The competitive swimming news website SwimSwam offered a rehabilitative hand out to the UVA Swimming program this week, in the form of a puff piece highlighting head coach Todd DeSorbo’s approach to coaching women.
“Todd DeSorbo and the power of confidence,” published on Monday, somehow avoids even a single mention of the two-year probation handed down to DeSorbo’s associate head coach, Gary Taylor, who admitted to emotional misconduct of athletes at NC State, Auburn and Cavalier Aquatics, the competitive swim program at the Piedmont Family YMCA, dating back to 2015.
ICYMI
We broke the story on the probation in a report published on AFP on June 9, and in the course of our reporting for that first article, and several follow-ups, we’ve shared the stories of several swimmers, all teen girls or young women, who recounted their stories of emotional abuse involving Taylor.
You’d think the news involving Taylor would merit at least some mention in the SwimSwam article on DeSorbo, who was an assistant coach alongside Taylor at NC State, then recruited Taylor to the job at Cav Aquatics after Taylor decoupled from Auburn after three years as the head coach there.
Instead, we get a piece from contributor Aglaia Pezzato in which DeSorbo is allowed to muse on the “unique challenges” that come with coaching female athletes: “I always say, if I knew I was going to be a coach, I would have majored in psychology instead of accounting. Numbers and data are great, but confidence is everything.”
And then there’s this setup from Pezzato: “Todd’s biggest priority? Making sure his athletes believe in themselves,” after which we get a lofty-sounding quote from DeSorbo.
“Day-to-day training is centered around building confidence. By the time they step up on the blocks, they should already know they’re ready. If they’ve done the work, they should feel good about their training and be confident in their ability to perform.”
Contrast these observations from DeSorbo about the importance of “building confidence” with the complaints shared with us by Taylor’s former swimmers at Auburn:
- One athlete who wrote that Taylor had confronted her about taking a mental-health break to go home one weekend said the coach “never once asked if I was okay or anything and made me feel guilty for my mental health and trying to take care of it.”
- Taylor, in a meeting with another swimmer, who he had told repeatedly one swim season that she was not getting results in the pool because she “lacked confidence,” asked her, when she pushed back against another assertion on her lack of confidence, “Are you on your period?”
- Another swimmer described how Taylor had taken an innocuous comment that she had made to him during a recruiting phone call – that she was “excited to race for something bigger than myself and be a part of the outstanding legacy that Auburn possesses” – against her for the next two years.
- Another swimmer who had an asthma attack during a dry-land training exercise, and said Taylor advised a trainer, “don’t help her, she’s fine,” and later lost her spot on the team, wrote that she is “terrified for the girls that are still being coached by him and will have to put up with his verbal abuse.”
A former Cav Aquatics swimmer featured in a July 7 AFP article might have had the most heartbreaking story to tell.
ICYMI
- The toll of emotional abuse on a young swimmer: ‘I haven’t been able to get through a practice without planning how I’d end my life’
- UVA All-American: ‘The kids that quit at Cavalier Aquatics had horrible attitudes’
The young woman, now a junior swimming at an ACC school, shared with me her complaint to the U.S. Center for SafeSport written in 2022, when she was a high-school junior.
“All of my life, I have been living through the doubt of myself, faltered confidence and overthinking. I have never thought that I was good enough, and when Gary convinced me that I was doing nothing right, I believed him. Here I am now. I haven’t been able to get through a practice without planning how I’d end my life, and I love this sport, I really do, and always have, but not like this. By my choice, my life has always revolved around swimming; it means everything to me. I have always attempted to detach my worth from swimming. Now that time has come with ruthless force, for I am no longer able to love myself while loving this sport.”
DeSorbo, who in the SwimSwam article was quoted claiming to believe that his female swimmers “should feel good about their training and be confident in their ability to perform,” hired Taylor to his UVA staff in May 2024, as the SafeSport investigation into emotional misconduct that led to a Notice of Decision putting Taylor on probation effective March 17 was ongoing.
Some pushback from Pezzato on the Taylor situation would seem to have been in order, but I write that assuming that the article was ever meant to be actual journalism, and not thinly disguised PR.
I get why SwimSwam would do what they did here – DeSorbo has coached the women’s team at UVA to five straight national titles, and he was the coach of the women’s national team at the 2024 Olympics, leading that group to 19 medals, including six golds.
There’s a reason it took somebody like me, outside the swim news community, to break the story on Taylor.
I don’t make money covering swimming.
UVA Athletics is the entity that should be embarrassed with this story.
I wrote last week about how I’d emailed DeSorbo and the athletics director, Carla Williams, to advise them to issue a statement showing contrition, and noting that “UVA Athletics is aware of the issues with Gary Taylor, note that he has received some sort of training, retraining, counseling, whatever is the case to help him deal with the issues that led to the probation, and have Gary make some sort of statement to the same effect.”
“Pretending that nothing happened and hoping the story will just go away is not the UVA Way,” I concluded that email.
ICYMI
The statement that I got back, from a UVA Athletics spokesperson – “We are committed to providing a safe and supportive environment where all of our student-athletes can thrive. Any form of abuse or harmful behavior is taken very seriously and won’t be tolerated. Per UVA policy, we are unable to comment on specific matters involving student-athletes or personnel.” – is the living, breathing definition of “pretending that nothing happened and hoping the story will just go away.”
This fawning article in SwimSwam, though, isn’t hoping the story goes away – this is something else entirely.
They’re rubbing our noses in it now.
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Chris Graham
