Former Olympian and national team coach Conal Groom was accused of abusing young rowers. Colleagues, parents and regulators failed to act.
“It’s a great spawning ground for people that want to groom children, with highly motivated children whose parents are all-in to do it,” she said. “It serves it on a silver platter. I’m not like the only kid who’s ever wanted something so bad they would do anything for it.”
But from the beginning, his training tactics and explosive temper drowned some rowing careers in their wake. In 2007, Olympic hopeful Samantha Twardowski was training at Pocock when, she said, an incoming speedboat submerged her boat. Twardowski confronted Groom for not warning her. Groom, in response, grabbed her by her shoulders, cursed at her and threw her to the ground, as other rowers stood by and watched, Twardowski said. She left the boathouse and never returned.
The center’s plan, the letter said, was to suspend Groom without pay for two months from coaching the elite scullers. Groom, however, would remain in his paid role as director, the letter stated, adding that “it is impractical to prohibit contact with team members.” In 2010, Groom and Nagy struck out on their own, opening the for-profit Seattle Rowing Center out of a canal warehouse. Groom said their goal was to emulate European training methods by starting rowers as young as 8 years old in small boats. Young children, Groom
At SRC, Nancy Miles became one of Groom’s most successful protégées. His obvious power in the sport normalized his conduct, she said. Yet she returned to the boathouse every summer, feeling beholden to his power over her rowing career, she said. When Miles was training with other scullers for the World Rowing Championships in 2013, Groom grew angry that they didn’t follow an instruction. Miles said Groom cornered one of the women and while screaming at her, used his hand to pound the wall beside her head.
“To talk to high school girls like that was a hundred ways of wrong,” Schulte said. She attempted to complain to USRowing, she said, but the organization never followed up. It was a windy and frigid winter day on Lake Washington. Their boat began to take on water. They were so afraid that they considered climbing the ladder of a nearby bridge onto the highway overhead. Ultimately, they bailed out their boat with water bottles and returned, according to a written account he later shared with regulators.
Groom, she wrote, “has done far too much damage to athletes, to the community and to the sport to allow him to remain part of competitive rowing.” Glenn Merry, CEO of USRowing at the time, declined to comment. Kraus, the current CEO, would not discuss “the organization’s decision-making at the time,” she wrote in an email. “What I can say is that the current leadership team has zero tolerance for this sort of behavior.”
“Given Conal’s history this failure and its implicit sanctioning of his behavior ensure you will have the opportunity to revisit the issue,” the father wrote. “The children who will inevitably be harmed in the interim are on you.” But that season would be their last together in Seattle. A couple of months earlier, Groom had emailed that he and Nagy were leaving town, blaming their departure on rising costs on the city’s waterfront. “I ask that instead of being angry, upset, and disappointed, we all take a moment and celebrate the community we have grown,” he wrote.Groom and Nagy’s new base of operation was on the patchy banks of Cachuma Lake, land owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
In messages reviewed by The Post, Groom wrote that she was “f---ing model beautiful,” called her “babe,” told her he loved her and that he was not “breaking up with [her] never ever.” He urged her to send him “modeling shots.” “Yum, yummy,” he wrote when she obliged and sent him selfies. Groom offered to buy alcohol for the girl and her underage friends.
Heywood, the Olympic hopeful, lived for a time with the girl’s family in Santa Ynez. Groom screamed at the girl more than others and “tended to get more physical with her,” Heywood said. She recalled the girl appearing to suffer a panic attack while training on a machine. Groom, angry that she had stopped rowing, grabbed the handle out of her hand, pulled her to the side and screamed in her face, Heywood said.
Before a regatta, the girl said, Groom pointed out every SafeSport official at the event and told her to “act normal” around them. But when they were back alone, she said, he continued to yell at her, including that she was a “bitch” and a “slut.” Groom then placed his hands on her upper thighs, she said. He brushed his hand across her breast, knocking off the spaghetti strap of her dress. When she stood up to leave, Groom grabbed her by the arms, saying: “No, you can’t go.” He had her sit across his lap.
A few days later Nagy sent an email to the other directors of Mission Rowing saying that she had a “long and productive conversation” with Groom about the girl’s allegations. “He owned the behavior, the drunkenness and sadly acknowledged that he’d spent most of the weekend considering committing suicide,” Nagy wrote, according to a later police report that quoted the email in full.
SafeSport’s code states that it is able to take temporary measures, such as suspending a coach pending a full investigation to maintain the safety of athletes. But in Groom’s case, it didn’t act for months. In July 2022, nearly a year after the alleged sexual assault, the detective sent his report to prosecutors. “Based on the information learned during this investigation,” the detective wrote, “it is apparent that Conal Groom committed the offense” of annoying or molesting a child, an offense that in California requires those convicted to register as a sex offender.the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Groom.
SafeSport, meanwhile, continues to investigate. Investigators at the notoriously short-staffed nonprofit have reached a formal resolution on only 1,877 of 12,751 complaints — roughly one out of seven — in its history, according to. In March of this year, more than a year and a half into its probe, SafeSport told a witness in Groom’s case that its report on Groom is “currently under review” and that there was no timeline for its completion.
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