The tip that led to Monday’s report on UVA Swimming assistant coach Gary Taylor showed up in my inbox three weeks ago.
I wasn’t the first reporter contacted about Taylor, who is serving a two-year probation after an investigation by the U.S. Center for SafeSport that concluded with Taylor admitting to emotional misconduct while coaching swimmers from 2015 to 2022 at North Carolina State, Auburn and Cavalier Aquatics.
ICYMI
“The Daily Progress has been contacted and may be working something, but they seem to be dragging their feet,” the tipster wrote to me in a May 22 email that led to our work on the Taylor story.
“A local radio station was also contacted, but they won’t publish due to the YMCA advertising on their platform. So much for independent media,” the tipster wrote.
It’s not as if I don’t know why no one else wanted to touch this story.
First, it involves the University of Virginia, a monolith and main economic driver locally and regionally.
It’s not so much that UVA goes out of its way to kill negative stories as, the local and regional media tend to know to comply in advance, which, yes, if you’re reading this, and it feels like I’m targeting you, I know that sounds harsh, and I’m not, just letting people in on the secret.
Second, and probably a bigger factor with this specific story, it involves the UVA Swimming program, and Todd DeSorbo, who has led his women’s swimming team to five straight national championships, and was the head coach of the U.S. Women’s National Team that won 19 medals in the 2024 Summer Olympics, with six golds.
The story of Taylor’s emotional abuse of his swimmers at NC State, Auburn and Cavalier Aquatics directly involves DeSorbo, who coached with Taylor at NC State, recruited Taylor to the Cavalier Aquatics job in 2021, after Taylor had left Auburn under a cloud, then hired him as his associate head coach at UVA Swimming last year.
DeSorbo also coaches youth athletes at Cavalier Aquatics, and it would have been hard for him not to notice the departures of half of the competitive swim team in Taylor’s first year, against a backdrop of complaints from parents about Taylor’s demeanor that continue to pile up.
DeSorbo would have also been among those contacted by SafeSport when it issued its Notice of Decision, which included the two-year probation for Taylor, in the Taylor case on March 17.
I’ve been getting emails from parents of Cavalier Aquatics swimmers since the story went live on Monday who are irate over not having been notified by the program or by the Piedmont Family YMCA, the youth program’s host organization, about the findings in the case or the two-year probation, and that they had to learn about the matter from a media report.
This is precisely why somebody in the local media needed to do the heavy lifting on this story.
Yes, it looks bad on Todd DeSorbo – and his five national championships, and Olympics glory.
It also looks bad on Carla Williams, the athletics director at UVA, who, from my reporting, was aware of the investigation into Taylor in real-time, even ahead of the final dispensation in the case.
To be clear here, no, I didn’t want to have to be the guy to write this story, any more than anybody else wanted to have to be the guy or gal to write this story – obviously there, right, because others were given the chance before me, and none took up the cause.
Some reading here won’t believe this, but, no, I don’t want something that I write to take somebody down.
Writing an op-ed on what to do about a football coach who doesn’t win enough isn’t the same universe as reporting on a coach who admitted to years of emotional misconduct involving athletes.
My goal here was simply to shed light on what is going on here, and hope that the proper authorities – Carla Williams at UVA Athletics, the folks in charge of operations at the Piedmont Family YMCA – would take some sort of action as a result.
We’re on Day 3 of this story being out there, and it’s still crickets from both UVA Athletics and the Piedmont Family YMCA.
And crickets from the rest of the local and regional media.
I wouldn’t mind others piling on here at all.
To me, more reporting on this from the mainstream media in the area – I didn’t make up the “fringe media” epithet for myself all on my own – would serve to reinforce the seriousness of this matter.
I hope the silence isn’t about fear of losing a seat in the press box in the fall.
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Chris Graham
