D6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23 , 2021
Dames, including the fact that
they were dating someone, fear-
ing he would use it against them.
“I realized that this man would
use information he has about me
in a way that will harm me and in
a way that he can manipulate me,”
one of those players said. “I don’t
want him to know about the
things that matter most to me.”
Dames, like a number of other
NWSL coaches, came to the
league from youth soccer, where
he still heads the elite youth club
that he founded, Chicago Eclipse
Select. He is known for cultivat-
ing Red Stars players from the
Chicago area, and he has known
some of his professional players
since they were teenagers. Eclipse
Select did not respond to a re-
quest for comment.
Some Red Stars players have
praised Dames’s toughness pub-
licly, saying it has shaped them
into better competitors. After the
Red Stars’ loss in the NWSL
championship game Saturday,
one star player, Morgan Gautrat,
called him “the glue that’s held
this team together.... He’s
pushed us, and at the same time
he’s made people better.”
One longtime Red Stars player,
Danielle Colaprico, recounted
this year that Dames’s treatment
had sometimes left her “dis-
traught” but that she believed it
was because “he wants to get the
best out of us.”
“It’s not like he does anything
without a reason,” Colaprico told
the website the Equalizer for an
article headlined “Rory Dames is
the last coach standing.” In it, she
described how Dames had yelled
at her after an early game. A
teammate had reassured her that
Dames was “just in one of his
moods,” she said.
“That’s the thing that I have
taken away is that if I’m getting
yelled at, there’s always going to
be a reason,” Colaprico said. “It’s
just a matter of finding that
reason.”
But for other players, Dames’s
treatment was debilitating.asked about the kind of coach he
was to them. It was a day at
training when he zeroed in on
one player, as he often did. This
time, he felt she had not been
communicating clearly. When
she failed to talk enough, he
turned to the player, who was the
mother of a young child, and
screamed, according to multiple
players who witnessed the inci-
dent. If you can’t even talk on the
field, he said, what kind of moth-
er are you?
The player, stunned, started to
cry. (The player could not be
reached for comment.) It was not
the fact that Dames yelled, play-
ers said, but how he did it: in a
way that was personal and public
and, by extension, for players,
painful and humiliating.
“Something happens to
[Dames] when he comes to work,
because he’s a completely differ-
ent person, and he does not have
to be that way,” said Sam Johnson,
a former Red Stars player who
witnessed the incident. “It’s ex-
tremely demoralizing and defi-
nitely verbally abusive. Is verbal
abuse against the rules? I don’t
know, but I just know I wasn’t
comfortable with him challeng-
ing my teammate like that.”
“It was really sexist,” said an-
other former player who saw the
incident. “You would never say
that to a male player.”
Dames routinely made his at-
tacks personal when he was an-
gry, three former players said. He
would mock players’ educations
and personal lives on the field,
they alleged. He sometimes joked
that an Asian player should be
smarter than she was playing,
two players said, in a way that
they felt made implications about
her race, and he frequently com-
mented to religious players about
their holidays. Two players re-
membered Dames calling a play-
er from Appalachia “trailer
trash.”
Three former Red Stars players
said they had intentionally with-
held personal information fromplayers who gave their accounts
for the investigation said the fed-
eration’s response discouraged
her and her teammates from
speaking up, making them feel
powerless.
“I was terrified of what Rory
would do and say if he found out
this was something I’d said,”
Press said of her decision to speak
up to U.S. Soccer officials in 2014.
“And then I was made to feel by
U.S. Soccer that I was in the
wrong, there was nothing to re-
port, and that this was accept-
able.
“For so many women in this
league, you think you don’t have
any worth,” Press said. “And if you
stand up and you say what you
think is right or wrong, nobody
cares.”‘Just in one of his moods’
It has never been a secret that
Rory Dames often yells at his
players. From the earliest days of
the NWSL, his screams have
echoed from the sidelines of
games, directed at referees and
players alike.
But there is one story that
Dames’s players return to whentigators of some of the players’
allegations as part of an inter-
view. Whisler did not respond to
requests for an interview.
Bauer Luce said the team had
never received any final report on
the outcome of the investigation
nor any official recommenda-
tions from U.S. Soccer. After the
investigation, she said, the team
had “taken steps on its own to
address what it understood to be
the concerns,” including s hifting
coaching responsibilities and
adding “regular player surveys.”
