Queen's coach fired over comments of Guelph's handling of DST allegations

danewrunner wrote:

copy-paste, try it sometime.....cherry picking is what you're doing gryphon. take a chill pill, they're only words. Curious, any thoughts on a coach checking a teenager out of juvi psych to do the nasty in his car down the street? Nah, didn't think so.

Ad hominem attacks, false dichotomies, how many other failures of logic are you going for? Also seems like your initial comments on this thread are factually incorrect.

Thinking Steve was unprofessional is not mutually exclusive with thinking DST was completely wrong and should be punished severely (as well as anyone who legitimately enabled/didn’t react). It’s not an either-or, both can be true at the same time. Shocking isn’t it.

go away wrote:

danewrunner wrote:

copy-paste, try it sometime.....cherry picking is what you're doing gryphon. take a chill pill, they're only words. Curious, any thoughts on a coach checking a teenager out of juvi psych to do the nasty in his car down the street? Nah, didn't think so.

Ad hominem attacks, false dichotomies, how many other failures of logic are you going for? Also seems like your initial comments on this thread are factually incorrect.

Thinking Steve was unprofessional is not mutually exclusive with thinking DST was completely wrong and should be punished severely (as well as anyone who legitimately enabled/didn’t react). It’s not an either-or, both can be true at the same time. Shocking isn’t it.

There is no point in engaging with this guy. Nothing you say will shake his hero worship of the great Oldster.

But despite his own blindspot towards Boyd, he will blame all the griffins for purportedly turning a blind eye towards Dave act inappropriately.

He wants to talk about context, yet conveniently ignores the last 10 years of Boyd’s bullying rants on trackie and elsewhere. In a CBC interview I believe Boyd called his own AD a bully. Boyd will take his self righteous, and woe is me, attitude to the grave, But Danerunner will support him regardless.

All true. He is clearly lying and grasping at straws. Good advice to step aside!

Creepy , Icky Fred ... melting down again .

Again, Boyd was not criticizing the Guelph crew for turning a blind eye to the Megan Brown incident (although surely many people at Speed River had heard the rumors, especially the senior club athletes). He was asking questions about people's failure to address the abuse that many athletes have claimed they saw firsthand.

It's undeniable that people saw abuse happening and did nothing. It's fair, then, to ask why that was. When people raise this point, the Guelph crew switches focus to the particular abuses Megan suffered in order to deflect attention from these questions of collective responsibility.

I've raised these points before in this thread and nobody has even attempted to rebut them, likely because they can't.

Question , a runner driving himself in this way, ie., to become the best , no matter what, and no excuses, becomes a coach. Does this approach seep into their coaching strategy, as well. How do they step back. I watched Fairrell, and he would hold them back and maybe let them go as hard as they want on the last rep.

Boyd wasn't done in by Gryphons; he was stabbed in the back by Queen's insiders.

It's like that in all organizations.

Sure, that’s a fair point. To be honest, I am well removed from the running scene, and I’ve only got back into all of this once the whole Guelph situation blew up. So I only know what I’m seeing on the boards and in print.

However the thing that I keep trying to understand, is how everyone seems to be connecting a whole bunch of dots in a way that might be creating a story that isn’t quite what it seems.

There’s no excuse for the MB situation and Dave clearly was involved in an inappropriate situation.

So no debate there.

Since that time, including the 2019 complaint, there seems to be no evidence of any type of inappropriate sexual behaviour continuing. Yet people seem to be assuming there is a pattern of sexual predation and that there are multiple victims or that dave continued to do these sort of things – this is despite an apparent lack of witnesses, evidence, rumors, or victims or complaints coming forward. So that puzzles me. I feel like people are missing that point - but maybe I am misunderstanding the facts.

Then we have the last bucket with you speak to, which is that independent of the Megan Brown situation, Dave was apparently an abusive coach. And there seems to be a lot of discussion around whether Guelph athletes should’ve spoken up to call out this abuse. I certainly wasn’t there, but when I hear about a coach pushing athletes very hard, ignoring athletes that are not performing to his expectations, playing favorites, or having unrealistic expectations, I think to myself, that’s pretty much half the coaches I ever had no matter what the sport. It may not be ideal, but I’m not sure it rises to the level of the shock and dismay that is now being lumped into the other discussions.

It is sort of an esoteric point, but I sort of feel like Dave did something obviously horrible in 2006, now that that’s come out, every other minor transgression has become elevated to some sort of fireable offense, that apparently generations of Guelph runners should’ve called it out. And I just don’t feel like that’s reasonable. I think if MB never happened, no one would be expecting some 17 year old freshman to call Dave out for making his team run mileage that was too high, or for ignoring the B team while he focussed on the A team.

