ADVISORY: If you are a minor reading this story, you may want to have adults with you to provide more context and perspective.
Remember this?
Well, there is more to the story of Brett Clay, former coach with the Centercourt field hockey program, who was deported to South Africa after bring brought up on morals charges.
And that detail surrounds a teacher in the Bridgewater-Raritan School District named Tracy Biondi. According to charging documents and information obtained by a communications data warrant revealed that Biondi, the mother of a Division I student-athlete, engaged in a period of harassment and cyberstalking of a player who accused Clay of wrongdoing.
It is an awful thing to do; Biondi is accused of harassing a minor child because she dared to speak the truth.
In the situations that we have seen, with more than two dozen people in the American field hockey community being brought up on morals charges, we have seen more than one occasion where a second person, unrelated to the original charges, has been accused of either covering up or engaging in potential witness tampering.
We saw a situation in 2013 when a girl attending the Keystone Games field hockey event was raped by a 25-year-old man in a hotel room, and his girlfriend tried to cover up the crime. The girlfriend, a coach, was banned for life by the U.S. Olympic SafeSport Committee.
In another situation, an assistant field hockey coach in South Jersey was brought up on charges of having an illicit affair with one of her players, and the head coach of the team was convicted for witness tampering — receiving a longer sentence than the assistant.
Thing is, this probably isn’t going to be the last time that a single situation of wrongdoing is going to result in multiple people being carted into court. In the business of games — the Youth Sports Industry — there are many people who stand to lose if one person within the apparatus goes off the rails.
If you want to read the reporting on the Clay/Biondi situation, I invite you to read the reporting by Jana Banscoter of Female Athlete News. Her story yesterday was mind-blowing, and shows the lengths Biondi went to harass a single teenage field hockey player.