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Code of Conduct

By David

Edit: A very important point the subject of this article is made in the comments section here. It makes a very good point about why we can’t let abuses of power continue in 2011.

It is a constant surprise how often those in power abuse their position. Much of the current debate going on in swimming is about words like honesty and integrity. Can our leaders be trusted? Swimming New Zealand has a Code of Ethics. But what use is it if the leaders of the sport are in almost daily violation of its terms.

For example, is altering the minutes of an Annual General Meeting being “honest in all dealings with others.” Is Butler’s claim that the Regions are paying too much attention to process and rules compatible with maintaining “an uncompromising adhesion to, standards, rules, regulations and policies?” Is Byrne’s decision to place a North Shore Club’s letter on the Agenda of the Annual Meeting compatible with the requirement to, “operate within the Constitution, Regulations, Policies and Procedures of SNZ?. Is Cameron’s rant about the “rubbish” written in the Ineson Report compatible with accepting, “responsibility for your actions?” Is Coulter’s decision to close down a Committee formed by an Annual Meeting and dismiss at least one Regional delegate, Suzanne Spear, compatible with being, “fair, considerate and honest in all dealings with others?”

I could keep going on but I’m sure you get the point. Putting the North Shore Club’s letter on the Annual Meeting Agenda when the deadline for receiving items of General Business has passed and when the North Shore Club is not a Region and therefore has no constitutional authority to place anything on the Annual Meeting Agenda is simply dishonest and wrong. And yet Butler allowed it to happen.

When the leaders of the sport demonstrate a clear disregard for the rules, their bad behaviour permeates down to everyone.

Being at the top means being cleaner than clean. It does permeate down. This weekend, in Hawke’s Bay, the Region’s Winter Championships were being held. For overseas readers, Hawke’s Bay is about 500 kilometers from our club’s home in Auckland. Our Club has a member who took part in the event. She has only recently joined the Club and, with the exception of her mother, was on her own at the Championships.

The President of the Hawke’s Bay/Poverty Bay Region is a guy called Keith Bone. As it was reported to me he approached our swimmer and asked whether it was true she had joined our club, she confirmed, it was true. Keith Bone then exclaimed,

“You are not swimming with THAT David Wright are you!” and turned and left. My swimmer tells me she felt “really stink. I wanted to say something but because it was the President I didn’t think I could.”

Is that event a Code of Conduct violation? Of course it is. It is intimidating. It shows no “respect the rights, dignity and worth of others.” It is not “fair and considerate” And it is a violation of the instruction to “refrain from any form of abuse towards others” and to “refrain from any form of harassment towards others.” It may seem like a small event but it is important to a swimmer who has just taken the step of joining the big city club. To have a Regional President scorn her decision is disgusting and gutless. Keith Bone – you may not like me. That is fine. I don’t really care. But you leave my swimmers alone. If you have something to say about me, have the guts to pick up a phone and say it. Don’t you dare beat up on an athlete because she is a member of this club.

It was really the episode in Hawke’s Bay that prompted me to write this story. I think there is a link between the bad behavior of Swimming New Zealand in Wellington and Keith Bone’s disapproval of our swimmer’s decision in Hawke’s Bay. Common respect has been lost. Wouldn’t it have been just as easy for Keith Bone to pass on his best wishes? But oh, no – in the climate we have in Swimming New Zealand just now he chose to be nasty. He appears to have learned well from the current leaders of this sport.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2011 at 5:58 am and is filed under New Zealand . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • A little while ago, I made a comment about the absolutely horrible situation we had to put up with whilst living in Hawke’s Bay. I was succinctly told to shut up and get over it by a commenter. However, what I experienced as a teenaged swimmer in Hawke’s Bay very much DOES matter in 2011, if people like Keith Bone are perpetuating the toxic environment that I had to endure in the region.

    Why? Because they’ll do it to other teenagers. That is very, very much not okay.

    Indeed, it doesn’t matter what happened to me ten, eleven, twelve years ago, but I have no trouble believing that it’s still going on.

    I put up with boatloads of shit in order to swim whilst living in Napier. I can relay a couple of choice things here.

