Betrayal of Trust: A Coach Reflects on the Megan Brown story
A COACH REFLECT SON THE MEGAN BROWN STORY AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR CANADIAN ATHLETES
When former national champion Megan Brown’s story of abuse by her coach, Dave Scott-Thomas, exploded onto the pages of The Globe and Mail in February, the running world was shocked – not only about what happened to Brown, but at the indifference shown by those who should have, and could have, helped. Thankfully, things are starting to change at the highest levels of Canadian sport.
Next to their families, young athletes may spend more time with their coach than anyone else. It’s a relationship of trust, and when that trust is broken, as it was in Megan Brown’s case, the repercussions are devastating
As far as the athletes knew, their coach was on a leave of absence. How were they to know that an athlete had raised issues about inappropriate behaviour that had led the university to suspend one of the premier track coaches in the country? That allegations of a sexual relationship with a high school athlete from almost 20 years ago were soon to be levelled against the man behind the most successful track and field program in Canadian history? That they would inadvertently become part of the system that closed ranks around this successful coach – just as both the university and the sport’s national governing body had in 2006, when they first learned of the relationship.
The athletes found themselves sticking to the party line, because that’s the only one they knew.
“Where was Dave today?” I asked one of the runners from the Guelph cross-country program after the Ontario University Cross Country Championships in October, 2019, wondering where head coach Dave Scott-Thomas was.
“He’s taking some time off – family issues,” he said.
A few days later I was in Guelph for an interview for Triathlon Magazine Canada. I took the opportunity to track down an athlete who did a lot of training at the university and asked if he had heard anything about Scott-Thomas.
“I’ve heard that Dave had an inappropriate relationship with an athlete,” he said. “I hope the university doesn’t try to sweep it under the carpet.”
A few days later I brought up what I’d heard with some of the other writers and editors at Canadian Running. They, too, had heard the rumours. I let them know I would keep trying to find out what I could.
I didn’t feel even remotely comfortable asking these questions. I’d known Scott-Thomas for decades. He’d been a training partner of my sister’s – the two were coached by Pete Grinbergs in late ’80s and early ’90s. I’d also known numerous athletes he had coached. I remember personally congratulating him at the finish line of the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in 2012, where I was announcing at the finish line when two of his athletes, Reid Coolsaet and Eric Gillis, qualified for the Olympic marathon. Chris Moulton, an assistant coach at Guelph, recruited my daughter to the Guelph program. (She ended up running at McMaster University.) Scott-Thomas went out of his way to find me at the 2015 Pan Am Games, where he served as one of the national team coaches, to congratulate me on my announcing at the marathon and race walking events. A year later he served as a reference for some other announcing events I applied to.
That reference meant a lot. Scott-Thomas was renowned as one of Canada’s premier coaches. He’d coached countless Olympians, won numerous national titles – at one point 12 women’s university titles in a row for Guelph – and his Speed River Track & Field Club was considered the premier distance program in the country.
I reached out to Scott-Thomas, but never heard back. My original source from Guelph tried to get an athlete to speak to me on the record, but she was unwilling. I reached out to Coolsaet, who told me that he’d been in contact with Scott-Thomas and confirmed the “leave” story – as far as he knew, Scott-Thomas was in Japan spending some time with his three daughters. Other writers at the magazine reached out to athletes who had been involved in the Guelph program, who either did not respond or said they didn’t know anything.
In mid-December we learned that the University of Guelph had fired Scott-Thomas. Athletics Canada severed its relationship with the program and started an investigation into its relationship with the coach.
On March 25, Scott-Thomas was banned from spectating at Athletics Canada or affiliated events for five years (other than those in which his children are participants). He is banned from coaching Athletics Canada members or affiliated club or association members for life.
Afew months later Michael Doyle, a former editor of this magazine, published a shocking story about the events that led to Scott-Thomas’s firing. The coach is alleged to have had a sexual relationship with one of the athletes he coached in the early 2000s, Megan Brown.
“Now 35, Ms. Brown has decided to end her silence,” Doyle wrote, “alleging Mr. Scott-Thomas groomed her as a 17-year-old for a sexual relationship that ended abruptly with her departure from the school a year later.”
My source needn’t have worried – the University of Guelph was hardly sweeping anything under the carpet – not this time, anyway. In a statement, the school said that, had it known in 2006 what it
knew now, it would have fired Scott-Thomas then. Doyle’s story, though, made it clear that both the university and Athletics Canada could have, and should have, been able to learn those details. Instead, Scott-Thomas was lauded as a superstar in the track community for the next 13 years.
As long as the results kept coming in – national championships for Guelph and Olympic athletes for Athletics Canada – neither organization seemed inclined to look any further.
