In August of 1995, Dr. Anthony Delach saw a patient for what he believed would be a routine physical. The patient was dehydrated, had eaten nothing but carrots and lettuce for a week and had been given diuretics by his football coach to aid in weight loss.
Under his coach’s direction, the patient had been trying to make a lower weight class, and he had lost 15 pounds in three hours. When it came time for weigh-in, someone had to help him to the scale.
Delach’s patient — a player on a pee-wee team — was 10 years old.
“I tracked down the coach, and I thought he’d lie,” recalled Delach, a pediatrician in southwest suburban Palos Park, “but he said quite blatantly where he got the drugs. He said it was better than giving kids enemas and wrapping them in plastic to lose weight.”
That coach, who has a football field named for him, claimed he had been giving the drugs for 20 years and always followed up weigh-ins with large amounts of Gatorade.
What’s worse is that the drug, Lasix, is so strong it is heavily regulated, even in horse racing, where it is most commonly used on horses.
“I had visions of kids dropping dead on football fields,” Delach said. “If (someone) would have fallen dead, it would be nearly impossible to trace.”
Although the coach was never found liable and is still coaching, Delach’s efforts to make the incident known through the news media spurred a movement. Local media told the story, and Delach was deluged with calls from parents who had had similar experiences either with drugs or with physical and verbal abuse from coaches.
“I felt like a priest at a confessional,” Delach said. “There were girls in gymnastics being starved so they wouldn’t get their periods. There were ice skating and wrestling and baseball problems.”
In January 1996, Delach received a call from Jeff Sunderlin, a program director for the Illinois Department of Public Health in Springfield who had heard news stories about the case involving the football coach. Sunderlin was concerned about these apparent coaching abuses and, after bringing Sen. Patrick O’Malley (R-Palos Park) on board, held a meeting with numerous sports organizations at the United Center in November of that year. What resulted was a committee formed under Senate Resolution 152 that, with the help of O’Malley, developed Senate Bill 918, goes into effect Jan. 1, 1998.
Essentially, the new law will regulate the certification of coaches, referees and any person involved with youth sports associations, public or private. The Governor’s Council on Health and Physical Fitness will decide on the minimum necessary standards for certification and, once the law goes into effect, will monitor those organizations that choose to go through the training and certification process.
But here’s the catch: the new law will not mandate certification. So, if a youth sports organization has volunteer coaches who are not trained and certified, no one will be able to force the organization to comply.
“What it does is provide for a certification effort for a Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” O’Malley said. “This allows parents to know that if the certification has been achieved, the sports program that their children are enrolled in has met certain standards.”
But this also allows for coaches who give diuretics to 10-year-old boys to continue coaching.
Sunderlin, who supervised the work of the committee formed under Resolution 152, said, “Ultimately we’d like to see a (mandatory) certification program for coaches, but until we do a better job of educating the public and have people understand the need for certification, we aren’t going to go anywhere with this issue.”
Indeed, although numerous sports associations were represented at the United Center meeting, many still have never heard of this law, despite the fact that it goes into effect Jan. 1.
That’s largely due to a lack of advertising funds, though Sunderlin’s committee is developing a plan to attract contributors. He hopes corporate sponsorship will drive this program.
What SB 918 says, essentially, is that the Governor’s Council will evaluate coaching curricula of various youth sports associations that are claiming to certify coaches.
Sunderlin hopes that insurance companies will offer discounts to associations on their liability premiums if the associations’ coaches have been certified.
Additionally, the committee plans to set up a hotline for parents where they can get answers to questions about nutrition, training and appropriate behavior of anyone involved in youth sports.
And finally, Sunderlin wants to establish statewide regional teams to put on workshops for parents and organizers of youth sports to educate them about what kind of behavior might be questionable. Issues include such seemingly innocent gestures as hugs for a job well done.
“Ours is a broad-based program,” Sunderlin said. “There’s physical development and conditioning, coaching philosophy, psychology and officiating covered.”