    On many occasion, I desperately wanted to give up. That is what the region wanted of me, because of “that man” David Wright, who is also my father. The only thing that kept me going to was knowing that I’d get out, having been offered scholarships to two US colleges. August 23, 2002, I left and I never went back. Anyone else at the mercy of these officials’ viciousness, who didn’t have a foreseeable escape, can be forgiven for giving up.

    Swimming officials are not there to make kids quit. They are not there to make people feel bad about their coaches or themselves. They are there to officiate the sport, and encourage swimmers to swim.

    When I was 15 (I learned about this at 16), local English teacher, Hawke’s Bay official and mother of two regional swimmers Gwenda Cowlrick reportedly told a meeting of the Aquahawks swim team that the only reason I got my name in the paper as often as I did was because I was involved in a sexual relationship with the newspaper’s photographer. This, I may add, would have been a crime under New Zealand law. This woman was, and probably still is, an English teacher at Napier Girls’ High School. Luckily, I had been sent to Hastings’ Girls, as I doubt my English education would have gone too well as NGHS.

    A school teacher, making up sex stories about a teenager.

    So who knew about this lie? Who believed it was true? Probably a great deal of the children, teenagers and adults in the HBPB region.

    Edit: I forgot this additional story initially: when I was 15 or so (so long before the next few incidents), a newspaper article and photograph of me was stuck to the noticeboard at the doors to the Onekawa pool. I think it was following the winter nationals in Wanganui. One morning, my father saw Mrs. Cowlrick at the noticeboard, apparently scratching something off of it with her fingernails. He was about forty metres or so from her, on deck with me, so he couldn’t really tell what was going on. She finished whatever she was doing, and he walked over to where she had been. The photograph of me was gone. He asked the receptionist if she had seen anything, to which she replied that she had not. However, she said, why not check the rubbish bins directly outside the front door, if he thought someone had deliberately removed the photograph?

    David did, and he found the fingernail-scratched picture in the bins. So that’s also a high school English teacher, taking to the face of a high school student with her fingernails and binning the picture outside. I realise this made no different to my quality of life, but it was fairly disturbing behaviour from an official, a teacher and a mother. End edit.

    At 17, the police visited my mother one evening after our car had been reported abandoned in the Onekawa Aquatic Centre’s parking lot by Basil Dynan, another Aquahawks parent and Hawke’s Bay regional official. To this day, I don’t know how he got away with wasting police time and making a false report, as he was more than aware whose car he had reported.

    My mother was understandably terrified, as the police needed to know if she knew the car’s or our whereabouts. To hear her tell the story, it sounded as though they had found us in a ditch, perhaps injured beyond recognition.

    Mr. Dynan was also responsible for contacting my mother’s employer and accusing her of conducting swim team business on company time in an effort to have her fired. For the sake of swimming. For the sake of him not liking her husband or her daughter.

    Later that year, a local swimming parent, whose name I don’t actually know, reported to pool staff at Onekawa that I had sworn at them in a threatening manner, and I was thrown out of the pool for three months. The story was an absolute lie.

    I was dragged out of training, mid-session, and ejected from the premises. We drove to Clive Memorial Pool and I finished the session. My evil, terrible father probably doesn’t know this, but I cried for the rest of the session, underwater, and got out of the pool at one point to go throw up in the bathrooms. Not because I was training too hard. Because I was crying too hard.

    This story greatly pleased the regional Hawke’s Bay officials. Friends from Auckland and Wellington were made aware of it. I was a leper and a laughing stock. I was embarrassed to an inch of my sanity. Sometimes, embarrassment and anger get so strong that it hurts. It makes you cringe. I spent my 18th birthday training at Clive due to my ejection from Onekawa. It was just mortifyingly embarrassing. At least if it had been true, I’d have felt remorse instead of anger and undue shame.

    All of this–every last nasty action, perpetuated on a teenager by adults–was sanctioned by Keith Bone and his colleagues in Hawke’s Bay. God knows how adults justify bullying a teenager because they don’t like her father, but this is what these people do.

    And they feel fine about it.

