It was a special day, Hiea-Yoon Kang told the group of young athletes she was coaching at La Mirada Aquabelles, one of the nation’s most successful artistic swimming clubs, as they prepared for a practice in 2011.
It was Kang’s 29th birthday.
The swimmers, however, found no cause for celebration.
“She got us in the water and announced that we would be celebrating by doing 29 50s in the lap lane timed on 29 seconds for the 50 yards,” recalled Miranda Marquez, a member of the Aquabelles at the time. “One way would be butterfly and the way back would be an underwater lap. No breathing.”
There was one more thing, Kang, one of the sport’s most influential coaches and a current member of the U.S. Olympic team staff, told the swimmers that day.
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“We had to start the 29 (sprints) over if we took a breath,” Marquez said in an interview. “Coach Kang told us that blacking out was not an excuse not to finish the drills and that we would have to finish them before she allowed any medical attention. She even remarked that she didn’t want us passing out and messing it up for everyone else by making our teammates rescue us and make us all start from the top.”
Marquez, then 16 and considered a potential U.S. national team member, was especially apprehensive. Only days earlier she had been rushed to a local emergency room to treat a kidney stone. The kidney stone remained trapped causing infection and leaving her in agonizing pain.
“I was riddled with infections,” Marquez said.
Exams later revealed that her kidney was twice the size of a normal kidney and a stint was needed to drain the infections. Marquez later required surgery.
But Marquez also knew how Kang treated athletes who couldn’t finish practice or drills, or who made a mistake in training or suffered an injury.
Former U.S. national team members, La Mirada Aquabelles swimmers and their parents allege in interviews and complaints to the U.S. Center for SafeSport provided to the Orange County Register that Kang over the course of more than a decade has routinely physically, verbally and emotionally abused athletes as young as 9, many of whom have been driven hours each day or relocated from other parts of the state or country to join a program that has become a pipeline to the U.S. Olympic and national teams.
Kang repeatedly bullied, laughed at or ignored swimmers sobbing or screaming in pain and in at least one instance personally dislocated an athlete’s toe during stretching drills and training, 14 current and former Aquabelles swimmers, including former U.S. national team members, and parents allege in interviews, formal complaints filed with the U.S. Center for Safe Sport, other confidential Safe Sport documents and athlete interview recordings and transcripts, and USA Artistic Swimming documents obtained by the Register over a months long period.
As many as 18 swimmers, including former and current U.S. national team members, have filed complaints with the U.S. Center for SafeSport since 2022, according to interviews and SafeSport documents.
Kang in January was named assistant coach for the Los Angeles-based U.S. national team and tasked with playing a leading role in preparing Team USA for the Olympic Games in Paris later this summer. It was the latest in a series of Team USA promotions for Kang, who has been part of U.S. national team staffs since 2011.
“It’s terrible,” said a former U.S. national team member, who asked not be identified out of fear of being retaliated against by Kang or U.S. Artistic Swimming officials. “I don’t know how she’s allowed to continue to coach on the highest level of the sport.
“This has been going on for so long. This is not a secret” in the sport.
The appointment came 16 months after Adam Andrasko, chief executive officer of USA Artistic Swimming, the sport’s national governing body, was presented with complaints alleging “psychological and emotional misconduct and abuse” by Kang, that she forced injured athletes to practice or compete, routinely body shamed young athletes and committed child labor abuse by punishing athletes as young as 11 by making them teach swimming to and monitor children between ages 5 and 7 for up to two hours per day while otherwise unsupervised by adults or any certified lifeguard, according to USA Artistic Swimming documents. One parent alleged in a complaint that their 11-year-old daughter witnessed a small child nearly drown while being “taught” by another Aquabelle team member.
In a previously undisclosed and unreported move, Kang was suspended as U.S. national team coach indefinitely on May 9 pending the outcome of the SafeSport investigations “on the same timeline as you were building your investigation,” Andrasko told the Orange County Register, which had actually been investigating Kang since 2023.
Andrasko said he was notified on May 8 by SafeSport of additional allegations against Kang “that were much more concerning.”
“Still these are just allegations,” Andrasko continued. “This is not an admission of Coach Kang’s guilt. But at the end of the day, my responsibility is to the (safety) of the athlete.”
USA Artistic Swimming hired Kang to help coach the U.S. national team in the run-up to the World Championships in February where Team USA qualified for its first Olympic Games since 2008 even though Andrasko and other USAAS officials were aware that Kang has been under investigation by the U.S. Center for SafeSport for more than a year, according to USSAS and SafeSport documents.