Horror stories in youth sports programs, unfortunately, are not new, and many organizations made efforts to train and certify their volunteer coaches long before SB 918 was crafted. USA Hockey, for example, in addition to coach certification, will begin full background checks, both locally and through the FBI, in the 1998-99 season. With more than 5,000 coaches registered in Illinois alone, the task is both daunting and expensive.
Norm Spiegel of Skokie, president of the Amateur Hockey Association of Illinois, said, “Most people are extremely innocent of anything, but we have to do it because of social conditions today. I would expect the policy will weed out quite a few because some will just refuse to be screened. So in effect it’ll do its job.”
Although the biggest concern for most people is the cost involved in background screenings, Spiegel concedes that “some feel it’s an invasion of their privacy and they’ll probably stop coaching when you start searching into a person’s background. He may be uncomfortable even if he has nothing to hide.”
Bruce Lukasik of Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood, assistant regional director for the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) on Chicago’s Southwest Side and in the southwest suburbs, has a different take on background checks.
“I don’t believe I should have some of the information that’s on that form,” he said. “If we get to a point where we have to have that done, we’re going to lose coaches. It’s tough to get coaches now.”
With the exception of USA Hockey, most youth sports organizations such as AYSO have no immediate plans to begin background screenings, but many people believe that it’s only a matter of time before they become necessary.
“I believe there is some movement in that direction,” Sunderlin said. “Many park districts and sports associations do some level of background checks right now, but our task first is to educate.”
Sunderlin believes that background checks may put many parents’ minds at ease, but his priority is for volunteers to know what they’re doing relative to their coaching skills. Likewise, many organizations such as the AYSO have begun coaching and officiating certification through guidelines set forth by the National Youth Sports Coaching Association (NYSCA). Basically, the training takes eight hours (though this may vary slightly from region to region) and covers everything from first aid to strategy to the psychology of working with children and teenagers.
Although many agree that this training is worthwhile, Lukasik said many of the coaches in his region didn’t show up for the scheduled day of training. He estimated that roughly 60 percent of the 200-plus coaches in his region went through the certification, but that there is no real way to force people to attend, particularly volunteers.
“We told them it was mandatory,” Lukasik said, “but we can’t enforce that” because of the lack of volunteers to coach.
Still, the AYSO’s goal is to have every coach certified by the year 2000. In an organization with more than 760,000 players nationwide, it seems a huge undertaking, and many people fear that asking more from an already thin population of volunteers will make it even harder to recruit people, let alone keep the faithful few.
“I think we’ll lose a few because of it,” said Lukasik, whose region is short seven to eight coaches each season.
“We demand more and more of (volunteers) every day,” Spiegel said. “But if you’re going to coach, you’re going to have to go through the process.”
Sunderlin, though, believes these fears are unfounded.
“The data doesn’t support it,” he said. “Parents who want to coach want to know what they’re doing. They’re very interested in the parameters and those areas that can get them into trouble. You don’t see a mass defection from this.”
Another area that concerns many members of youth organizations is the increased cost of training and certifying coaches and referees. At the AYSO, there may be two or three coaches per team, in addition to referees. It costs $15 per person for the training, and although the AYSO picks up the cost for one head coach per team, the remainder is filtered down to the players. Spiegel, Lukasik and others, however, all agree that the extra cost is worth it to help ensure that children are coached only by qualified, trained individuals.
Although steps like SB 918 and NYSCA training are solid attempts to monitor people who work with children, eight hours of training may do little to mitigate an already abusive personality.
“Even when they get the education,” Sunderlin said, “sometimes people do things they shouldn’t do with kids, and the problem is how to eliminate some of these horror stories.”
Still, the horror stories happen rarely, and what everyone agrees on is that the legislation and the regulations all are for the protection of children.
“These people are very involved,” O’Malley said. “They spend their lives doing this.”
