Safeguarding Youth in Sports: Strategies for Building a Safe and Supportive Environment

Introduction

Youth sports provide invaluable opportunities for young athletes to develop skills, build friendships, and learn important life lessons about teamwork, dedication, and healthy competition. With over 45 million children participating in organized sports in the United States alone, the popularity and reach of youth athletics is undeniable. However, ensuring player safety is paramount.

Youth sports safety means more than just preventing injuries. It also means creating an environment where youth can enjoy the benefits of sports participation while being safe from abuse.

According to a 2024 SafeSport Culture & Climate Survey Report, nearly 11% of athletes indicated that they had experienced unwanted sexual contact or sexually explicit behaviors during their sports involvement. Coaches or assistant coaches were the most common perpetrators (44%) of non-consensual sexual touching, followed by other athlete peers (40%), highlighting the critical need for robust safeguarding measures in youth sports programs.

Significant Risk Factors for Abuse in Youth Sports

Power Dynamics and Inherent Trust in Coaches

A natural power dynamic exists in the relationship between a coach and the athletes they coach. Athletes often place an enormous amount of trust in their coaches, relying on their guidance, expertise, and experience to make them better and help them succeed. This natural but risky dynamic can open the door for grooming in youth sports, allowing coaches to exploit the trust of athletes they coach.

Lack of Monitoring and Oversight

Coaches often develop trust with not just the athletes, but also with the athletes’ families and parents. In many sports programs, parents or guardians regularly drop their child(ren) off at practice and pick them up when it is over without staying to watch or supervise. Many organizations allow volunteer coaches to supervise practices themselves, with no other staff or management on site. This creates an environment where abuse is more likely to occur by providing easy opportunities for access to youth , along with privacy and control.

Environments around sporting events also provide those opportunities for privacy. Many incidents of youth-to-youth problematic sexual behavior occur in restrooms and locker rooms, which are frequently unmonitored and/or are open to the public.

High-Pressure, “Win-at-all-Costs” Culture

Youth sports programs can create high-pressure environments, where young athletes feel the weight of expectations to please their coaches, parents/guardians, or the program by performing well and succeeding. Over time, coaches can take advantage of the level of pressure that athletes experience, exploiting their drive to improve and win.  For example, a coach can convince an athlete who wants to improve to practice one-on-one with him or her outside of normal practice hours, spend time together on additional travel, or communicate frequently through unsupervised means like texting under the auspices of providing encouragement and guidance.

Inadequate Reporting Mechanisms

Many youth sports programs have ineffective systems for reporting abuse, or no reporting mechanisms at all. If reporting methods do not exist or are not widely publicized to everyone involved (parents, athletes, coaches, etc.), it can lead to underreporting and a lack of accountability for those who are allowed to push boundaries over time.

Athlete Protection Strategies & Creating Safe Sporting Environments –

Denying Offenders Access, Privacy & Control

Youth sports programs present tricky challenges. An adult offender needs three things to carry out an incident of abuse – access, privacy, and control – and youth sports can provide all three.

But there’s good news! Your program can enhance its culture of safety and protect young athletes by implementing robust safeguarding policies, providing comprehensive training, and fostering a supportive and transparent environment.

1. Comprehensive Screening Practices for Coaches

All coaches—whether staff or volunteer—should go through a rigorous screening process before you permit them to work with youth athletes. A background check alone is not enough to screen out offenders – many offenders discovered in youth serving spaces have had a clean record up to that point. Ensure coaches complete an application, interview, and reference checks to help fill in the gaps that would exist if you only required a background check.

Be comprehensive in the checks as well. There are multiple levels of background checks that should be completed for individuals with frequent or ongoing access to youth, including the National Sex Offender Registry and county-level checks that go back at least seven years.

If all of these screening methods sound normal or familiar, that’s because they are already considered standard practice – for staff. Since coaching is largely a volunteer role, we often find that organizations do not have as rigorous a screening process for these roles.

For even more information on the risks associated with failing to adequately screen and select the individuals that you trust with the youth in your programs, you can find Praesidium’s most recent white paper here.

2. Education and Training

Coaches, parents/guardians, and athletes should all be provided with tools to identify, respond to, and prevent abuse.

• Parents/guardians and youth should be provided with clear information about your organization’s abuse prevention policies, age-appropriate information for youth on how to protect themselves and identify inappropriate behavior and clear guidance about everyone’s options to make a report if they have any concerns. This information will help the youth feel empowered to say something if they or a fellow athlete is being abused, and guide parents/guardians if they notice or hear about something unsafe or outside of the program’s boundaries for acceptable behavior.
• Coaches should receive the same onboarding and ongoing training that your other youth-serving individuals are required to complete, including education about the types of abuse and identifying warning signs, mandated reporting procedures, and best practices for interacting with youth athletes. It is critical to define what is and is not acceptable within the sports program so that it is easy for someone to identify when a person is breaking the rules.
• Coaches should also be required to sign and comply with safety policies captured in an organizational Code of Conduct and/or handbook, acknowledging your program’s expectations related, but not limited, to the following:
• • One-on-One Interactions
  • Outside Contact and Private Lessons
  • Acceptable and Unacceptable Physical and Verbal Interactions
  • Gift Giving
  • Electronic Communication
  • Regular Monitoring and Evaluation
  • Travel and Overnight Guidelines

3. Creating a Healthy Reporting Environment

The first step in creating a healthy reporting environment is to ensure that your organization has adequate reporting procedures in place. Research shows that approximately 80% of abuse goes unreported, and encouraging open communication emphasizes the importance of creating an environment where athletes, their families, your staff and volunteers feel comfortable speaking up about concerns.

• It’s important to put in writing who the point person(s) is that receives reports as well as what the reporting procedure is and what information is important to report right away.
• Establish clear and confidential reporting mechanisms for athletes and parents to report any concerns and ensure that all reports are taken seriously and investigated promptly.
• Finally, the reporting methods must be publicized. This can be done in a variety of ways – posting signs throughout the space being used, informing youth at the beginning of practices, sending emails to parents, etc.

Conclusion

Developing a culture of safety within your sports programs will only happen with strong leadership. Creating a safe environment requires a proactive approach and a commitment to transparency, education, and vigilance. However, putting the work in to foster safe youth-serving spaces ensures that athletes, coaches, and parents will have the best experience possible in your program.

Praesidium can help you take action. Contact us for support on policy creation, risk assessment, guidance for implementation, or additional resources.

Download our Code of Conduct Resource: Establishing Safe Boundaries in Youth Sports