WP EXCLUSIVE

They trusted a coach with their girls and Ivy League ambitions. Now he’s accused of sex abuse.

Kirk Shipley, the rowing coach at Walt Whitman High in Bethesda, Md., held onto his job through two investigations into his behavior. Then he was arrested.

By Lizzie Johnson
Today at 8:00 a.m. EST

The rowing season had already ended by the time the seven girls began drafting a letter that they hoped would get their coach fired.

They’d spent years competing for the crew team affiliated with Walt Whitman High, one of the Washington region’s highest achieving public schools. In an affluent Maryland suburb fixated on success, their team was a juggernaut, regularly winning medals at Philadelphia’s prestigious Stotesbury Cup Regatta — the world’s largest high school racing competition — and sending its rowers on to Brown, MIT, Yale and other top colleges.

Many credited the team’s accomplishments to its longtime head coach: a Whitman High social studies teacher named Kirk Shipley. At 47, he was a three-time All-Met Coach of the Year who’d led the parent-funded club program for nearly two decades. He’d cultivated a loyal following, becoming drinking buddies with rival coaches and accepting invitations from rowers’ parents to dine at their Bethesda, Md., homes. They trusted him with their daughters — and their Ivy League ambitions.

Now, three days after their graduation from Whitman, the seven rowers decided to send a missive to the parent board, a group of mothers and fathers who volunteered to oversee the program. In just a few weeks, one girl was headed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; at least three others had earned scholarships to row in college. None of them wanted other students to have the same experiences they’d had with Shipley.

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Dan Morse also contributed to this story.

Story editing by Lynda Robinson, photo editing by Mark Miller, copy editing by Thomas Heleba, design by Brianna Schroer.

By Lizzie Johnson
Lizzie Johnson is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post and the author of "Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire." Twitter https://twitter.com/LizzieJohnsonnn