    And they will keep doing it. Keith Bone’s words to a West Auckland swimmer this weekend prove it. I don’t know who Gwenda and Basil and Keith have found to slowly destroy in 2011, but I guarantee you they are, or they would if they found suitable prey. Do you want that, New Zealand? Hawke’s Bay, do you want people officiating and representing you who have no problem taking out pathetic political grievances on children?

    Jenny Smith, the commenter who told me to get over it, might be back. But she should know that it isn’t about me, and it hasn’t been about me since I left Napier airport, most definitely not looking back. I got out, and now I look at St. Paul’s Cathedral from my kitchen window as I make my morning coffee, half a mile away: I did fine. I am not the problem. Who do these poisonous, pathetic little people torture in 2011? That’s who you should worry about. That’s who I care about, as well as caring that the same thing never happens to me or anyone I know again.

    For the record, our car wasn’t abandoned, it was just in a poor state of repairs. It had been at Onekawa for no longer than an hour. I’ve never slept with a photographer or reporter, and in fact didn’t even have a boyfriend until I moved to the United States. I never spewed the bile at a stranger in the pool that I was reported to have done, but it *did* take me a semester at WSU to stop getting nervous when someone I didn’t know walked onto the pool deck, or an official smiled at me at a swim meet. What a fantastic way for an 18 year old to go off into the world: nervous, untrusting and suspicious.

    Part of me wants to gloat, read off my university grades, share my Washington State all-time best results and send a big “ha! You didn’t get me to quit, and I was successful at university, both in the classroom and the pool!” to those people. But that isn’t the point. The point is that they’ll have been doing this to people for the last ten years. I didn’t have reason to think about it much until now: I naively hoped that new people would be officiating or that they’d have grown out of it. But it’s perfectly obvious that the same unpleasantness is still going on, based upon what happened there this weekend. I just don’t know who it’s happening to, or who it will happen to in the future.

    Adults who bully children, spread lies about them, make them feel bad about themselves or use their power as weapons of manipulation are the worst kind of scumbags. I dearly hope someone removes these people from positions of power before they go to town on anyone else’s lives. The fact that we place responsibility for kids’ athletic careers in these people’s hands shocks me, and I implore anyone with some power to change this for the better.

  • Tracy McGrath

    MY BLOOD IS BOILING.

    As a coach of kids (Netball), I am absolutely furious that this stuff goes on. I have not been a party to any because God help the person that directs this kind of crap at my kids. I also have a daughter who is currently coached by ‘THAT David Wright’! I think it is absolutely necessary that these people are exposed and shamed, so GO DAVID and GO JANE.

    and GO THE ALL BLACKS!!!!!!.

  • chhill

    Jane, thank you for putting this out there, it really needed to be said. I can think of a number of situations that were designed to bully kids out of the sport over the years, one quite recent and a bit too close to home. These people need to remember that the code of conduct does apply to all – swimmers, parents coaches and officials. For a supposed “grownup” to make such personal attacks on what are usually young teenagers is just so inappropriate and destructive, and for what gain? Some personal vendetta? Do they really feel more satisfied or vindicated when they have had a crack? These bullies are just the most gutless people around – too scared to take on someone their own size, and often also too scared to do it face to face, instead firing off nasty missives into the general arena or using someone else to do their dirty work.

  • Chris

    David, Jane, commentators above ….

    I do get distressed when stuff like this still goes on with gossip and innuendo still as palpable even after all these years. And there is absolutely no excuse for it when we see it resulting in our children feeling intimidated, isolated, and uncomfortable.

    But I must say that Keith Bone is actually one of the most guileless people around and he would, I am sure, be absolutely mortified at this reaction. It was a silly remark, no question, but to be honest, this sport needs more good, good people like Keith Bone, his brother Mark, and their families who have contributed an enormous amount to this sport all their lives.

    What it highlights is the destructive capacity that careless remarks can have on not only the vulnerable, but the reputations and careers of people. Unfortunately, ours is a sporting community that is very small, is very parochial with our regions and clubs throughout the country separated by great distances in many cases, and much of the ‘bad’ face of the sport is perpetrated in many instances through sheer ignorance.

