By Staff
Athletic Management, 15.6, October/November 2003, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1506/wuliability.htm
A California Supreme Court decision reinstating a previously dismissed liability suit against a high school swimming coach contained both bad and good news for athletic administrators and coaches. On the one hand, it stated that the coach may be held liable for injuries suffered by one of his athletes, reversing two lower court decisions. On the other, the court established a firm, relatively high, bar for when a coach can be held liable for injuries.
The case, Kahn v. East Side Union High School et. al., involves a then-14-year-old high school swimmer, Olivia Kahn, who suffered a broken neck in 1993 when she hit the pool bottom after diving from a starting block before a race. Kahn was temporarily paralyzed after the injury and still walks with a limp and suffers severe headaches.
When Kahn joined the East Side Union swim team, she said she was terrified of diving off the starting block and claimed her coach promised that she could start her races in the pool. Kahn alleges that shortly before one race, the coach told her she would have to dive off the block or she would be unable to compete. Not wanting to let her team down, Kahn, who reported that she had received no previous training in diving off the block, said she enlisted a couple of teammates to help teach her. On her third practice dive, she hit the bottom of the pool and was injured.
Lower court rulings had dismissed the suit before trial, saying that Kahn had assumed the risk of injury by agreeing to compete in swimming. But the California Supreme Court has now ordered the lower court to hear the case, ruling that the district and coach could be held liable if the coach was determined to have acted recklessly by requiring the student to dive off the block without providing proper training. The court also established the standard by which liability will be determined, stating, “A sports instructor may be found to have breached a duty of care to a student or athlete only if the instructor intentionally injures the student or engages in conduct that is reckless in the sense that it is ‘totally outside the range of the ordinary activity’ involved in teaching or coaching the sport.” The lower court will now determine whether that standard was met.
East Side attorney Mark Davis told the San Francisco Chronicle that Kahn actually had been properly trained and that he was confident the district would win the trial. “At the least the court set a high standard that seemingly will make it difficult for plaintiffs to prove liability against a coach or school district,” he said.
In drafting that standard, the court relied on a 1992 decision in Knight v. Jewett that addressed liability among sport participants. In that case, the court found that injuries are an inherent risk in most sports and that a participant could be held liable for another participant’s injuries only if they intentionally injured that person or “engage[d] in conduct that is so reckless as to be totally outside the range of the ordinary activity involved in the sport.”
The court noted that the relationship between a coach and a player is different than the one between competitors, and acknowledged that coaches must challenge their athletes to accomplish increasingly difficult tasks. Thus, they should not be held liable for simply misjudging an athlete’s ability or pushing an athlete too far, as long as they have provided the proper training.
“The decision came down just before one of our scheduled coaches meetings, and it was one of the very first things we went over,” says Terry McGilvery, Athletic Director and Head Boys’ Basketball Coach at Santa Clara (Calif.) High School. “Coaches are going to have to make sure that the tactics they use, whether they involve motivation or conditioning or whatever, are pretty much universally accepted. If they come up with some crazy fitness scheme, for example, that no one else adheres to, and a kid gets hurt doing it, that would probably be considered reckless, since it was not commonly accepted as a proper training method.”
Although McGilvery says he was disappointed by the decision, it probably won’t affect the way he coaches. “I don’t think any coach would condone being reckless,” he says. “We’ve always told our coaches, ‘Don’t do anything that you can’t justify to a mom and dad or a principal when you’re sitting across a table from them.’”
McGilvery says coaches who are also teachers are already well trained in liability issues through the teacher education and accreditation process. But non-teaching coaches often don’t have that same background, so educating those coaches is particularly important.
“Let’s say, for instance, after a hot day of practice, one of our off-campus coaches opens the pool gate and lets all the players jump in to go swimming,” McGilvery says. “If I walk by as the athletic director or physical education teacher, I immediately wonder, ‘Are you supervising your players?’ and ‘If you are supervising them, are you qualified? Do you have life guard certification?’ But the coach may just be thinking he or she is being good to the kids by letting them cool off.”