Perhaps someone can provide more context as to, other than the MB rumours and possible administration coverup , what was actually happening at Guelph that was so terrible.

Seconday question. If you just coast in your job and marriage, you may lose both.

Is university sport suppose to be fun. It seems to me that Dave was using reinforcement - reward the desired behaviour and ignore/shut off from those failing.

And if you got injured from exceeding the limits of your body, you were treated as though you did not exist.

Is this the abuse, or were there other forms as well.

I think we agree on quite a bit, actually (although it sounds as if, given this new 2019 complaint, there's a pretty clear indication that sexually predatory behavior wasn't limited to the Megan Brown incident).

I agree that in situations like this there is a risk of people combing through and possibly distorting their memories in search of incidents that confirm things they've learned more recently. But in this particular case, it sounds like the abuse in that club wasn't normal at all. Here's what a poster named Nathaniel Carter wrote on the trackie thread:

"The first former Guelph runner came to talk to me about their experiences with DST and the difficulty in dealing with the aftermath in early 2003, a few months after I had left the program myself. Over the course of the next 15 years, I would assist 8 other former DST athletes through their own healing processes. I'm not the only one. There is a therapist in Guelph, another in Cambridge, and a third in Toronto who have worked with former Guelph runners. I know for a FACT that at least one runner was diagnosed with PTSD. The Globe and Mail's description of Guelph's Women's team as "one big eating disorder" is not an exaggeration. Megan Brown is not the only former Guelph runner to contemplate suicide.

Some of us have been cleaning up DST dogshit for 15 years. Some of us have earned our axes.

This is not a case of a coach who just wasn't fun to work with. This is a person who DESTROYED PEOPLE. "

The tragedy of all of this is that people's lives, MB, this coach guy, etc were destroyed in the name of appalling mediocrity. Everything about Canadian running is horribly BAD. Canada college running is Div 4. Everything is awful. The poster boy for Guelph is a guy that couldn't run under 2:11, couldn't beat a national record from 1975.

EVERYTHING... AWFUL!!!

With the help of several people. When you "one big eating disorder" is mentioned, one name comes to mind: Trent Stellingwerf

And, to follow up on another point you made, I didn't mean to suggest that a 17-year-old freshman should be blamed for not speaking up after witnessing abuse. In fact, I don't think it's fair to blame anyone in particular for failing to speak up. In clubs there are almost always pressures against speaking out.

However, I do think it's fair to ask why seemingly no one spoke out in a situation where, if the numerous statements made by Guelph athletes are true, abuse was out in the open, in plain sight. The varsity athletes would have had likely filled out anonymous evaluation forms for the coaches, and the post-varsity club members (especially the senior ones) are full-fledged adults who could have exercised their voices.

Again, I don't think it's fair to blame any one person for the fact that abuse was allowed to go on for years. But those who were part of the club should ask themselves how and why they as a community collectively neglected to address it.

Right now the Guelph athletes, at least in any public statement I've seen, are carefully avoiding that question. Instead, they seem focused on presenting each and every last club member as purely a victim. Yes, there were victims in that club, and I have nothing but sympathy and sadness for them. But for those who saw abuse happening and did nothing, "victim" isn't quite an accurate term. There are small degrees of culpability here mixed into the complex situation in which these athletes found themselves. It's not fair to blame any one individual for allowing the abuse to continue unchallenged, but there is most definitely collective culpability here.

But the Guelph athletes on that Facebook thread and elsewhere don't seem remotely interested in considering this. Their language of collective victimhood is merely an attempt to shut down conversation.

question man wrote:

Please direct me to the facebook thread where this took place. thank you

I took screenshots of the whole thing - I'll upload them later.

fred wrote:

Boyd wasn't done in by Gryphons; he was stabbed in the back by Queen's insiders.

It's like that in all organizations.

Fred - read the globe article from today; a former Guelph athlete is the one who lodged the complaint. She is not a Queens insider.

"Shortly after Mr. Boyd’s Facebook comments, Jennie Biewald, a former Guelph student athlete, e-mailed the Queen’s athletics director to express her frustration, saying that Mr. Boyd’s posts were incendiary."

Boyd just got kicked out of spectating an event.

https://twitter.com/LeslieSexton/status/1230994456347914240

They're giving him the Salazar treatment for just being a critic??

From Leslie Sexton:

The @yorkuniversity athletic director just kicked Steve Boyd out of the spectator gallery at

@OUAsport track & field championships. He was quietly watching a race. Cannot believe this just happened.

Vid of him with security too - insane

Guelph Omerta is strong.

This just gets stranger!

Boyd wouldn't be so paranoid if everyone wasn't out to get him...