    I am reluctant to use the “A” word, but these experiences, particularly as related by Jane are nothing other than abuse. There is much which we as adults must take responsibility for in stopping this cycle in our community. And it can be as simple as victimising a swimmer or their family because they choose to change clubs, telling a child poolside in front of their peers that they have to get out of the pool because their parents haven’t paid their fees, or coaches saying that a swimmer “won’t make it because they’re too fat”. We must remember that while we as adults often have the ability and life experience to put many of these situations into some perspective, children and young people do not have those life skills and the damage can sometimes not be underestimated.

    What Jane relates is horrifying and is descriptive of a level of abuse that is far more systematic and deliberate – and to think that some of these perpetrators are in the education sector is distressing.

    But Keith Bone is not in that category.

  • Chris

    Another comment David – does SNZ have a Child Protection Policy? I can’t seem to find anything on the website.

    They should have one – every other major swimming federation seems to have one so it must somewhere, gathering dust no doubt!

  • Chris, I definitely take your views on Keith into account. I guess my view here is that if Keith Bone or anyone else with a degree of power knows bullying of swimmers goes on and doesn’t do anything about it–or makes snide statements themselves that are borne of the nastiness spread by others–they’re massive apologists for the problem.

    I can’t easily forgive him for saying what he said to the WAQ swimmer, because I know the underlying culture that the comment supports.

    Even if the comment was an off-the-cuff, silly remark, here is how it would have felt if that had been said to me ten years ago: “I’m the president of your region, and I know what my officials have been up to (no one didn’t know). But because of who your coach / father / friends are, I’m not going to do anything about it. You’re on your own, kid.”

    Rather a lonely place to be.

    This same nonsense can’t be let to go on in that region, directed at the WAQ swimmer or anyone else, ten years later. It simply has to stop, which is why I beat on about my own story.

  • Sensible Swimming

    Chris, Jane, David and others,

    I found this the other day.

    https://secure.zeald.com/site/auckswim/files/General%20Info/CPP%20%28August%202011%20-%20Final%20Version%29.pdf

    It seems like someone is taking these issues seriously. A pity once again that it is not the national body taking a lead on this really important issue.

    Jane when experiences like yours are recounted I am just sickened to the bottom of my gut. I wish I could find a magic balm to simply make it go away but I know that will not happen. Thank you for sharing what is very painful so we can understand what too many of the participants in our sport have had to go through in one form or another. Abuse such as this can never be defended. Ever.

    I too know Keith Bone and rate him as one of the finest in the sport. I cannot in any shape or form imagine that were he sighted to it that Keith would ever, for one single moment condone behaviour which is abusive. Like many of us I am sure he will occasionally make a comment which with hindsight he will wish he had not, but the Keith I know is one of the kindest and most genuine gentlemen I have ever had the privilege of knowing.

    We can all become much wiser from the reading of this story. Abuse in all its forms must be stamped out.

    There but for the grace of God go I.

  • David

    Let’s just see if your Mr.Bone is one of the “finest in the sport.” Right now that label is really hard to believe. Your defence may have credibility if Mr. Bone picks up the phone and apologizes to the swimmer or to one of our Club officials to pass on to the swimmer. That’s what “gentlemen” do. Until then he stands condemned, as bad as all the rest.
    I’m not holding my breath.

  • Yeah, I guess realistically, I wouldn’t have minded an apology or action for what was said and done to me with the blessing of HBPB swimming either. They knew what Basil Dynan and Gwenda Cowlrick were up to, and they let it continue. He let it continue. It’s a bit too late now.

    As I said, not doing anything about it and spreading it is just being an apologist, and a current swimmer met a little bit of that culture this weekend. That’s never going to be okay.

    Keith Bone has a daughter roughly the same age as I am, who swam the same events in the same town. I wonder how much he’d have liked it if the same things had been said, falsely, about her?

    If my father, myself or anyone else had been supporting a culture where his teenaged daughter was being victimised and lied about, I’m sure he wouldn’t have been so nonchalant.

    I woke up this morning and thought, “ugh, did you really have to leave that comment? Why bring it all up and subject yourself to whatever the New Zealand swimming public might think?”

