Coaching involves more than overseeing what happens on the field, court or ice. Coaches also need to control the locker room. This is especially true at the high school and college levels, where athletes hazing new members of the team may be common practice in some sports and at certain schools. When coaches do not supervise the locker room, they open themselves and their schools to the actions of immature or malicious individuals. A good example of what happens when coaches fail to supervise athletes in the locker room is Nicholas B. v. River Delta Joint Unified School District, Case No. 34-2017-00213972.
Assault and ostracization
Nicholas B. was a high school sophomore in the River Delta Joint Unified School District, which serves a rural area outside Sacramento, Calif. Prior to the lawsuit in question, another student-athlete complained to the principal about coach Stephen Bunch’s general lack of supervision and his failure to stop student-on-student hazing during the football season. The school district, however, failed to discipline or even caution the coach over the incidents and allowed him to continue coaching, including with the junior varsity basketball team.
After a basketball practice that same school year, Nicholas B. was pinned to the locker room floor by two of his teammates while a third boy slapped and rubbed his genitals against Nicholas’ face. Despite school rules mandating that a coach be present in the locker room, there were no coaches supervising the boys on the evening of the assault. In fact, evidence at trial indicated that coaches routinely left the locker room unsupervised.
In the assault’s aftermath, Nicholas endured a month of unrelenting sexual harassment at school, during which other students laughed at him, insulted him and imitated the assault by slapping their face with two fingers. Amid such ostracization, Nicholas spent most of his days in the principal’s office to avoid the other students. Nicholas’ mother repeatedly complained of the harassment to the principal, but the principal and other district officials failed to stop it. As a result, Nicholas was forced to withdraw from the school.
While the three boys involved in the assault were eventually charged criminally and convicted, with the boy who rubbed his penis on Nicholas' face convicted of a sex-related felony, the family still claimed that the school district and its employees were negligent in failing to monitor the locker room in which Nicholas was sexually assaulted. In addition, Nicholas claimed that the school district and its officials violated Title IX when it failed to address the continued student-on-student sexual harassment that Nicholas was subjected to following the assault.
In particular, Nicholas argued that the school district was negligent, due to a lack of supervision, in creating the unregulated hostile environment where the sexual assault was allowed to take place. The school district then compounded its error by again failing to protect Nicholas from the vicious sexual harassment that followed, in clear violation of Title IX protections.
Negligent supervision
To establish a negligent supervision claim, Nicholas had to show that: 1) the coaches had a duty to supervise the locker room; 2) that they breached their duty to supervise; 3) that their breach or failure to supervise was the actual or proximate cause of his injuries; and 4) that Nicholas suffered actual damages.
Nicholas argued that as the team’s coach, Stephen Bunch had a duty to supervise his athletes and that his duty did not end when practice ended. It is uncontested that coaches do have a duty to supervise their players the entire time they are under the coach’s control — from the moment the athletes step into the locker room until they leave the facility after practice. By routinely not supervising the locker room, even after the earlier complaint of harassment involving another student during football season, the coach breached his duty to Nicholas and all his players, and Bunch’s breach of duty was the cause of Nicholas’ injuries.
As for the Title IX claim, Nicholas argued that after the incident in the locker room, the River Delta Joint Unified School District was deliberately indifferent to the alleged harassment by other students, which forced him to move to a different high school. Sexual harassment, Nicholas argued, is a violation of Title IX under either one of two legal theories: quid pro quo or hostile environment.
To establish a hostile environment sexual harassment claim under Title IX, Nicholas had to show that the conduct complained of was so severe that it created an intimidating, hostile or offensive educational environment with the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with his ability to perform at school or benefit from the services, opportunities or privileges thereof. In this case, Nicholas argued that after becoming aware of the unrelenting sexual harassment at school, the principal and other school officials had a legal obligation to stop the harassment but instead were deliberately indifferent to it, thereby creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive educational environment that unreasonably interfered with Nicholas' ability to benefit from the school’s educational services.
The jury agreed and awarded Nicholas $3,150,000 plus nearly five years of interest, attorney’s fees and costs. In finding that the school district had a duty to protect Nicholas from sexual assault and the sexual harassment that followed, the court held that the coach, principal and other school officials with authority to take corrective action had actual notice of and were deliberately indifferent to the student conduct impacting Nicholas.
Same-sex harassment, hazing
What, then, are the takeaways from Nicholas B. v. River Delta Unified School District? The first and most obvious is that coaches need to supervise athletes not only on the field, court or ice, but also in the locker room. While this case involved sexual assault, coaches also need to be aware of other forms of locker room hazing, too. There are anti-hazing laws in 44 states, and while the strength and breadth of the laws may vary from state to state, ultimately it is the responsibility of coaches and their schools to protect all athletes from any form of hazing.
Second, while it is sometimes easy to think that Title IX only protects female athletes, it is important to remember that Title IX prohibits all forms of discrimination based on sex. Sexual harassment does not necessarily involve people of different sexes and includes male-on-male harassment.
The key factor in establishing hostile environment sexual harassment is whether the harassment is motivated by the victim’s sex. Therefore, if schools learn that a student is being sexually harassed by other students, whether male or female, they have a legal obligation to take affirmative steps to stop the harassment. If a school and its employees fail to stop such conduct, or are indifferent to it — as the court showed in awarding Nicholas $3.25 million — it can prove very costly.
