SafeSport won’t say anything about the two-year probation it gave to UVA Swimming associate head coach Gary Taylor, making it hard to know exactly what led Taylor to admit to emotional misconduct involving athletes that he had coached at NC State, Auburn and Cavalier Aquatics.
I’ve been able to track down one of the complaints from a Cav Aquatics athlete submitted to the investigatory body in 2022.
“Because of how he treated me and the culture he created, I was so convinced that I was worth nothing, but I’ll tell you this, I’m worth a hell of a lot more than what he’s put me through, and I won’t be convinced that this is what I’m worth,” the young swimmer who filed the complaint, now a rising college junior competing for an ACC school, wrote in the lengthy statement to SafeSport that she submitted as a high-school junior three years ago.
The swimmer reached out to me after reading our initial story on Taylor’s probation last month, telling me she was hesitant at first “because I was instilled with fear with how this would fare for my younger sister, who just finished college recruiting. I know Gary has allies within the swim world, and I have had teammates who stood against him and may have lost offers because of it,” she told me.
ICYMI
The swimmer had been involved with the Charlottesville YMCA Aquatics Club program and the Cav Aquatics program for eight years when Taylor was hired to serve as the youth program’s head coach in September 2021, four months after he’d left after three years as the head coach at Auburn – that uncoupling described at the time as the school and the coach having “mutually agreed to part ways.”
It wouldn’t be known publicly that a group of Auburn swimmers and swim parents had lodged emotional-misconduct complaints against Taylor ahead of that “mutual” parting of the ways until we reported on the two-year probation from SafeSport last month.
The Piedmont Family YMCA, the parent organization of Cavalier Aquatics, has since informed parents that the first complaints from swimmers at Cav Aquatics date to 2021, so, within Taylor’s first four months on the job.
ICYMI
By the end of Taylor’s first full year on the job, half of the swimmers in the program had quit, but it seemed to swimmers and their parents that the staff, administration and board of directors at the YMCA were circling the wagons around Taylor, instead of trying to get at the root of the what was going on.
“Numerous emails were sent from swimmers quitting the team to the board, and the only way this was addressed was after practice one day, and it was not addressed in a positive or healthy way. Gary pulled the girls team aside and asked kids to raise their hands if they or their parents had ever complained about him,” the swimmer told me.
“This singled kids out and made kids scared to voice their concerns, as they knew that Gary would find out and would likely call them out negatively for it. In the same meeting, he asked us to raise our hands if we thought we had tried at practice that day. He then told us all to put our hands down, because we were lying to ourselves, and had a talk about how none of us were working as hard as the guys.”
The focus from Taylor on the teen girls on the Cav Aquatics team was part of a pattern, the swimmer noted.
“The criteria to be a favorite differed evidently between the girls and boys teams. For the boys, being chosen as a favorite usually had more to do with talent, work ethic and personality. For the girls, it was clear that appearance played a role in Gary’s opinion of them, and therefore the manner in which they were treated,” the swimmer told me, sharing her observation that “blonde girls who were skinny enough to be deemed ‘fit’ and ‘in shape’ by Gary quickly moved up in his personal rankings, while girls who did not fit these standards had to suffer through their physical attributes being negatively commented on.”
The swimmer then alleged that the comments might have crossed a line of appropriateness at one swim meet in 2022.
“Gary started complimenting one girl’s appearance. He said, ‘Did you bleach your hair? It looks really good.’ She replied ‘no,’ and he responded by emphasizing how much he loved the color,” the swimmer said. “Witnessing this and feeling slightly uncomfortable, I jokingly said, ‘Shouldn’t we be complimenting something about her personality or like how hard she’s working, not her looks?’ He replied, ‘Girls love it when you compliment their looks. Isn’t that all what you like to hear?’
“This girl was 15 at the time. I didn’t even fully realize how disgusting it was for him to make a comment like that to a minor, but the more time that passes, the more I have grown aware.”
The swimmer telling this story, for the record, isn’t a tall, thin blonde, and she said she was told by Taylor she was “not tall enough to be a successful swimmer, and that I needed to re-evaluate my potential in the sport,” she told me.
She didn’t go into it again as a college junior, but this comment reminded me of something I’d read in her statement to SafeSport from 2022, and it’s heartbreaking.
“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,” she wrote three years ago.
“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.”
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Our ACC swimmer assures me that she’s not at that low point anymore, but man, you have to wonder.
“I am lucky to have had the time and distance to build myself up from the emotional state I was in after my junior year of high school,” the swimmer told me.
Her struggles are why she felt like she wanted me to help tell her story.
“I truly hope that more stories of experiences with Gary are able to be shared to limit his power over the swim world and the lives of many aspiring athletes. I don’t want others to have to go through what my teammates and I did,” she said.
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Chris Graham