    I hate wondering what some nasty piece of work like “Jenny Smith” (a previous commenter who said my views were everything that was wrong with swimmers’ opinions, or some such) might have to say about me – that I’m too sensitive about what happened years ago (ignoring the fact that it appears to still happen today), or perhaps that I deserved it or brought it on myself. I was a goddamn teenager–15 when it began–and I did NOT deserve that in the slightest. Gwenda, Basil, Keith – what the hell were you thinking? How can you live with yourself, continuing to pick away at members of your sport who are legally children?

    I wish we had had a website back in 2001, as we could have had an audience back then to say “this isn’t okay.” But we have one now, and if I can make sure no one is subjected to cowardice and bullying from swimming officials again, I’ll put myself out there for the Jenny Smiths to have a go at.

    Because it has to be said. I’m not ashamed to speak out about this since it’s still going on. These people have to be taken away from positions of responsibility over children if they’re going to perpetuate or support bullying.

  • David

    There are good people who do deserve a mention. When Dynan and Cowlrick were making Jane’s life a misery (only because I was her father) three fine people from Gisbourne insisted it stop – Greg Meade, his mother Beth Meade and Gary Martin. Our debt to those three is huge.

  • Tom

    I realise this isn’t entirely on topic, but there was an interesting interview with Mike Byrne over the weekend. (http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/other-sports/5598197/Swimming-NZ-boss-looks-for-calmer-waters).

    Predictably, the position he finds himself in is in no way his fault. Instead, it is the consequence of a number of regions with a vendetta against him, who have used and misconstrued the Ineson Report to further their cause.

    That’s the Ineson Report, which, he maintains, is wrong anyway.

    The good news is “Every day I am receiving several letters, emails or phone calls from people who are horrified with what’s going on at the moment.”

    Says Byrne: “All I can do at the moment is pray for common sense and hope that some of the people involved in this smear campaign realise that what they’re doing is damaging the sport.”

    Indeed, when will he realise his smearing of the regions is damaging the sport? Prayer might be what it takes.

    Also not on topic, but must be said, go the All Blacks!

  • Rhi Jeffrey

    Wow. What is WRONG with people? It reminds me of at Auckland Winter Champs when that newspaper article came out about Justin and myself. Justin had never been in any kind of spotlight before that and needless to say he was a bit self-concious having his personal life on display to the entire swim world. (Pretty much everyone at the meet that day bought and read that paper.) While Justin was being marshalled up to the blocks to swim his 100 butterfly, Gwen Ryan (who is on the Auckland board mind you) kept making snide comments to him like “smile Justin” and “oh you’re still not smiling Justin”. While the kid was walking up to COMPETE! I will NEVER understand adults that think bullying kids is ok. It makes me need to believe in a place like Hell so I know those people will eventually have somewhere to go where they can know what they make people feel like.

    And Jane, shit if I had been here or known any of that before, I would have verbally beat the shit out of people for you lol. That’s one of the burdens of not only being a great swimmer but a “controversial” person who speaks her mind and isn’t afraid to stand up to people. Jealousy is a VERY evil human emotion and never really dies with time.

  • Thank you Rhi :) I would hardly call myself great, but it seems to be the experience of quite a few people that just getting a bit better brings out the negative brigade. Funnily enough I was not particularly outspoken back then. I didn’t really have much to say: I’d just go to training and school… and think about moving to Pullman, WA, haha.

    The kicked-out-of-the-pool incident happened weeks after I broke a New Zealand open record for the first (and sadly last!) time. I don’t think it was unrelated.

    I am really surprised about what the official did to Justin before he raced. Surely these officials know that you do NOT distract or irritate a swimmer before he races?

    The more I think about what that crap was like, the happier I am that I moved to America. Nothing like this happened to me there. Brilliant escape plan! Go All Blacks and go Cougs! :)

  • Northern Swimmer

    Jane,
    I can remember the ‘heat’ that I got from merely talking to you at one national champs; I cannot imagine what that sort of attention must have been like for you. From those of us swimming at the turn of the Millennium, and who allowed those rumours to continue to circulate, I’m truly sorry.

