A U.S. district judge on Thursday sentenced former Iowa Barnstormers coach Greg Stephen to 180 years in federal prison, the maximum penalty he faced on sexual exploitation and pornography charges after preying upon boys who saw the coach as their hope to play college basketball.
As reported by the Associated Press, the 43-year-old Stephen had worked with Iowa’s most promising youth players as a co-director and coach of the Barnstormers, which competed nationally under Adidas sponsorship. Almost every high school senior Stephen worked with earned a college athletic scholarship, including to such schools as Iowa, Northern Iowa and Wisconsin.
A U.S. district judge on Thursday sentenced former Iowa Barnstormers coach Greg Stephen to 180 years in federal prison, the maximum penalty he faced on sexual exploitation and pornography charges after preying upon boys who saw the coach as their hope to play college basketball.
As reported by the Associated Press, the 43-year-old Stephen had worked with Iowa’s most promising youth players as a co-director and coach of the Barnstormers, which competed nationally under Adidas sponsorship. Almost every high school senior Stephen worked with earned a college athletic scholarship, including to such schools as Iowa, Northern Iowa and Wisconsin.
After a daylong hearing, C.J. Williams delivered the sentence, saying the coach's conduct was "of such an extreme nature" that it warranted an effective life term. "The harm the defendant caused to the children is incalculable and profound," Williams said.
According to the AP report, Stephen secretly amassed a digital collection of thousands of sexual videos and photos of his players and their friends. The majority of the victims were coerced by online personas in which Stephen pretended to be a teenage girl and enticed them to provide videos and photos of themselves masturbating — relationships that went on for years. Others were surreptitiously recorded by devices that Stephen placed in bathrooms in hotels and his home or disrobed by Stephen and photographed while they slept.
Related: Coach Charged with Filming Players in Bathroom
On at least 15 occasions between 1999 and 2018, Stephen touched boys, often as he shared a hotel bed with them during trips to tournaments and professional basketball games, according to Thursday’s testimony. One of the boys later told police he kept quiet for years because he believed Stephen was his link to college basketball coaches.
Â
Stephen came under investigation after his former brother-in-law found one of the recording devices while performing remodeling work at Stephen’s home in Monticello last year and gave it to police. Eventually, investigators found a hard drive that contained more than 400 file folders, each with the name of a different boy, that contained thousands of images collected over more than a decade.
Stephen apologized to his former players and their parents, saying, “I am disgusted. The things I have done are repulsive and wrong.” He said his greatest regret was that his accomplishments as a coach were now tarnished.
Williams rebuked Stephen for that comment, saying his biggest regret should be the harm he caused the boys and their parents.
