Sports organizations concerned over transparency as OSIC plans public sanctions list

Eight months after Ontario hockey parent Matt Taub filed a misconduct complaint about two Greater Toronto Hockey League (GTHL) team coaches, he received word in mid-November that both coaches would be suspended.

Taub’s complaint, which he shared with TSN, alleged that Toronto Shamrocks U16 head coach Nic Sampogna had routinely insulted players, discussed sexual subjects with them, and had not done enough to discipline a player who made homophobic comments in the locker room.

After Hockey Canada’s independent third party (ITP) department investigated, Sampogna was suspended for six months and was directed to take 20 hours of training if he wanted to return to coaching, according to a Nov. 16 ITP decision.

A summary of the decision said that Sampogna “implemented a code of silence” and “used foul and unsupportive language… yelled and swore at players… Those actions are demeaning, belittling, insulting, disrespectful and offensive.”

Shamrocks assistant coach Ryan Coopersmith was suspended for two months and was told to take 10 hours of training.

Yet even after the coaches began to serve their suspensions, their sanctions remained a closely guarded secret.

Neither the GTHL, the Ontario Hockey Federation (OHF), nor Hockey Canada publicly announced the penalties given to Sampogna and Coopersmith, and Taub said he was ordered not to disclose a 42-page ITP investigation report. The ITP provided him with a three-page summary of its findings but advised him not to make it public.

“I asked the ITP if I could share it and their answer was that there was nothing to stop me but that they wouldn’t do it,” Taub said in an interview. “This secrecy drives me nuts. What is the point of all of this, of having a proper complaint process and months-long investigations if we are not going to make these sanctions public and give parents information about people who have been disciplined for their behaviour? They put the rights of someone who is sanctioned ahead of the rights of parents. I believe in right and wrong, and this secrecy is wrong.”

Sampogna and Coopersmith, who also are instructors at Golden Glide Hockey Inc., a private hockey school in Toronto, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Thanks to the secrecy, these suspended coaches control the narrative,” Taub said. “There is nothing stopping them from telling people they aren’t suspended but are just taking a leave from their GTHL team to work with their private hockey school. No one would be the wiser because Hockey Canada, the OHF, and the GTHL have decided to keep sanctions secret.”

The case of the Shamrocks coaches opens a window on a question being debated throughout Canadian amateur sports: Should the public have the right to know about discipline decisions against adult-aged coaches, athletes and officials?

“The names of people who are suspended should be public,” said Peter Donnelly, a professor emeritus of sports policy and politics at the University of Toronto. “It just makes sense. There are too many cases where coaches have moved to other provinces, or countries, or clubs. This information needs to be easier for people to find.”

Minister of sport Carla Qualtrough announced an 18-month “Future of Sport in Canada Commission” on Monday that will explore ways to make amateur sports safer. Qualtrough acknowledged during the announcement that she and her staff don’t know how many people are currently suspended or have been banned by national sport organizations or the more than 600 provincial sports organizations in Canada.

“Sport is primarily a provincial jurisdiction,” Qualtrough said, adding that mandatory public sanctions registries “could be part of what is reviewed.”

Hockey, one of the country’s most popular, organized, and well-funded sports, offers a glimpse at the scope of the secrecy that advocates for abuse survivors say remains a problem.

“Too many people holding the balance of power have too much to hide,” said Kim Shore, a former athlete who was on the board of Gymnastics Canada from 2018 until 2021 and served as the chair of its SafeSport committee before resigning because she believed allegations of abuse within the organization were being mishandled.

“There are good people in sport for sure, but they often don't last. We have seen board members quit boards because they don't want to be complicit with bad behaviour and we have heard from coaches who are treated like pariahs because they try to implement safe and healthy coaching.”

Hockey Canada committed to an organization-wide overhaul last year as it tried to mitigate the damage from an alleged sexual abuse scandal that rocked the organization. Hockey Canada’s entire board and chief executive were replaced, and the organization announced that an ITP would accept misconduct complaints and investigate them if it had jurisdiction to do so.

As part of that process, an adjudication panel decides suspensions if they are called for and also has the power to make those suspensions public. To date, no suspension handed down by the ITP, including those to Sampogna and Coopersmith, have been made public.

“Hockey Canada continues to review the implications and concerns associated with having a public sanction registry,” Hockey Canada spokesman Jeremy Knight wrote in an email to TSN. “While we understand that most national and provincial sport organizations in Canada do not have such a public registry at this time, we are studying and evaluating possible options to be implemented in the future.”

Similarly, none of the provincial or territorial hockey organizations in Canada maintain public sanction registries.

The OHF does not publish a sanction registry because of legal exposure, OHF spokeswoman Laura Brown wrote in an email to TSN

“We understand that there are significant privacy issues and considerations, and that Hockey Canada will revisit it should the legal landscape change,” Brown wrote.

