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Yesterday brought the news that Noah Rucker has plea-bargained his indictment for sex with a girl he coached on a high school team. Rucker most recently coached under Rick Curl at the Washington-area Curl-Burke Swim Club.<\/p>\n
When a criminal complaint against Rucker surfaced last spring, USA Swimming announced an “emergency hearing” on his coaching credentials.<\/p>\n
Weeks later at the Olympic Trials in Omaha in late June 2012, when I approached USA Swimming public relations director Karen Linhart with a question about the status of the Rucker hearing, she threatened to have me thrown out of the CenturyLink Center, on emergency charges of audacity.<\/p>\n
It was also during the Trials that former swimmer Kelley Davies, now Kelley Currin, learned that Rick Curl was still prowling the deck — months after she personally divulged to a USA Swimming investigator the details of his molestations of her, which had begun almost 30 years earlier and were widely known by top officials and a good chunk of the swimming community for at least 20. Over the ensuing months, Curl’s lawyer engineered an administrative consent decree whereby he “accepted” a lifetime USA Swimming ban. Shortly after that, Curl was arrested in Montgomery County, Maryland, and he now faces criminal charges in the Davies case.<\/p>\n
(Meanwhile, don’t you continue to go calling his organization the Curl-Burke Swim Club [CUBU]. Everyone knows that it’s now the Nation’s Capital Swim Club [NCAP]. In a front-page fresh coat of paint last month, The Washington Post<\/em> ID’d NCAP as the vortex of the area’s “deep talent pool.” Ever alert to priorities, The Post<\/em> also mumbled that Curl was not around any more due to “allegations” of a “relationship.”)<\/p>\n Back to Noah Rucker and his “emergency hearing.” USA Swimming publishes on its website a list of banned coaches that gives fresh meaning to the phrase “tip of the iceberg.” Rucker still isn’t on it.<\/p>\n NEXT: More on the rapist former judge who became a club coach and state swimming official in South Dakota and was named head coach at a team in USA Swimming’s backyard in Colorado — before the club was alerted and sent him away, but without filling in anyone else about his newly beefed-up “background check.”<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Irv Muchnick<\/em><\/p>\n <\/body><\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday brought the news that Noah Rucker has plea-bargained his indictment for sex with a girl he coached on a high school team. Rucker most recently [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n