Women athletes are being mistreated across the board
How many times can the system fail its female athletes? Today’s newest report of an abusive coach from The Athletic feels like it’s just the next in a long line of the mistreatment of female athletes by their coaches and institutions willingly overlooking complaints.
The case reported on today is somewhat more high-profile because of who the coach was — Cynthia Cooper-Dyke, described as the “Michael Jordan of women’s basketball” — is a pillar of the sport, having made a name for herself as one of the greatest players of all time on the college, professional, and international levels. Perhaps that is why she was able to keep moving from college job to college job as her athletes came forward and were turned away at the door, administration standing firmly by Cooper-Dyke as she allegedly abused basketball players physically, mentally, and emotionally.
The report is somewhat graphic in its detail, describing Cooper-Dyke calling her players “bitch,” “pussy,” and “retarded,” pretending to perform oral sex on a male assistant coach, commenting frequently and inappropriately on her athletes’ sex lives, forcing athletes to play through injuries, and physically punishing one athlete to the point where she was vomiting profusely and had skin scraped off of her knees and shoulders. It goes on — at UNC-Wilmington, at USC, at Texas Southern, at Prairie View A&M. Some former players spoke on the record, and others off, but the sentiment abounded: Cooper-Dyke had severely abused her power as a trusted adult in these girls’ lives.
And it’s happening on every level of women’s sports. Take the NWSL a professional league in which multiple coaches were accused of abuse just last year in the form of racist and bigoted statements, verbal abuse, and even sexual coercion directed toward players. Last month, the head coach of the University of Florida women’s soccer team was fired after complaints of verbal abuse just one season in. The Syracuse women’s basketball coach resigned in 2021 after players came forward with allegations of physical harassment and abusive language. Illinois fired their head women’s basketball coach in 2017 after players filed a lawsuit alleging a racially abusive environment within the program.
https://deadspin.com/women-athletes-are-being-mistreated-across-the-board-1848887855