When a coach is accused of sexual abuse

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CHICAGO – It was the sexually explicit videotapes that left Spiro Lempesis without a job.

In 2010, he was the head baseball coach at Concordia University, a private, liberal arts school near Chicago, with a successful reputation for turning a losing program into a winning one, he said.

“I was very good at what I did and do,” Lempesis said.

He loved his job. He loved coaching.  He loved winning. But it was his interest and relationship with one of his players, Anthony Collaro, that ultimately cost him his job.

He was so close to Collaro, an adult student-athlete on the team, that he convinced Collaro to perform sexual acts on camera while he videotaped them in his campus office at Concordia University.

With dreams of making it to the big leagues, Collaro said he participated because Lempesis promised him meetings with baseball scouts, and threatened to cut his playing time if he didn’t. The former student-athlete also said his coach told him that he could pay off Concordia baseball team fees by making the videos.

“He said… ‘If you do these videos, I’ll help you really get to where you’re going,’” Collaro recalled. “He said ... ‘You’ll play baseball and I’ll get you to where you’re going, or if you don’t, things are going to go really sour for you.’”

Although Lempesis says the videotapes were Collaro’s idea, he admitted that making them was a mistake.

“It cost me everything. It’s cost me my job, my future, my family. It has cost me everything, which again, I take ownership,” Lempesis said. “I’m a man. I was responsible for my actions. I entered into a relationship I should never have been.  It should never have happened, and I paid the ultimate price for it.”

Collaro kept the videotaping arrangement quiet, telling no one.

“How do you tell someone that?” Collaro said. “I’m so embarrassed by it.”

In September 2010, another teammate alleged that Lempesis asked him to participate in sexually explicit videos, too. And when the university discovered the secret, it quietly terminated Lempesis.

“I regret it because it shouldn’t have happened,” Lempesis said. “I’m the coach.  Some people will say I used undue influence. I don’t think so.”

It wasn’t until two years later, when police arrested Lempesis for having sex in the backseat of a car with a 16-year-old boy in a nearby town that the university informed the student body about the reasons for Lempesis’ firing.

Lempesis said the boy in the backseat of the car lied to him about his age, saying he was 19. 

Police investigated and agreed. They never filed charges against him.

Collaro, who first met Lempesis at a baseball camp when he was 10, said he recently started to regain old memories of inappropriate encounters with Lempesis that occurred during his high school years.

“He would text me all the time,” Collaro recalled. “He would ask me to do the [pitching] lessons. He would ask me to hang out. He’d ask me about my girlfriends. He’d ask me about what I was doing sexually.”

Lempesis scoffed at the idea that Collaro would come to Concordia if he was being inappropriate with him while in high school.

“Who would do that?” the former coach asked. “If you were abused by somebody in high school, would you go play for them?”

Lempesis, who has not been charged with a sex crime, said the allegations of childhood abuse are false.

One reason that there’s a reluctance to report sex abuse allegations involving a coach and a player is the fear of upsetting parents, said Char Rivette, executive director of the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center.

Rivette said most cases of abuse are never reported to authorities.

“It can be really hard to tell the difference between a healthy adult-child relationship and one that’s starting to move into an unhealthy child-adult relationship,” said Rivette. “What begins to become problematic is if that relationship starts to change into more of a power and control relationship that becomes coercive, that becomes intimidating.”

Lempesis said the relationships he had with children were very friendly, and they could be misconstrued as being something else.

When he taught at Kelley’s school, Burr Ridge Middle School in Burr Ridge, Illinois, he said he sometimes spent the night at children’s homes when their parents were traveling. He said he also attended concerts with young athletes.

A mother once caught him wrestling, alone at her home, with her teen son.

“She walked in on it,” Lempesis said. “Fully clothed, nothing inappropriate. Just walked in on it and said, ‘What’s going on here?’”

Lempesis said the mom reported him to the superintendent and the principal, but he believes 99 percent of his behavior as a teacher and coach of young athletes was completely appropriate.

He also said he monitored the boys’ showers when he taught P.E. classes, because he was instructed to make sure the kids were out of the showers within six minutes.

“You were just walking around the locker room at the time. You had no choice but to peer into the shower,” he said. “It wasn’t where I just sat there and stared at them.”

When a coach starts to cross a line into personal behavior that could be categorized as something else, then it’s a significant warning sign that a coach might be going too far, Rivette said.