Sam wrote:This sport constantly fails to weed out the worst of us, indeed seems to reward bad behavior. If the governing bodies refuse to take a roll in removing these folks from positions of leadership, certainly no one will. It does suck that we are reduced to calling on the governing bodies to take action, but the only other choice is to do absolutely nothing and wait for the next worse thing to happen.
I wasn't going to post on this topic anymore, simply because I've already added any potentially useful insight that I might have, and probably exceeded that by a fair amount. That said, let's agree to disagree on this particular incident, and think more generally. You are way more experience than I am, and you gained this experience near the epicenter of the softball universe, but I've been around enough to know that there is plenty of bad behavior out there.
Here's the question I see, how do the governing bodies take action when there are multiple relevant sanctions? If a high profile coach from a high profile organization gets banned from one, nothing is going to prevent them from moving their business to another. Depending on how much pull this coach/org has, that could hurt the sanction more than the coach. Politically, there is no chance that the sanctions will band together to pass a joint decision. Even if they did, I would presume it would be near impossible to defend a legal challenge if the behavior occurred in another sanction's event. For that matter, the potential legal costs of defending a challenge might be one of the biggest obstacles for individual sanctions to impose penalties within their own domain. The best authorities to make these decisions are the orgs themselves, but they have a bottom line to maintain, and if you fire a coach from one they will probably wind up somewhere else, if they have a name, or start their own org. That leaves it in the hands of the parents who traditionally have shown poor judgement in this regard. Even worse, it leaves "justice" to a grass-roots process that invariably becomes so corrupted by group-think and manipulation by disgruntled parents that it's almost impossible for an outsider to make an accurate assessment. Kind of a catch-22 in my mind.