Nemchik said the center’s policy is to make decisions free from influence of law enforcement, noting the center relies on a “lower standard of proof. In fact, it wasn’t SafeSport, but the local police department that first shed light when an investigator contacted the accused teen and his family in early July 2022 to ask questions about the alleged episode.īy October 2022, the police department had dismissed the case. That deprived the teen of swimming in his best event, where he had previously swam times that could’ve qualified him for a key junior national meet in December.Ĭontacted by AP, Linda Eaton, the referee who removed the boy, would not comment about the case. He was then approached by a meet referee who notified him he was breaking the rules and wouldn’t be allowed to come back for the second day of the competition. This reached a boiling point at a swim meet in November, when the swimmer’s mom, who has taken over duties as his full-time coach, briefly turned away from her son on the pool deck. Not until fall of 2023 was the teen able to register for a USA Swimming event, and then, only with restrictions: He had to be chaperoned on the pool deck and could not come into contact with his accuser. The center’s spokesperson, Hilary Nemchik, told the AP she could not speak about specific cases, but “those types of responses are not consistent with the center’s values or our commitments to athletes and will certainly be reviewed.” When the family reached out in November for an update, a SafeSport investigator told them he “could not provide a firm timeline” for resolving the case, the mother said. “I scratch my head and wonder if they’re overwhelmed, if they just don’t have the staff to take care of all the complaints that are coming in. “I asked, ‘When?’ They said ‘When we’re done.’ I asked, ‘When’s that?’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’” They said ‘Yes, eventually,’” the teen’s mom said. “I asked if I could see a copy of the report. The slow-moving timeline fits into a common theme at an organization that operates on a $24 million annual budget, received around 7,000 complaints last year and has about 65 employees in its “response and resolution department.” Cases take too long because there are too many and too few people to handle them. “I think the guilty-until-proven-innocent aspect is what bothers me the most, because right now, he’s still (considered) guilty until the case is finalized,” she said.
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