buried it,” Salon, June 8, 2025, https://www.salon.com/2025/06/08/congress-wanted-a-report-on-abuse-in-youth-sports-then-they-buried-it/

“Sports-abuse agency promises new reforms, after years of failing young athletes,” Salon, February 22, https://www.salon.com/2026/02/22/sports-abuse-agency-promises-new-reforms-after-years-of-failing-young-athletes/

by Irvin Muchnick

What America needs is a recalibration of its sports priorities, as well as a federal sports ministry with the mandate and tools to minimize sexual abuse of youth athletes. What America gets, instead, is atomized episodic journalism and half-hearted legislative whack-a-mole.

Submitted for your consideration of this Groundhog Day phenomenon is its latest exhibit:  a lengthy investigation of the Amateur Athletic Union, in a joint enterprise of the nonprofit ProPublica news site and the Washington Post. The links are (free at ProPublica) https://www.propublica.org/article/aau-youth-sports-sexual-abuse-failure-amateur-athletic-union and (behind a paywall at the Post)  washingtonpost.com/sports/2026/08/13/how-aau-is-failing-protect-young-athletes-sexual-abuse/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f009.

I feel a little churlish writing harshly about a fundamentally competent takedown of the AAU by reporter Molly Hensley-Clancy. I’ll get over it.

“The AAU,” whose programs cover more than 100,000 young athletes in the sport of volleyball alone, “is failing on nearly every level,” Hensley-Clancy accurately writes – “misleading the public about its prevention measures and suppressing allegations of sexual misconduct.”

Here’s my beef. In order to build out this case, ProPublica and WaPo don’t reinforce it with another example. Rather, they juxtapose it. Every good narrative, it seems, needs a bad guy and a good guy.

The good-guy foil is the Olympic movement’s U.S. Center for Safe Sport (I use a space because I refuse to recognize its pompous “SafeSport” branding). The thing is, anyone who knows the second thing about Safe Sport realizes that it’s as abject a failure as the AAU – a bad joke on American families and the public that needs a recommended restructuring. The pertinent reform happens to be right out there on the vine, but dying for lack of attention.

In a classic of speaking wimp to power, the Post avers:

“The new Center for SafeSport [started in 2018] was far from perfect. Underfunded and understaffed, the center quickly racked up a backlog of unresolved complaints and closed many others without findings or with what critics said were inadequate investigations.

SafeSport has since resolved many of those issues, improving its process to resolve cases more quickly and cut down its backlog, the organization said. [Emphasis added.] … CEO Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, an Olympic gold medalist, said the organization ‘acknowledges the challenges we have met as the first national sport safeguarding organization in the world. We are on surer footing today.’”

Left unsaid in this article is a single word about the 2024 report by the congressional Commission on the Future of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Co-chaired by a sports law expert and supported by members who are Olympic legends, the commission explicitly called for federal funding of the safe sport agency, to divorce it from the money-first, medals-first priorities of the Olympic movement. Additionally, the report proposed spinning off grassroots local programs in sports such as swimming from the control of Olympic Committee governing bodies – a move that would require those families determined to push their Johnnys and Jills to elite prowess to do so minus the subsidies of below-market community pool rentals and the volunteer labor of hundreds of thousands of parents whose involvement is, by definition, more recreational and low-key. 

Now I’ll admit that if Benita Fitzgerald Mosley proves half as adept at making the U.S. Center for Safe Sport mission-appropriate as she appears to be at spinning the Washington Post (which I suspect could have been pulled off in her sleep), then the future may indeed be brighter. I don’t advise holding your breath.

The Post shouldn’t feel too bad about its Safe Sport stenography. After all, two years ago it did give the release of the commission recommendations a two-paragraph book report. With no follow-up.

Meanwhile, the Post’s confrere in nationalist sports rah-rah, the New York Times – the “Gray Lady,” the “Newspaper of Record,” blah blah blah – has never even mentioned the report. Last year, when I quizzed the Times on this lapse, a spokesperson chirped back, “We can’t and don’t cover every study.” I guess the ones authorized by Congress don’t have enough juice.

In fairness to the news media, which work hard for their gentlemen’s C grades, the very congressional architects of this study fare even worse. They seem content to allow their own commission’s report to gather dust – the better not to contradict their and their constituents’ primary motive, which is to make the periodic gesture toward protecting kids, while concentrating on rooting for max-profit, max-internationally competitive youth sports programs. (In response to a query, the office of Connecticut’s resident blowhard Senator Richard Blumenthal, who co-sponsored the legislation establishing the study commission, platitudinized: “Keeping athletes safe is a nonnegotiable priority – and meeting that challenge requires a commitment from all stakeholders.”)

The world over, everyone loves a juicy story about bad actors and even, occasionally, about their institutional enablers. Right now in Ireland, George Gibney, former coach of the Irish Olympic swimming team – and for three decades the most notorious at-large sex criminal in sports history – awaits October sentencing on a scandalously tardy extradition from the U.S. and conviction at trial for a tiny subset of his likely hundreds of acts of molestation and rape. The Irish press and public wait with bated breath to pounce rhetorically on whether the length of the prison term of this creep, now approaching 80 years old, will be sufficiently cathartic. What no one is talking about is how Gibney, along with scores of other privileged accused abusers, got off the hook in the first place in the 1990s. That was thanks to a technical ruling handed down by the Irish Supreme Court, in a case argued to the court and one of its justices – later Chief Justice Susan Denham – by Gibney’s barrister Patrick Gageby. Who just so happened to be Denham’s brother! Who said justice wasn’t a family relay race?

On our side of the sports-abuse pond, media coverage of the inadequacy of vigilance against sexual predation of youth athletes is a tick better, as the new Post article shows. But not nearly good enough.