Hey, everybody. This is Taylor with a quick explainer up front. This obviously is not our standard episode of the big thing. It is not airing on a Friday, but we felt like this was an issue that needed to be discussed with some immediacy. So yesterday, the results of an independent investigation commissioned by U.S. Soccer and headed by Sally Yates were released in a comprehensive report which revealed, amongst many other things,

that the U.S. Soccer Federation and the NWSL failed to provide a safe environment for players

and repeatedly ignored players' allegations of abuse and inappropriate behavior by coaches over many years.

I won't attempt to summarize a 173-page document because there are others far more qualified to do so.

What I will say is that it is horrible to hear what these women had to go through from the abuse itself to the

inaction when it was reported and the ostracizing that followed. It hurt their careers. But much more

importantly, their lives, their relationships,

their mental health. It was men who they were supposed to be able to trust, who revealed themselves

to be predators, and then the institutions that were meant to protect those players doing nothing

at best and in some cases protecting the predators at worst. It's a situation that requires

knowledge to discuss empathy to understand

and emotional maturity to not just end up ranting for hours on end. And we didn't feel like we

had enough of any of those things to be able to add necessary information or necessarily

useful information to the conversation, certainly not more than Meg Linahan and Steph Young already have.

So with their permission, we're republishing their episode of full-time in our feed today.

Meg and Steph are incredible at what they do. I'm guessing many of you already know that, but

for those who don't or aren't as familiar, listen to this episode, you'll soon understand.

One other thing for me that I'd like to say, I didn't know anything about this until the stories

of the players started getting reported, but I still feel complicit.

I felt pretty sick, pretty angry yesterday reading the report, reading the summaries of the report.

I remember asking a guest, like somewhat recently, about a team and why they were playing so poorly, why they couldn't put things together. Was it the players? Was the coach struggling to convey what he wanted? We didn't really have any answers, but we're talking about them, you know, in terms of how they're playing. And this was a team who we now know the coach was an abusive and manipulative predator and that the team had a toxic atmosphere because

they didn't know what else they could do. And I think about that and really feel just horrible.

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