SafeSport has received complaints from as many as 18 swimmers and parents against Kang detailing more than 80 specific allegations over the course of the past 13 years ranging from physical, verbal and emotional abuse, bullying, body shaming, forcing athletes to compete or train while injured or suffering from medical issues that required surgery, and child labor and endangerment abuses, according to SafeSport documents obtained by the Register and interviews.
“Hiea Yoon Kang’s coaching has resulted in physical and mental suffering for myself and many others,” a swimmer who competed for Aquabelles as recently as 2022 wrote in a complaint to the U.S. Center for SafeSport.
The allegations undercut assertions USAAS officials made when Kang and Stanford coach Megan Abarca were named to the Team USA coaching staff in January that the coaches would have a “positive impact” on the Olympic and World Championship teams’ culture.
“The two coaches will bring their strong skill sets to enhance the abilities of the country’s best athletes in their pursuit of Olympic success,” USAAS said in a statement in January. “These positions will also enhance our commitment to a healthy attitude that fosters the development of the best all-around athlete. The goal is to help each athlete become the most well-rounded individual in and out of the sport.”
Andrasko said he was unaware of abusive behavior by Kang while coaching various U.S. national teams.
Andrasko disputed the characterization of Kang’s U.S. national and Olympic team appointment as a promotion.
“It was a contract extension,” he said.
In a press release at the time of the move, USASS said, “Due to recent changes in the USAAS Senior National Team coaching staff, the organization will add two talented assistant coaches to serve the senior national team in preparation for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. The new hires will work directly with the senior national team head coach Andrea Fuentes, high performance director and assistant coach, Lara Teixeira, acrobatics coach Victor Cano and the incredible support staff at USAAS training facilities in Los Angeles, CA.”
The belief that Kang could also make Marquez an Olympian someday is what led her to join the Aquabelles in the summer of 2011.
“When I had joined, I had told Coach Kang of my goal to be on the national team,” Marquez said.
Her parents also bought into her Olympic dreams, looking past the toll Kang’s pushing swimmers through as many as 40 hours of training a week had on their daughter and her teenage and pre-teen teammates, some still in grade school.
“They understood my need to push myself until I was throwing up in the gutters and go back to it and keep working in the pool,” Marquez said of her parents.
It is why Marquez carpooled 90 minutes each way, each day to train in what she and other Aquabelle swimmers and their parents characterize as a “culture of abuse” created by Kang.
It is why Marquez ignored Kang’s alleged body shaming, her taunts, her screaming, the isolation, why she ignored being called a “loser” by the coach, why she ignored the intense pain that day in 2011 and jumped into the pool and began the grueling, potentially dangerous, workout.
“Before practice, I had told (Kang) that my kidney was hurting horribly and that I had been vomiting from the pain. She said something very close to, ‘That sucks but you’re here so you’re going to do what I said,’” Marquez said. “Again, I prioritized my getting better over my health and I was only 16. I didn’t know what to say or do. So I started the drills with everyone else.”
By the 19th 50, after more than a half-mile of swimming, a quarter-mile underwater without breathing, Marquez realized she couldn’t continue.
“Those are both hypoxic exercises so the pain in my back and my kidney was getting so excruciating,” she said. “Because I knew I was peeing blood and I knew I was going to throw up and I ran to the bathroom.”
Marquez informed Kang of what was going on and as she dashed to the bathroom she heard the coach yell behind her, “We’ll wait until you’re back in the pool but everyone has to restart because of you.”
Kang followed Marquez into the bathroom where she found the swimmer “collapsed on the bathroom floor vomiting and sobbing,” Marquez said.
Marquez asked Kang to call her parents so they could take her to the emergency room.
“She acted like I hadn’t said anything and instead said, ‘You know everyone has to start over because of you now, right?’”
Marquez said in an interview, repeating an account she made in a complaint to the U.S. Center for Safe Sport. “I was too stunned and in too much pain to respond.”
What also stung, Marquez said, was Kang’s next comment in which she questioned both the athlete’s truthfulness and her desire to make the U.S. national team while the swimmer was doubled over in pain.
“Kang told me, ‘I think you’re a liar. I don’t think you actually want it bad enough,’” Marquez recalled.
Marquez’s parents finally arrived and as they were leaving the pool to take their daughter to receive medical attention Kang made one final comment.
