The U.S. Center for SafeSport now gets more than 1,000 reports of misconduct every month. That's a 160% increase over the last six years.
Most of those reports come from the grassroots — volunteer coaches, club teams, rec leagues. Not the Olympic pipeline.
At the Project Play Summit in Boston yesterday, our CEO Seth Lieberman sat on a panel with Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, the new CEO of the U.S. Center for SafeSport, and Tom Farrey, founder of the Aspen Institute's Project Play. The panel went past policy. It got into the practical reality of running a safe program when nobody agrees on what "safe" requires.
Three things stood out.
Massachusetts requires a CORI check. New Hampshire, 40 minutes north, doesn't. California requires a Live Scan fingerprint. Pennsylvania has its own rules. Thirty-two states have their own background check requirements. The Olympic NGBs layer their own rules on top.
A coach cleared in one state may be unknown in the next. A volunteer who completed abuse prevention training for one league has to start over for the league across town.
That's friction. Real friction, that costs directors hours every week and burns out the volunteers they're trying to recruit.
Seth's argument on stage was the one we've been making to clubs and parks departments for two years, and it's still counterintuitive: programs that put safety first attract more families, retain more coaches, and pay less for insurance.
Here's the logic. If you're a parent, you put your kid where you trust the adults. You don't pick the program with the best logo. You pick the program where the coaches were checked, trained, and held accountable.
That trust shows up in enrollment. It shows up in coach retention. It shows up in your insurance premium. Compliance isn't a tax. It's a flywheel.
Tom asked Benita what's possible by the 2028 LA Olympics. Both she and Seth landed on the same word.
Not money. Not buy-in. Not awareness.
Friction.
Coaches who can't tell which training counts. Directors who don't know which background check satisfies which rule. Agencies that can't share credentials with each other. The system makes it hard to do the right thing, and then we wonder why people don't do the right thing.
Benita's two-year vision: a gold medal safety plan — consensus on standards, accountability for enforcement, and a way to fund the work. SafeSport's federal allocation has been flat at $20 million a year since 2020, with no cost-of-living adjustment, while reports have climbed 160%. The math doesn't work without policy change and outside partners pulling weight.
Seth's framing: take the friction out, and the rest follows.
The policy fight will play out over the coming years. The 2028 Olympics are coming. The reports keep climbing. Federal legislation will get drafted, whether or not it passes this Congress.
Directors don't have to wait for that.
The clubs and rec departments we work with already know what good looks like: one place to track who's cleared, what they're trained on, and when credentials expire. Coaches who don't redo paperwork every season. Parents who can trust that their kid's coach was checked.
That's the work. And it's why safety-first clubs end up ahead of the ones still chasing paper.