Coach-Athlete Sex Morally Wrong, Rules Or No Rules

Someday, I predict, we will reach a national consensus that coaches must not have sex with their athletes. We will not need written rules that prohibit every possible form of coach-athlete sex. We’re not there yet.

Rick Butler, a former Olympic assistant coach and the founder of a successful youth program called Sports Performance Volleyball in West Chicago, was expelled in July from USA Volleyball for allegedly having sex with three underage athletes.

Julie Bremner - who led her UCLA team to the 1991 national championship - testified that while she was playing for Sports Performance as a teen, Butler lured her to a hotel room and forced her to have intercourse. She shouted, “No! No!” He was 32; she was 17. For the next 18 months, Butler pressured Bremner into having sex, she says. “I thought I’d done or said something to lead him on,” she told Chicago Magazine. “I tried to make myself like it. I even thought I was in love with him, because he said sex equaled love.”

Two anonymous women also testified that Butler molested them, beginning when they were 16 and 17. Because the legal statute of limitations has expired - all the incidents took place in the ‘80s - no criminal charges are pending. Butler, who referred my call to his lawyer, Jerry Wiener, admits that he “dated” all three players, but insists they were already 18 and had left his program.

“Whether they were 17 or 18, it’s clearly an inappropriate way to behave,” asserts John Dunning, head volleyball coach at the University of the Pacific, which has won two national championships. “If they were ever in his program, then it’s very serious. He had lots of control over them. We’re treading into areas that males have tread very carelessly into for years.”

But many parents defend Butler. “I don’t have a problem with him dating girls that were in the program,” says Paul Stettin Sr., whose two daughters each won athletic scholarships to college after playing for Butler in high school. “There are other coaches at Sports Performance who have also dated players. It happens all the time.”

The sexual practices of other Sports Performance coaches are not (yet) being investigated, but Stettin’s attitude is common. Because coaches often “date” athletes, parents come to see coach-athlete sex as normal - as long as it doesn’t involve their daughters.

“My anger is at the innuendoes that in order to be a captain, to be on the No. 1 team, you probably had to sleep with Rick,” says Stettin. “It offends me. Both of my daughters were captains. They were on the No. 1 team. And that (sex with Butler) never ever occurred.”

Stettin doesn’t understand how sexual harassment works. The coach never has sex with all the top players.

A judge also sided with Butler. Judge Michael Getty of the Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago did not deny that abuse had taken place, but ruled in Butler’s favor because USA Volleyball had no policy against coach-athlete sex.USA Volleyball countered with an appeal, offering this statement: “It remains the position of USA Volleyball that the type of conduct which is alleged to have occurred, sexual intercourse between a coach and underage players, is and has always been totally unacceptable behavior in this and any similar organization, and that the law does not require an organization to have a specific rule outlawing each type of abhorrent behavior by specific description.”

“A code of ethics is not an issue that our board has ever had on the front burner,” explains Sandy Vivas, a board member of USA Volleyball who is also executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA). Sexual harassment workshops offered to coaches at the Nike Volleyball Festival in 1993 and at the AVCA’s national convention in 1995 were poorly attended.

Vivas and Debbie Hunter, director of educational development and services for USA Volleyball, have spent the past year drafting a code of ethics to be presented to the boards of both the AVCA and USA Volleyball in May. The detailed code prohibits all sexual comments, gestures, and physical contact, “even when an athlete invites” the contact. Coaches are forbidden from dating former athletes for at least two years after the professional relationship ends.

(Mariah Burton Nelson is the author of “The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports,” recently released in paperback by Avon Books. She can be reached via e-mail at: Mariahbn@aol.com.)