“She said, ‘This is not what I wanted for my birthday,’” Marquez said. “‘How dare you do this on my birthday?’”
The incident was confirmed by Elisa Marquez, Miranda’s mother, and another Aquabelles swimmer.
“Miranda was throwing up from the pain and (Kang) still didn’t believe her,” Elisa Marquez recalled. “It was just awful. No empathy, nothing, nothing. It was like it was an inconvenience that Miranda was in pain and throwing up.”
Kang isn’t the first abusive coach Marquez and other Aquabelles swimmers said they have encountered.
“Mostly synchro coaches are psychologically abusive,” Miranda Marquez said in an interview. “That’s kind of their whole deal.”
But “Kang is different,” continued Marquez, who had previously competed for Riverside Aquattes before joining the Aquabelles. “She is crueler and was cruel right off the bat. Didn’t want to know the first thing about us. And the few questions that she did ask were what our goals were and I remember the conversation that we had when me and my teammates first came from Riverside, basically telling her we wanted to be on the national team. We wanted to be the national team. We wanted to reach the highest levels and eventually go to the Olympics and she replied something to the effect like, ‘Alright, that means I’m going to be really hard on you.’ And none of us were strangers to working hard. We were high level athletes who pushed ourselves to the point of illness, past the point of what we should be doing. I already competed when I was not medically cleared by nine different neurologists because I had suffered a concussion in the pool and I competed anyway. I bring this up because it was not a lack of drive and determination and we were not strangers to any of this.
“But what Kang was like was so beyond the pale.”
Among the allegations current and former Aquabelles swimmers and their parents have made against Kang:
*Swimmers and their parents said athletes lived in constant fear of Kang’s volatile temper, never knowing what might set the coach off into a rage resulting in Kang screaming and belittling them as a team or as individuals, or kicking them out of practice, according to USAAS and U.S. Center for SafeSport documents, interviews and recordings of SafeSport interviews with Aquabelles swimmers. Kang could be set off by small mistakes in routines, athletes struggling in endurance or core drills, athletes talking to each other, references to a swimmer who was on vacation or even by an athlete who had just suffered an injury in practice or competition, athletes and parents allege in interviews and complaints to SafeSport. Sometimes, swimmers and parents allege, Kang would become so enraged she would leave the pool in the middle of practice.
“During my time at La Mirada when Hiea-Yoon got furious she would just leave my teammates and me alone at the pool while she left somewhere,” Nicole Meza, a former U.S. champion swimmer for the Aquabelles, said in an interview. “We would all be in the water not knowing what to do alone. Wondering if we should get out or send someone to get her. It was always nerve wracking because we did not know how to please her.”
• Swimmers suffered regular physical abuse by Kang ranging from being required to train as much as 40 hours per week, being forced to train or compete while recovering from surgeries, injuries that required other medical treatment and concussions, to being subjected to hypoxic training that put athletes at risk of losing consciousness under water, athletes and parents allege in interviews, SafeSport complaints and recordings. Swimmers have suffered dislocated toes and hyperextended knees and other leg injuries during drills in which Kang has manipulated their legs or feet to the point where some swimmers scream in pain or are left in tears, athletes and parents allege in interviews, complaints and recordings.
A U.S. national team member recalled Kang laughing as 11- and 12-year-old swimmers cried in pain during a two-chair drill designed to create greater flexibility. In the drill, a swimmer does the splits, resting the bottom part of her front leg on the front chair, her lower part of her back leg on the chair behind her, her torso and upper part of both legs suspended between the two chairs with Kang sitting on the hamstring area of a girl’s unsupported back leg.
“The girls are crying, tears running down their faces and Hiea is laughing about it and saying, ‘Suck it up.’ That turns it from helping to being malicious.”
“Kang insisted on a slavish adherence to the 30-40 hour practice week and any deviations upset her, resulting in retaliatory behavior (ignoring my daughter upon her return, requiring punitive workouts, making passive-aggressive comments, etc.),” the mother of a swimmer who competed for Aquabelles from 2019 to 2022 wrote in a complaint to SafeSport.
• Kang routinely verbally abuses athletes, swearing at them or calling them “dumb,” “stupid,” or “losers,” according to interviews, SafeSport complaints and recordings.
“‘Losers’ is her favorite word,” Marquez said.