U.S. Soccer oversees American
soccer at every level, from its
youth development system to
coaching licenses and the men’s
and women’s national teams. The
federation has been deeply in-
volved in the NWSL since its
launch in 2013, acting as the
manager of the league until just
this year. For a time, NWSL offi-
cials worked out of U.S. Soccer’s
headquarters in Chicago.
Multiple players criticized U.S.
Soccer’s handling of the investi-
gation to The Post, saying they
had never heard from investiga-
tors despite wanting to share
their stories. Press and otherHoy, who said she was a fre-
quent Dames target, recalled an
offseason when she considered
leaving the team because of
Dames’s treatment of her and her
teammates. Her now-husband
encouraged her to leave.
“He’d heard about the environ-
ment; he’d seen the effect on me,”
she said. “He told me, ‘You staying
says to me that you don’t respect
yourself, and I know you do.’ He
helped me to see what I couldn’t,
and I realized then that I had to
go.”
Hoy soon asked for a trade
because of Dames’s treatment,
she said, leaving the team in 2018.
“It affects people’s individual
confidence, individual every-
thing,” Johnson said of what she
had witnessed her teammates go
through. “For some players, you
question everything you do, ev-
erything you are.”Power off the pitch
In a league where players al-
ready had little power — no free
agency and many players making
$30,000 per year or less — Dames
seemed intent on exerting con-
trol over them on and off the field,
four former players said.
Three players said they feared
that Dames, known for his cun-
ning trades with other teams,
would ship them out in retalia-
tion if they defied him or raised
concerns about his coaching.
Dames handled much of the trad-
ing for the Red Stars, who do not
have a general manager.
He rarely gave players advance
notice of time off, four players
said, and sometimes withheld it
as punishment. Hoy, who played
for Dames for five years, recalled
a trip to New York for a game that
kicked off a long holiday week-
end. She asked him if she could
stay in New York to see her
parents, who had driven eight
hours to watch the game; Dames
often gave the team the rest of the
weekend off, meaning she
wouldn’t miss team events.
Dames said he would let her
know after the game.
She played poorly that day, she
remembered, “caught up in anxi-
ety and fear” that he might not let
her stay. She said she sat in the
locker room after the game “com-
pletely defeated, just thinking,
‘Please let me go see my family.’ ”
Dames approached her and
said: “You’ll be traveling back
with the team tonight.” She was
crushed, she said. When they
returned to Chicago, Dames gave
the team the entire weekend off.
“Looking back on it now, I
realize how controlling and ma-
nipulative that was,” Hoy said.
“While I was in it, I didn’t realize
the full extent of the emotional
abuse.”
Dames sought to control play-
ers in other ways, they told The
Post. During a preseason training
trip, five players recalled, Dames
told his team that he had planned
a day of one-on-one meetings. But
he did not give them a schedule,
instead telling them they needed
to be available with five minutes’
notice.
That day, three players said, no
one dared leave the hotel, even
for food.
“You knew he had the power in
this situation and he was going to
use it,” one player said. “All of
these young girls, and he’s hold-
ing your career in the palm of his
hands. He would use that against
you in so many situations.”
Press said she frequently wit-
nessed Dames control his players
in a way that made her uncom-
fortable, pushing her at times to
intervene. To her, the dynamic
felt gendered, she said.
“He asserts control like you’re a
little girl, not an adult woman —
when you can go out to a concert,
when you can say something or
you can’t say something, when
you can see your family,” she said.
“It felt like it’s a disrespect that is
related to gender.”Blurring the lines
There was another side to
Dames that players said could be
just as damaging as his volatility.
Several said they had witnessed
Dames intentionally blurring the
line between player and coach in
a way that made them — and their
teammates — uncomfortable.
One former Red Stars player
agreed to describe her relation-
ship with Dames on the condition
of anonymity because of concerns
about professional retaliation.
Three of her former teammates
confirmed parts of her story to
The Post, saying they had wit-
nessed his behavior with her pub-
licly and were concerned by it.
From the time she arrived in
Chicago as a rookie, the player
said, Dames took a particular
interest in her — one she said she
felt went far beyond soccer. It
started with lunches, usually with
just one other player present, and
then dinners with just one or two
other players before games; he
told her they were mandatory. As
the player recalled it, Dames
SEE NWSL ON D7work culture” but did not address
specific allegations. Hours later,
the team announced Dames
would resign.
