I would echo the message that what you bring to the field, the pool or the court is heaviness from life. There are items people can't change, be it their sex, sexuality, ethnicity, race or gender. When those become the issue, the sport becomes the place where you don't want to be, and you don't want to spend your time on it. It's too much of a challenge, and most people won't stick around for it.
It's unfortunate when you see elite athletes getting to the top level and being put in this position. They've worked their entire lives on this, yet they're uncomfortable and feel unsafe in this environment. They ask, “What can I do about this?” Then they stick it out, like they stuck out their hamstring injury and stuck out something else that they tried to put behind them, and they perform. That's why I love the message of the holistic athlete. That's the way to do this.
For the safe sport program we dealt with, I think too much of it relied on the good nature of the person in the position of receiving the information, the complaint from the athlete or the anonymous message that came in, and not on the process. That's why making the process efficient and effective is so vital to helping an athlete and ensuring that when a complaint comes in, it's dealt with in an appropriate way.
Too much of this relied on a gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper had an interest in the performance of the team, the sport or the outcome. As we said, it's about the medals. We found the most problems when the gatekeepers of reporting were also the same people responsible for outcomes on the field or on the court. That was the number one challenge we ran into.
My biggest piece of advice would be to look through your processes to see if the reporting is coming in through a channel with someone who has an interest in other items outside of a player's welfare. The player's welfare is more than just the outcome on the field or on the podium. It can't only be that. I think that's where we had some success, in that we were removing people and positions from the process that had anything to do with performance. Of course, you must have performance reporters and the people involved who are with athletes every day, but you should also have an alternative place where athletes can go and where steps will be taken no matter what happens.
I give credit to the safe sport program for the mechanism and process that was put in place, but this relies on our constantly rechecking and evaluating annually, if not more often, for effective outcomes of what we're looking for. Are athletes making reports that are making it to the right place? Are they all taken seriously? Are they all being followed up on?