PLN 20

I just read "Soccer coach sentenced in sex assault" in The Denver Post about how a soccer coach, Delbert Wallace Stiewert, was accused of having sex with a teen-aged girl in Jefferson County. The 41-year-old Delbert pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a child and was sentenced to two years in jail and 10 years to life of intensive supervised probation for sex offenders. He was arrested last year when the former student told police he sexually assaulted her in 2005 and 2006, when she was 13 to 14 years old. According to prosecutors, Stiewert began coaching the girl privately while he was also working for the Colorado Rush soccer organization. At the time of his arrest last year, he was coaching for another youth soccer organization, Real Colorado. "Shortly after the coaching sessions began in 2005, Stiewert told the teen that he was suicidal," the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office said in a statement. "He told her that she was the only one who knew and asked her not to tell anyone. The teen became worried and feared that if he did kill himself it would be her fault." Later, Stiewert began to call the girl on her cell phone. "He told her that he loved her," according to prosecutors, and became controlling and jealous of her friends. He convinced the girl to have sex with him at his townhouse in Lakewood, and continued to use his threat of suicide to manipulate the girl into sex on multiple occasions.

This matters to me because I know Del. I am a youth soccer player in the Real Colorado soccer club and Del was the coach for the U-14 girls' team when I met him. I used to see him 3 days a week at training and I wonder now if he felt like he had gotten away with what he had done? It creeps me out that he could have done the same thing to one of the girls on the U14 team too. I know that if Real had known about this before hand, they never would have hired him in the first place.

I am going to connect this to my 2 police PLN's. This matters to society in general because these are people who are suppose to be helping us and teaching us good things. Instead, they are taking advantage of not only what and who is around them but they are taking advantage of their professional positions. They are throwing away their lives for something stupid and ridiculous. David Dolan and Del should be ashamed of themselves!