By David D. Dodge
david@sprtsoc.com
Although the sports industry has been rocked and roiled by one scandal after another, the typical response of a team or a league or a sports organization has been to react to each disgrace as an isolated, one-time incident and hope what’s been made public is the end of the matter. This determined refusal to establish an enterprise-wide system for receiving reports of abuse all but assures that outside parties will step in to clean up the mess.
And so it is that in mid-November the U.S. Senate passed legislation introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein and others to compel amateur athletics governing bodies to report sex-abuse allegations immediately to law enforcement. The House had earlier passed similar legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support. On each occasion, legislators celebrated the event by lambasting sports officials for not doing their job. [Read more…]