250 - Missed Opportunities for Safer Practices in Youth Sports: Surveying Community Awareness of the U.S. Center for SafeSport

Publication Number: 2240.250

Grace Malley, Joseph M. Sanzari Children's Hospital Hackensack University Medical Center, Lyndhurst, NJ, United States; Timothy W. Watkins, Joseph M. Sanzari Children's Hospital Hackensack University Medical Center, Hackensack, NJ, United States

Background: Sports participation offers significant physical and psychological benefits for youth but also poses risks of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Athletes may be particularly vulnerable due to power imbalances between coaches and athletes, unsupervised one-on-one interactions, and the trust and authority often granted to coaches within their communities.

The U.S. Center for SafeSport (USCSS) was established in 2017 to prevent and address abuse and misconduct in youth sports. Research on its effectiveness is limited and mostly within Olympic settings. Despite this, SafeSport's educational training and reporting mechanisms represent valuable tools to enhance safety across youth sport environments.

Objective: We aimed to explore two themes with a survey: the level of familiarity among athletic directors (ADs) with USCSS and its resources, and secondly to identify additional opportunities to enhance safe practices in youth sports. The study sought to explore opportunities for future community-based initiatives aimed at promoting safe sport practices.

Design/Methods: The IRB-approved cross-sectional survey was formulated by the authors and consisted of 10 question items each with 2-3 categorical response options. Five questions assessed familiarity with the USCSS and its resources, and 5 sought to identify opportunities to enhance safe practice in scholastic athletics. The study was administered electronically to middle and high school ADs in Northern New Jersey during attendance at their quarterly meeting. Immediately following a brief presentation by the authors on the general topic of child maltreatment, all ADs in attendance were invited to complete the survey. Data were analyzed with one-sample chi-squared tests for each item.

Results: Twenty-five ADs completed the survey. Only 12% of respondents were "very familiar" with USCSS and most (88%) reported that staff and student-athletes in their district were "neither required nor encouraged" to complete USCSS educational courses. Furthermore, nearly half (48%) were unaware that multiple forms of abuse are reportable to USCSS. All respondents indicated that their school has a reporting protocol for concerns of abuse or misconduct, yet 80% believed their district could improve this process.

Conclusion(s): ADs have direct oversight of youth athletic programs, yet most in our region were unfamiliar with USCSS and did not utilize its resources. This gap may extend across communities and underscores the potential benefit for broader dissemination of SafeSport resources and the implementation of measures to protect children from maltreatment in youth sports.

Survey Questions


Survey Responses


One-Sample Chi-Squared Test Results
We performed one-sample chi-squared testing for each survey question. The expected distribution was random (uniform), assuming equal probability for each response option. The null hypothesis for all survey items was that respondents' answers would follow the expected distribution. For items with p-value < 0.05, we rejected the null hypothesis, indicating a poor fit of the observed distribution to the expected distribution. n=25 respondents for each question item.