A matter of trust

 I don't know what happens now at Huntington University, but I do know the folks there have some explaining to do. You turn a portion of your student body over to a manipulative charlatan, there will be questions.

If you haven't read about former women's distance and cross country coach Nick Johnson and how he played destructive head games with some of his athletes, you need to read this. It's the result of months of dogged reporting and exemplary work by my friend David Woods of the Indianapolis Star, and it's not pleasant reading.

It's a sordid tale of sexual exploitation and Lance Armstrong-esque coercion of runners to ingest likely PEDs, told  by former runners who have come forward with those accusations.  Astoundingly, the runners say Johnson's wife, Lauren, knew about her husband's intimate relationships with some of his runners, and she backed his play, saying he had a "sexual addiction."

And yet, amazingly, Huntington made Lauren Johnson the new head coach after firing her husband. I don't imagine that will stand now, but how could Huntington officials have elevated her to begin with, unless they just didn’t care about a situation of which some of their athletes had made them aware?

Because this is the country we live in now, I can already hear the MeToo backlash brigade warming up: I feel sorry for these women, but why didn't they just say no? If they didn't want to have sex with this coach, why did they? Why didn't they refuse to take the illicit (or at best unfamiliar) drugs he pushed on them?

The answer isn't a simple one, admittedly. But it goes to the dynamic between coach -- especially a charismatic one -- and athlete, a dynamic built almost entirely on trust. You do what your coach tells you to do because you trust him or her, and you trust him or her because that's what's been pounded into you since the day you popped out of the womb.

Good coaches understand that, and will never exploit that trust. Coaches without scruples or conscience will use that trust, and the emotional bond that comes with it, to serve their own corrupt ends.

That two of the women in Woods' story -- Hannah Stoffel and Emma Wilson -- stuck with the program until 2020 and 2021, respectively, indicates just how powerful that trust is, and how hard it is to break it. Especially when the coach in question had built their program  into the sort of national powerhouse a school can use as a recruiting tool.

The nation's fastest high school miler, after all, de-committed from Colorado to Huntington this summer, largely because Lauren Johnson had taken her under her wing. How big a get was that, for an NAIA school like Huntington, to land Addy Wiley?

Hard to say what Wiley does now, in the wake of this bombshell. But Stoffel and Wilson both say their individual national championships, and Huntington's team championship in 2020, should be wiped off the books.

As for the university, it finally fired Nick Johnson not for anything their own athletes had accused him of doing at HU, but for a felony arrest in December 2020 after Johnson, posing as a University of Oregon recruiter, spirited a high school athlete off to Oregon for a weekend in which he had sex with her.

Then they put Johnson's wife, who’s culpable in this, too, in charge of the HU program. Which pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would still have some contact with Huntington athletes. So ...

So, if you're the parent of a gifted athlete, how do you trust anyone at Huntington now, let alone its coaches? Because it does all come back to trust, ultimately.

Trust in coaches. Trust in administrators. Trust in the Christian values Huntington University officials claim as bedrock principles, and how diligent they will be in making sure those principles are not betrayed.

As it sure appears they have been.