The US Tennis Association can do more to prevent abuse such as sexual misconduct, a study says

An external review of the US Tennis Association’s security system resulted in 19 concrete recommendations on how the group that oversees the sport in the country and organizes the US Open Grand Slam tournament can better protect players from abuse, such as sexual misconduct.

A 62-page report by two lawyers – Mary Beth Hogan and David O’Neil of the Washington, DC-based firm Debevoise & Plimpton – was presented to the USTA board last week and released on Thursday.

“The USTA meets all requirements of the U.S. Center for SafeSport and in many respects has policies and procedures in place that provide more protection than the Center’s requirements. … However, we have identified several opportunities to improve player safety that the USTA should consider implementing,” Hogan and O’Neil wrote.

The report comes less than two months after a tennis player was awarded $9 million in damages by a jury in a federal court in Florida, alleging that the USTA failed to protect her from a coach who allegedly sexually abused her as a teenager at one of its training centers. O’Neil – a former head of the Justice Department’s criminal division – and Hogan wrote that their “review did not include investigating specific incidents involving allegations of sexual misconduct, other than examining whether the USTA met its obligations when abuse was reported,” and therefore did not investigate “the events leading up to” this Florida case.

They also pointed out that the USTA has been a defendant in four other lawsuits – one of which ended in a settlement – involving the sexual abuse of tennis players over the past two decades.

The lawyers said they conducted a “thorough, independent review” of “USTA’s current policies and procedures for preventing, reporting and responding to reports of abuse, including sexual misconduct.”

The review included interviews with USTA staff and access to hundreds of documents from the organization. It also included an assessment of safety measures at 51 other national sports federations in the United States, Paralympic sports organizations and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, as well as the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s guidelines.

The report states that the board “expressed its intention to incorporate the proposals into the USTA’s Safe Play program.”

“We view this report, including the recommendations of the Debevoise team, as an important step forward in our efforts to continue to ensure a safe environment for everyone involved in the sport of tennis,” USTA CEO and Executive Director Lew Sherr said in a written statement. “We are working to implement the recommendations as thoroughly and quickly as possible.”

The 19 recommendations include:

— seven that ‘focus on preventing wrongdoing before it occurs’;

– nine of these relate to keeping ‘individuals known to have engaged in misconduct’ away from USTA facilities and events, including by making information about them more widely available, because, the report states, ‘one of the greatest concerns of parents and players is with individuals known to have engaged in misconduct – whether as a result of an adverse action by the Centre or a criminal prosecution – who seek to continue to participate in the sport of tennis’, including by ‘attending USTA-sanctioned tournaments as spectators’;

– two ‘aimed at increasing the number of people obtaining the Safe Play certificate … and of people participating in SafeSport training, particularly parents’, who ‘are often unaware of the ways in which coaches manipulate both underage athletes and their parents, and for whom it can be particularly difficult to recognise problematic behaviour when a parent hopes that a coach will promote their child’s sporting success’;

– and one that requires “additional staff and resources” for the USTA’s Safe Play program to support implementation of the recommendations.

The review states that the USTA has only three staff members “dedicated exclusively to developing and implementing the Safe Play program and monitoring its compliance” and that there are “no staff members dedicated exclusively to monitoring athlete safety” at its three player development campuses in New York, Florida and California.

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Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis writer since 2002. You can find his stories here: https://apnews.com/author/howard-fendrich