    David,
    Our sport needs more protective and supportive figures like you, those who will say “it’s not ok” and recognise that abuse is a problem which belongs to all of us. (I’m sure all kiwi readers begrudgingly recognise that quote and that sentiment). I have always thought that Keith was one of those similarly supportive figures.
    ‘THAT’ David Wright does have polarising views and an approach to training that is different from the norm; I think, and hope, that this was what Keith meant.
    However, with the effect being to make a young swimmer feel “really stink” he does need to realise that his comment was off the mark, and should apologise, directly or indirectly, to that swimmer.

    With your swimmer coming to you to seek assistance in dealing with her problems you are attempting to do some good which hopefully will flow through the whole of swimming. I contrast this with what SNZ has done with the Ineson report in which the swimmers, coaches and SNZ staff reported a similarly ‘toxic’ and “dysfunctional relationship festering at the High Performance Centre”. It needs to be noted that it was not just disaffected ex-swimmers who reported this, but the current creme of our sport.
    However, rather than addressing these issues the response from SNZ has been:

    From Murray Coulter:
    To initially say that nothing was wrong, before spitefully resigning.
    http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2491492/swimming-shake-up-needed

    From Jan Cameron:
    To dismiss the report as ‘rubbish’, before initially gracefully, but unfortunately ultimately ungracefully, resigning.

    From Mike Byrne:
    As recently as Saturday “What was disappointing was that the report attacked the leadership of Swimming NZ for not having done anything about those problems when the report didn’t do any analysis or discovery into what is actually being done. However … the overarching recommendations in the report were consistent with things we’d been thinking ourselves.”
    http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/other-sports/5598197/Swimming-NZ-boss-looks-for-calmer-waters
    The problem is that, even if you had been thinking it Mr Byrne, you had not actually done anything to address the toxic environment festering at the HPC.

    There has finally been some forced change, but still no one to acknowledge that this problem exists, unfortunately, at every level of our sport.

    (Also I know that this is not the right post to be asking this, but could someone from the Coalition forces please answer me this –
    Why is Bronwen Radford not standing for the SNZ Board??????????)

  • Ex NSS Parent

    Some great performances at the Youth Commonwealth Games http://www.voxy.co.nz/sport/four-swim-golds-nz-final-night/5/101077 with swimmers from Howick, Aquagym, Wharenui and North Canterbury.

    15 medals and 6 golds!!!!!!

    Let’s hope these youngsters will get looked after in the future and get better treatment than Jane and others.

  • @ Northern Swimmer – Wow, I guess even that surprises me a little, ten years later, even though it shouldn’t, since I already guessed that stuff went on.

    I knew some terrible things had been said about me, but to this day, I doubt I know everything. I *hate* knowing that people I respected, liked, etc., got to hear whatever it was that was said. I’m also glad I left in 2002 and never came back if that was the case. I selfishly hope that via something like Facebook, some of the people I knew back then might have seen a different side to me or might have read this, and now might have doubted whatever they were told.

    And I really, REALLY hope that the same people and those coming after them doubt the things they’re told about 2011’s swimmers that probably aren’t true.

    Probably because of all this stuff, it makes my blood pressure go up when people come along now and repeat attitudes that were highly likely the product of the same gossip mill.

    To hear that you took heat from just talking to me… well. That’s not exactly the best thing I’ll hear all day! :) Thanks for giving me / us the time of day now though – it’s truly appreciated.

  • Tom

    I must say, my experience of playing sport (granted it wasn’t swimming) in New Zealand as a youth was extremely positive. My coaches were always fantastic. Sure, they made mistakes. But they realised when they had, which brings me to my next point.

    You don’t have to read a management book to know you have to recognise and admit to your failings before you can fix them. As Northern Swimmer pointed out, we’ve now had everyone in power at SNZ (chairman of the board, CEO and high performance manager) tell us the Ineson Report was rubbish. In the same breath, they’re assuring us SNZ is moving to fix its problems, so we don’t need to worry. If nothing’s wrong, what are they fixing?

    Congratulations to the swimmers at the Youth Commonwealth Games. You continue to make yourselves and your country proud.