Whistleblower Swimmer Austin Fiascone’s Father: Utah Investigators Not Interviewing Key Witnesses — ‘Have Gone Totally Silent’
March 21, 2013Fed-Up Utah Swimmer’s Mother: ‘Lack of Communication Adds to the Pile of Disgust’
March 21, 2013
As we’ve been reporting, there is legitimate concern that the great Salt Lake City investigation of the failure of University of Utah athletic director Chris Hill to listen, over a period of years, to the many athletes and parents complaining about abusive swim coach Greg Winslow won’t amount to a thimble of salt.
Concern goes from theory to practice with word that the university’s two “independent” investigators have not even interviewed many of the most important witnesses.
I wonder if one of them is Lisa Pursley. She was an assistant coach under Winslow one year, 2011-12, before going to work for her father, University of Alabama coach Dennis Pursley, a former national Olympic team coach. (Lisa Pursley had swum for Winslow on the Falfins youth club in Colorado Springs. She now goes by her married name, Lisa Ebeling.)
“Through all the problems here, Lisa and Charlie King [another assistant, now head coach at University of Wisconsin – La Crosse] were great,” whistleblower former Ute swimmer Austin Fiascone told Concussion Inc. “They were the ones who held the program together. That’s why everything fell apart this past year when they left.”
Multiple sources confirm that Pursley was the staffer who confronted Winslow about his alcohol problem. After he refused her offer to go with her to discuss the issue with athletic department officials, Pursley went alone to associate athletic director Pete Oliszczak and reported Winslow’s out-of-control drinking and related misconduct (which had included giving King a black eye with a punch during one drunken rage).
Oliszczak mysteriously disappeared from the scene last November; he is said to be on an unannounced family medical leave. Observers of the unfolding Utah and Winslow scandals wonder if Oliszczak is being set up as the fall guy in the upcoming report by investigators Michael Glazier and Alan Sullivan.
After Pursley’s report to superiors, Winslow was ordered not to accompany his team on a 2011 training trip to San Antonio. This anecdote is no mystery — Winslow told the whole team he was being disciplined, and why. If and how the upcoming Glazier-Sullivan report deals with the episode will be telling. If it is fully acknowledged, then Hill and his defenders will be hard-pressed to maintain that they had no constructive notice of Winslow’s misconduct. And that doesn’t even take into account the many documented complaints about Winslow prior to the clearly inadequate report two months ago by the campus Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action.
The OEO probe, which culminated in a finding of no cause for disciplinary action, simply brushed off the voluminous evidence of Winslow’s drinking, sexual harassment, racist utterances, and unsafe extreme training methods.
Complaints to Utah president David Pershing got fresh life with the report here three weeks ago that an Arizona prosecutor is reviewing the recommendation of the Arizona State University police that Winslow be charged with two counts of sexual abuse of a swimmer he coached — first at the youth club Sun Devil Aquatics on the ASU campus and later, for a year, at Utah. The alleged abuse began in 2005 when the girl was 15.
The associate director of athletics communications at the University of Alabama, Roots Woodruff, emailed, “Lisa Ebeling will make no public comment on the matter.”
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