Still, the provincial federation started this week to report statistics on maltreatment allegations.

The federation said it received 715 misconduct complaints from June 1, 2022, to May 31, 2023, and that 51 of those complaints are now under investigation. More than 100 cases were dismissed by the OHF, and another 519 complaints were redirected to be investigated by its seven member organizations, including the GTHL, Alliance Hockey, and the Ontario Minor Hockey Association.

Lorraine Lafreniere, chief executive of the Coaching Association of Canada, which works with sports organizations to develop standards for coaches, said her organization hired the Toronto law firm Gowling WLG in 2019 to offer advice about sanctions and the legal risks faced by national and provincial sports federations that create public registries.

According to Lafreniere, the law firm advised that because Canada’s federal privacy laws are stricter than those in the U.S., organizations may leave themselves exposed to lawsuits from people whose sanctions are made public. Gowling recommended that the safest way to introduce registries would be to create private lists of sanctions that are only accessible to sports organization officials, not to the general public, Lafreniere said.

It’s possible that advice is already outdated, she said.

“There’s no set of rules for organizations that guides publishing or not publishing,” she said. “People don’t know what to do. They should publish because these behaviours that are sanctioned can escalate, and that either leads to a corrective action or it leads to someone grooming someone. But it’s also complicated because if investigations are not conducted appropriately, it can put someone’s reputation at risk. People are scared and organizations don’t have the resources to deal with this properly.”

Nevertheless, there are a number of examples of organizations accepting that legal risk.

A modest but growing number of national and provincial sport organizations have committed to transparency when it comes to discipline.

Gymnastics Canada and Athletics Canada have public registries where they inform the public about discipline decisions against adults. (The names of minors are not included in any public registries.) Gymnastics Canada’s registry lists 36 people who have been suspended or banned from the sport.

Michael Bartlett, president of Canada Basketball, said his organization is creating a sanction registry that would include the names of people suspended by all of its provincial and territorial members. The registry is scheduled to be made public by 2024, Bartlett told TSN in an interview.

Canada Soccer general secretary Jason deVos told TSN his organization also plans to roll out a public sanctions registry next year.

The Ontario Volleyball Association, Athletics Ontario, Gymnastics Ontario, Field Hockey Ontario, and Swim Ontario are among the provincial associations that maintain public sanction lists.

Gymnastics Ontario publishes select details from discipline decisions that protect the identities of complainants but still inform the public about the reason someone was sanctioned.

It’s also possible some hockey-related sanctions will become public soon.

Hockey Canada is a signatory to the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC), an independent agency that was created last year by the federal government to investigate allegations of abuse in sports.

The OSIC has pledged to begin publishing the names of people who it has suspended or banned from Canadian amateur sport before the end of March 2024. The OSIC typically has jurisdiction to scrutinize misconduct complaints involving national team-level athletes, coaches and officials.

While many organizations still don’t have public sanctions registries, some have agreed to begin publishing data about how often complaints are being made and investigated. That alone is an important milestone, says former Olympic skier Allison Forsyth, who now advises sports organizations about how to train athletes, coaches and officials about preventing and addressing abuse.

“All of these organizations should disclose data, so people know the gravity of the problem we are dealing with,” Forsyth said. “The culture in sport needs to shift, and that starts with being open with how bad it is right now. And when we know that, thanks to statistical benchmarks, we can begin to address it and hopefully make things better.”

The GTHL, the world’s largest minor hockey organization with more than

$10 million in annual revenue and 40,000 participants, has started to publish data about the number of misconduct complaints it receives.

In 2022-23, the GTHL received and investigated 60 such complaints, including 19 related to bullying, harassment, and verbal abuse, 13 for threats and five for sexual maltreatment. The league, however, does not disclose details about how complaints are resolved or about sanctions that have been imposed.

That, too, may be about to change.

GTHL spokeswoman Stephanie Coratti said the GTHL’s board approved a new sanction disclosure policy last month. According to the policy, the GTHL will soon begin to issue public notifications about sanctions that are determined to be serious violations (suspensions of more than 10 games or one month, whichever is greater), or fines of at least $1,000.

But the GTHL’s transparency will only go so far.

According to the new policy, the identities of people or groups subject to sanctions will still be kept confidential unless the GTHL’s president and chief operating officer determine that it is in the public interest to release such information, Coratti wrote in an email to TSN.

That discretion rankles Taub.

“I have no faith in the GTHL to make decisions that are in the public interest,” Taub said. “Look at the history of this league. They have only recently agreed to disclose information on penalties related to racial slurs because they were under public pressure to do so and had no choice… Will the league be as transparent with sanctions when they should be? They are saying, ‘Just trust us.’ I can’t do that. Trust has to be earned.”