The first time Ryan Richardson was suspended from coaching volleyball, in early 2024, he gathered the parents of his teenage players in the back room of his gym in the border city of Pharr, Texas. It was a dark, cool space, one wall lined with shelves of trophies and dangling medals. The tinted windows looked out onto the courts where Richardson trained some of the best young female players in the Rio Grande Valley, but the glass was one-way, and from outside, nothing that happened in the room was visible.

For years, the room had also contained a twin-sized mattress that sat in the corner on a box spring, covered with dark sheets. By the 2024 season, though, the bed had disappeared.

On that winter day, the parents of Richardson’s club, Texas Fierce Elite, were worried. Their 14- and 15-year-old daughters were bound for the Girls Junior National Championship that summer in Las Vegas, but now Richardson was barred from attending. The organization overseeing volleyball in the state, Lone Star Region Volleyball, had suspended him after complaints about Richardson’s Instagram posts, including a mirror selfie in which he posed in skin-tight orange boxer briefs. The case had quickly been escalated to USA Volleyball, the sport’s governing body and the host of the upcoming national championship.

There was much more at stake than a single tournament. For more than 15 years at the helm of Texas Fierce Elite, Richardson had been trading on a dream: girls who wanted to play college sports, and parents who wanted to get them there. In Pharr and the cities surrounding it, which are more than 90% Latino and have poverty rates more than double the national average, opportunities to go to college were rare, and paying for it was even harder. Richardson’s players said he often told them that he and Texas Fierce Elite were their only path to a scholarship.

Although they were barely in high school, the Texas Fierce Elite girls were entering the most important period of college recruiting. The sidelines of the national tournament would be flooded with college scouts from all corners of the country. If Richardson could no longer coach, the parents feared, all of that might be derailed.

On that day in the back room of his gym, Richardson did not acknowledge the Instagram posts at all, according to two parents present. Instead, the former football receiver claimed that the suspension was the result of vindictive parents with complaints about their kids’ playing time. He promised the suspension would go away in a matter of weeks. And even if it didn’t, Richardson told them, he would find a way to keep coaching.

The suspension didn’t go away. Instead, it surfaced a flood of allegations far more serious than Instagram photos: One mother would allege that Richardson had been having a sexual relationship with her daughter that began four years ago, when the girl was 16 and he was 36, she told ProPublica and The Washington Post. Other players would come forward to say Richardson had groomed and physically and emotionally abused them. USA Volleyball referred the case to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an oversight body created to police abuse in youth and Olympic sports, which eventually suspended Richardson and put his name on its public disciplinary list.

Richardson was right about one thing, however: None of that mattered. Although he was barred from attending USA Volleyball events, including nationals, Richardson was able to keep coaching his teams of teenage girls. He attended daily practices and appeared on the sidelines of tournaments hosted by other volleyball groups for two years.

In February of this year, SafeSport listed Richardson as “permanently ineligible” to coach, saying it had substantiated a litany of allegations against him: that he had had an intimate relationship with a minor, committed sexual misconduct involving a minor, and engaged in physical misconduct and bullying.

But Richardson is still coaching teenage girls at his gym in Pharr. And that fact is not a secret. Nearly every day for the last two years, Richardson has posted videos in which he works with Texas Fierce Elite players, supervises practices and promotes the club — hundreds of posts in all, often visible to the public.

After his suspension in early 2024, Richardson said complaints against him were an effort to “retaliate and defame someone’s character,” telling the local news website MyRGV that he “would never do anything to risk the physical or mental wellbeing of these strong young ladies.” He called himself an “enthusiastic proponent” of SafeSport and the strict rules it has in place to protect children.

“I am extremely surprised by the suspension and disappointed that I have not been given any information regarding what I allegedly did wrong,” he said at the time. “The safety and security of the athletes that train with Texas Fierce Elite Volleyball is always my primary focus and concern.”

Richardson, who has not been charged with any crime, did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Last week, after ProPublica and The Post sent him a detailed summary of our reporting, Richardson posted a video of a girl training at his gym on Instagram with the caption, “Say what you want but this work will be on display for as long as I live !! Not interested in answering to the narrative created by outsiders just invested into the next one who is looking for change!!”

For more than a year, ProPublica and The Washington Post have been investigating failures in a system that is supposed to protect children from sexual abuse in youth sports. Those flaws, the investigation found, are putting a new generation of young athletes at risk.

The sexual abuse allegations against Richardson triggered that system, which was created by Congress in 2018 in the wake of revelations about sexual abuse in Olympic sports — among them the prolonged abuse of dozens of athletes by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. The 2018 law charged the new Center for SafeSport with overseeing the country’s 50 national sports governing bodies, including USA Volleyball, which prepare and train young athletes in sports overseen by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. SafeSport investigates allegations of abuse in these sports, especially sexual abuse. It has the power to suspend coaches as it investigates them, recording their names in a public database known as the SafeSport list, and can ban abusive coaches for life.

The SafeSport list was intended to address the decades-old problem of coaches who were accused of abuse but were able to continue working with young athletes for years, often as sports governing bodies looked the other way. But that system did not stop Ryan Richardson. SafeSport, USA Volleyball and its regional partner Lone Star all failed to keep Richardson from interacting with children, ProPublica and The Post found, even as allegations of inappropriate behavior and abuse piled up.

SafeSport delayed suspending Richardson for months despite the serious allegations, ProPublica and The Post found. Later, the organization failed to take action against a coach accused of “aiding and abetting” Richardson by allowing him to work with players after he was suspended. SafeSport said it could not comment on individual cases “to protect the integrity of our investigative process.”

Once Richardson was suspended by SafeSport, the law required USA Volleyball to ensure he was not working with its athletes. ProPublica and The Post found that both USA Volleyball and Lone Star had received multiple reports that Richardson was still coaching, but Lone Star allowed his club to remain a regional member, and USA Volleyball did not object. Richardson kept showing up to coach.

Hilary Nemchik, a SafeSport vice president, said in a statement that it was the job of national governing bodies like USA Volleyball to “enforce the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s sanctions” and that governing bodies had the ability “to make decisions regarding membership.”

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“We recognize there are gaps in the system, whether it be coaches avoiding SafeSport sanctions by going to organizations outside of the Movement or a reluctance by some NGBs to do everything in their power to prohibit the participation of banned individuals,” Nemchik said. She cited a case in which another governing body, USA Gymnastics, had terminated the membership of a club for repeatedly violating SafeSport sanctions.

“This should be standard for any NGB that prioritizes protecting their members,” Nemchik said.

A spokesperson for USA Volleyball said in a statement that the organization had done an “internal review” of the incidents in ProPublica and The Post’s story and “confirmed that USA Volleyball has........

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