Part Time Coach/ Full Time Sexual Predator

He spends about 20 hours a week with your son or daughter while you are not around.

He is rarely screened with a pre-employment background check.

Lurking in the background, there is a new danger for your children: the assistant coach.

While many youth sporting leagues are stepping up their screening processes for head coaches, most assistant coaches go virtually un-screened for several reasons including:

• Assistant coaches are often friends of the head coach and thus have someone who can vouch for their character.
• Parents view assistant coaches as having less influence on a child than a head coach.
• Less time is typically spent with assistant coaches in youth sports than the head coach.

Whatever the reasoning may be, it is a lot easier to become a youth assistant coach than a head coach. Therefore, our children have a problem.

Though we may shudder to think about it, sexual deviants are constantly trying to gain access to children. Most of the time, the avenues that will best lead these deviants to children are blocked. For example, registered sex offenders know that they probably won't be allowed to teach third grade or work as crossing guards. However, as the old expression goes "where there's a will, there's a way." Thus, sexual deviants will continue to seek out and find opportunities to be close to children including volunteering to help coach a youth sports team.

Sounds far-fetched? The potential danger for a sexual deviant to harm a child as an assistant coach is actually quite substantial because assistant coaches still spend unsupervised time with children, are not as scrutinized as the head coach and are rarely required to undergo a background check before being hired. Therefore, sexual deviants are able to use the guise of coaching to "give back to the community" to be alone with children at practice, on road trips and at fund raising events. Something needs to change.

What can we do about this dangerous situation? Parents need to put pressure on youth sporting leagues to perform online background checks on not only head coaches but on assistant coaches, volunteers and anyone else who will be around children. Online background checks are relatively inexpensive (sites like PeopleFinders.com sell them for less than the price of a large pizza), can be completed in a matter of minutes and are the only reliable source of information on an individual's past behavior. Therefore, PSN urges all parents who have children in sports to make sure that everyone who will be working with your kids this year is safe and is screened with a background check.