A Las Vegas high school track and field coach has been fired not because he did something wrong, but because his assistant did.
As reported by the Las Vegas Review Journal, Sunrise Mountain High School (Las Vegas, Nev.) track coach Cleveland Powe was fired in February, allegedly for allowing assistant coach Nik’olas Clater to attend a high school track meet he was not cleared to attend. It later emerged that the reason he was not cleared to attend the meet was because he was under investigation for an illegal relationship with a student at the school.
On May 9, Clater was charged with statutory sexual seduction, luring a child to engage in a sex act and two counts of lewdness with a child older than 14. The charges followed on the original report that Clater was acting inappropriately in February, and school officials banned Clater from campus when that initial investigation began.
While Powe did not deny that Clater was at the event in question, he does dispute both the reasons for his attendance and Powe’s knowledge of Clater’s alleged crimes. Per Powe, he had no idea of any allegations facing Clater at the time of the meet. Additionally, he holds that Clater was not serving as an assistant coach that day, but rather as one of Powe’s own student athletes training for college.
The most clear case for Powe’s defense is his insistence that he had no idea of the investigation or pending charges coming against Clater. If he had, he likely would not even have had Clater training on campus.
Instead, Powe is now out of a job himself, too, barring a reversal. That’s a stunning turn of events for a coach who didn’t do anything explicitly wrong himself.