U.S. Soccer said earlier this
year that it would launch its own
investigation of the NWSL, led by
Sally Q. Yates, the former acting
attorney general. A spokesman
for U.S. Soccer, Neil Buethe, said
that the federation would make
the results of the investigation
public but that it could not com-
ment on specific allegations until
the investigation was concluded.
He noted that U.S. Soccer is under
“new leadership” that has been in
place since 2020.
“We share the concerns about
allegations of abusive behavior
and sexual misconduct in wom-
en’s professional soccer and are
addressing this matter with the
utmost urgency,” Buethe said in a
statement. “Ms. Yates’s investiga-
tion is well underway and her
team has been given full autono-
my, access and necessary resourc-
es to follow the facts and evidence
wherever they may lead.”
Dames is the fifth male NWSL
coach to be accused of miscon-
duct this year, during which a
culture of mistreatment exploded
into public view and triggered a
reckoning throughout the league.
Players have criticized the league
and team officials for failing to
protect and listen to them. The
league’s commissioner, Lisa
Baird, resigned in the face of
revelations that she had dis-
missed two players’ pleas to re-
open an investigation against
Paul Riley, a coach who was ac-
cused of sexual misconduct.
But the allegations against
Dames also point to the role of
U.S. Soccer in the league’s repeat-
ed failures to address years of
alleged abuse — and in what
some players have called the
league’s “culture of silence.” Press
was an employee of U.S. Soccer,
not the NWSL, when she played
under Dames.
Press said she first spoke up
about Dames in 2014, during a
meeting with Sunil Gulati, then
the president of U.S. Soccer, and
other U.S. Soccer officials. She
remembered telling them that
Dames had created a toxic envi-
ronment on the team, yelling at
his players in a way that seemed
like “harassment.”
Gulati dismissed her concerns,
Press recalled, by saying Dames’s
behavior was normal for a profes-
sional coach. Press, who said she
had been told she needed to play
in the NWSL to keep her spot on
the national team, said she felt
she had no choice but to return
the next season.
Gulati declined to comment,
citing the pending investigation.
In 2017, Press said, she told
Dames that she wanted to be
traded, a request she said she
made because of Dames’s treat-
ment of her. The next year, she
filed a formal complaint against
him with U.S. Soccer, sparking an
investigation. She wanted to pro-
tect her teammates, she told U.S.
Soccer, according to documents
reviewed by The Post.
The documents show Press de-
tailed to U.S. Soccer how Dames
had repeatedly violated its pol-
icies against “emotional miscon-
duct” and those put in place by
the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an
independent organization
charged with protecting athletes
from abuse.
Press’s former teammates told
similar stories to the powerful
federation, according to two play-
ers who said they spoke to U.S.
Soccer investigators. Jen Hoy, a
former Red Stars player, recalled
detailing incidents where she had
witnessed or been a victim of
what she said was Dames’s abu-
sive behavior.
One player, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because
she feared retaliation, recalled
telling investigators how the
coach pushed her into an “emo-
tionally abusive” dynamic that
made her deeply uncomfortable:
texting her at all hours, asking
her to spend significant time with
him outside of soccer and retali-
ating against her when she even-
tually tried to pull away from
him. When he asked her as a
young player to frequent lunches
and dinners, she said, she did not
feel able to say no.
Gulati had left U.S. Soccer by
the time of the investigation. But
the outcome was the same as it
had been four years earlier: The
federation took no apparent ac-
tion, and it continued to pay
national team players to play for
Dames with the Red Stars. For-
mer players, including Press, said
they never heard another word
from the federation.
The Red Stars’ majority owner,
Arnim Whisler, who had worked
with U.S. Soccer to help found the
league in 2012, was aware of the
2018 investigation against Dames
at the time, two people with
knowledge of the investigation
said, and was informed by inves-
NWSL FROM D1
Former players say complaints about Dames were ignored
TIM NWACHUKWU/GETTY IMAGES
Rory Dames said he was resigning from the Red Stars because he was “refocusing my attention to my family and future endeavors.”ICON SPORTSWIRE/ICON SPORTSWIRE/GETTY IMAGES
Ex-Red Star Christen Press said of Dames: “He uses his power and status as the coach to manipulate players and get close to them.”ANDY MEAD/ISI PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES
Dames was the latest NWSL coach accused of a buse. Former
Courage coach Paul Riley w as accused of sexual misconduct.