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April 5, 2024 — Another sorry episode
ADVISORY: If you are a minor reading this story, you may want to have adults with you.
In what has become an all-too-familiar pattern, yet another American field hockey coach has been arrested and held on morals charges.
Authorities in Somerset County, N.J. say that Brett Clay, a 39-year-old coach with the Centercourt field hockey program in Mount Olive, exchanged text messages of a sexual nature with a 17-year-old girl. At one point, say prosecutors, Clay offered the girl $1,000 for pictures.
Clay is currently charged with endangering the welfare of a minor, and has been remanded into custody at Somerset County Jail pending a detention hearing.
Until his arrest, he was the managing director for field hockey at Centercourt, a club which has created a sizable footprint in New Jersey with eight locations in the Garden State.
Previously, he was the assistant coach for the United States women’s indoor national side which won the 2021 Pan American Cup, qualifying for the FIH Indoor World Cup.
Clay is the latest of roughly 25 people in the U.S. field hockey community to be arrested on a morals charge since this site started keeping track in 2005. The offenders, some of whom have been convicted of Federal crimes, range from former U.S. players to volunteer coaches to teachers at U.S. high schools.
Only seven of these people have been placed in the U.S. SafeSport database.
And so it goes.
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