Megan Brown found herself in a power dynamic with ScottThomas not unlike that between former movie producer Harvey Weinstein and his accusers. Like Weinstein, Scott-Thomas had the ability to make or break a career – you could either be part of the best running program in the country and get the inside track to a national team spot and the best racing opportunities, or not. Brown was a child prodigy who seemed destined to become one of Canada’s best runners. After leaving Guelph she would win a number of national titles while running for the University of Toronto and working with coach Hugh Cameron, but her road to the Olympics was always derailed by the presence of Scott-Thomas at the sport’s highest level.
“This is how abuse of power works – the one in a place of power stays protected by the victim because the victim has too much to lose in speaking the truth,” she told Doyle. “The victim is the one who suffers, who is ostracized, who is labelled, who is forced to rebuild their life, while the person in power continues to reap the benefits of their power.”
The power dynamic in the workplace is one thing – when it comes to a coaching relationship, though, things move to an entirely new level. Brown had lost her mother as a teenager, and running was one of the ways she dealt with her grief. At the time she met Scott-Thomas, she was technically a child, and vulnerable. And he was much more than just her coach – he had quickly become a trusted friend. A coaching relationship can be very healthy, as Gabriela DeBues-Stafford describes in the sidebar to this story – but the nature of the relationship means the potential for abuse is always present.
Unfortunately, sexual impropriety and abuse of trust between coaches and athletes are not new in Canadian track and field. In March 2019, former Ottawa Lions Track & Field Club board chair Ken Porter was accused of sexually interfering with nine teenaged male athletes by Athletics Canada commissioner Frank Fowlie, and former head coach Andy McInnis was accused of sexually harassing a female athlete. McInnis appealed, and in December an arbitrator ordered his case back to Athletics Canada for reconsideration by another commissioner. McInnis remains provisionally suspended, pending the outcome of the new investigation.
Ann Peel, a former national team member and Olympic race walker, published an opinion piece about both the Ottawa and Guelph situations in The Globe and Mail on February 14.
While noting that “there have been no criminal charges against any of the men and none of the allegations have been proven in court,”
Peel decried Athletics Canada’s history of looking the other way while abusive coaches behaved with impunity.
I’ve known Peel for longer than I’ve known Scott-Thomas. When it comes to game-changers in the sport, I put her at the top of the list. Many years ago, I watched her compete at a national championship just months after giving birth to one of her children in order to maintain her carding status. She was in the process of pushing Athletics Canada to revamp its carding process, allowing women to maintain their support during and after their pregnancies. After pushing the envelope around the carding issue, she helped form Athletescan, an organization that gave athletes more of a voice in sport.
The issues aren’t always sexual. In the Globe story, Doyle reported that numerous athletes and former athletes described Scott-Thomas as “emotionally withdrawn, egotistical and difficult to please.” Many had left the program.
In 2014, Dave Scott-Thomas verbally berated Jenn DowlingMedley, a Guelph runner, at a party after the Canadian Interuniversity track championships. In a Facebook post she pointed out that “not only did no one intervene (five minutes is quite a long time to intervene in a small bar!), no one even asked if I was OK when I ran to the bathroom afterwards.”
Other athletes have come forward to express their concerns about the “win at all costs” attitude at Guelph that saw them encouraged to run through injuries and other issues.
I asked Peel about this. “Own the Podium ( otp) needs to be held accountable,” she says, referring to the program launched in 2005 by the Canadian government as a way to improve our results at the Olympics – specifically aiming for medal performances at the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver. “I know from my time on the board at Athletics Canada, and from friends in high positions in other sports, that otp forces sports to keep abusive, bullying coaches if they are winning medals. As the main source of funds for most sports, otp has helped to build and to perpetuate that culture – they position winning medals as ambitious, a change in sporting culture for the better, etc.”
But this has been happening for much longer than Own the Podium has been in place, I argue. What about the 1980s, when many of us in the track community knew what was going on with Charlie Francis (former coach of Ben Johnson who in 1988 was stripped of his 100m Olympic gold medal after testing positive for stanozolol) and his sprint program, but the Canadian Track and Field Association ( ctfa) – now Athletics Canada – seemed to turn a blind eye.
“In the ’80s, the ctfa was told about all that was going on at York,” Peel says, but, at the time, the top officials at the ctfa claimed they “couldn’t act without a ‘smoking gun,’” Peel remembers, “which they would have had if they’d just randomly driven up to the track one day. They didn’t care to do so.
“I agree that the leadership of ctfa/ac has had a tendency to look the other way,” she continues. “Sport Canada, otp and sponsor funds f low with medals.”
In other words, if you want to stay in business, you need to keep winning.
Unfortunately, sexual impropriety and abuse of trust between coaches and athletes are not new in