Congress Opens Bipartisan Probe Into Youth Sports Giant AAU Over Child Sex Abuse Failures
A powerful House committee says the Amateur Athletic Union never fixed the safety gaps exposed by a 2011 abuse scandal — and wants to know how many of its 760,000 athletes and coaches have been put at risk since.
WASHINGTON — The House Energy and Commerce Committee has opened a bipartisan investigation into the Amateur Athletic Union, demanding internal records on how the youth sports giant handles child sexual abuse allegations across its roughly 760,000 athletes and coaches.
In a letter first reported this week, Committee Chair Brett Guthrie and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr. called AAU's failure to implement promised safety reforms "unacceptable," according to NBC News' report on the inquiry. The probe follows joint reporting by ProPublica and The Washington Post that found eight coaches banned by other sports organizations for misconduct were still working with children inside AAU programs.
That reporting is what triggered the committee's letter. AAU adopted updated child protection policies back in 2012, in the wake of an earlier abuse scandal — but lawmakers say abuse cases continued well after those reforms were supposedly in place, raising the question of whether the policies were ever meaningfully enforced.
AAU'S RESPONSE: IT "WILL COOPERATE FULLY" WITH THE COMMITTEE'S REQUESTS
The committee is asking AAU to turn over data on how many abuse allegations it receives annually, how many coaches have been disciplined or banned, and internal records of past investigations and child-safety training programs, per The Washington Post's coverage of the committee's request. The organization has said in a statement that it would cooperate fully, though it did not comment on the specific findings that prompted the inquiry.
Congress has waded into Olympic and youth sports safety before. The Safe Sport Act created the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an independent body with the power to suspend or permanently ban coaches found to have committed misconduct — but that authority applies most directly to Olympic-pipeline sports, and AAU, a private nonprofit that runs recreational and competitive programs across dozens of sports, has long operated with its own internal disciplinary process instead.
Lawmakers from both parties have signaled this isn't a one-letter inquiry. The committee's language — invoking AAU's scale and its "failure" to follow through on 2012-era commitments — suggests hearings or further document demands could follow if the organization's response falls short. For now, parents and youth-sports advocates are watching to see whether AAU's promised data actually materializes, and on what timeline.