• Kang regularly body shames swimmers, making critical and demeaning comments about their weight, appearance, physiques and diet, according to interviews and complaints. In April 2020, Kang required swimmers as young as 13 to regularly send her photos of them wearing sports bras or bikini tops and leggings so she could track changes in their physique over a month-long period. Kang has denied swimmers water breaks and limited their lunch break to five minutes even on days where the athletes are training eight hours, swimmers and parents allege. Kang at times has refused to let swimmers leave the pool to eat or even touch the pool’s walls while in the water, leaving swimmers to consume snacks like cheese sticks while egg-beating to stay afloat in the middle of the water, athletes and parents said in interviews.
“My daughter was even scared to eat her dinner a few times on the way home in the car because she thought Kang was driving next to us,” an Aquabelles parent said. The parent asked not to be identified because of concerns that Kang or USAAS officials would retaliate against their daughter.
• While swimmers and parents said no Aquabelle is exempt from Kang’s outbursts, the coach targets certain swimmers for regular bullying, subjecting them to screaming and degrading comments in front of the team, trying to turn the rest of the team against her targets, isolating swimmers from the rest of the team, according to interviews and SafeSport complaints.
‘It was just torture’
Parents said in interviews and complaints that Kang also retaliated against their daughters after they spoke up about injuries, questioned the length of weekly training or requested that their children be allowed to miss practice to join family vacations or take part in holiday activities.
“Now as an adult, I recall it as torture sessions,” Marquez said of her training under Kang. “There was no discussion of choreographing routines, she wouldn’t hear of it from any of us. It wasn’t synchro. It was just torture.”
A former U.S. national team member was asked how often Kang was abusive.
She laughed.
“All the time,” she said.
Kang did not respond to multiple requests for comment made over the course of several weeks.
USAAS Senior National Team assistant coach Hiea-Yoon Kang. (Courtesy of USAAS)
Kang has been named to a series of U.S. national team posts over the past 13 years and USAAS officials have regularly praised her even when confronted with abuse allegations against the coach.
“When we previously spoke Coach Kang held the assistant coach position with the senior national team. I shared this openly with you at that time. Her performance and behavior with that level of athlete has been exemplary. This is not to dismiss the information you provided,” Andrasko, the USAAS CEO recently wrote to an Aquabelles parent who had complained that Kang had been named to the U.S. Olympic team coaching staff in the wake of a SafeSport investigation and the nature and volume of allegations against her.
U.S. national team member Megumi Field, a World Championships bronze medalist who trains with Kang at Aquabelles, acknowledged in an interview that the coach is “strict” but said she has not witnessed what she considered abusive behavior by Kang.
But in interviews and their complaints to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, swimmers and parents maintain that Kang’s decades-long reputation for abusive behavior is well known within the upper echelons of the sport in this country.
A former Aquabelles swimmer recalled a 2023 incident at a UCLA pool where the U.S. national team trains. A group of 11-year-old Aquabelles swimmers were standing outside in the rain shivering after a work-out at UCLA when U.S. Olympic and national team head coach Andrea Fuentes came upon them, according to the swimmer.
“What are you guys doing?” Fuentes said, according to the swimmer. “Why don’t you come inside and shower?”
“No, we’re not allowed to,” the Aquabelles told Fuentes, according to the swimmer.
Fuentes said she did not recall the conversation.
“My experience with coach Kang has been always very positive and I never have seen any bad behavior from her part in my team otherwise she would not be able to join us,” Fuentes said in an email. “She has been very helpful and professional since the first day she has come to help the team.”
Parents tell a different story.
“Overall this emotional abusiveness, psychological abusiveness has been going on for a very long time. She’s well known to the whole artistic swimming world that that’s how she is,” said an Aquabelles parent, who also asked not to be named out of concern their daughter would be retaliated against by Kang and USAAS officials and coaches. “So many kids … they cannot deal with her hours. They cannot deal with her excessive abuse, emotional manipulation and control. She’s basically, if she cannot control a situation, she loses it. She targets a student, an athlete that she can abuse, She could say stuff to make them feel low self esteem, feel guilty and ashamed constantly.
“She looks for anything and everything to punish you, to point out you are getting on my nerves, you are annoying or you didn’t listen. Therefore I’m going to make your life miserable. Or ignoring her, isolating her. That’s huge.
“With Kang it’s been going on for decades.”
Kang, 41, competed for Ohio State, one of the nation’s oldest and most successful artistic swimming programs. Founded in 1928 as the “Swim Club, ” the Ohio State artistic swimming program was one of the first sports clubs for women in the U.S. and has won 34 national collegiate titles.
Kang headed west after college, taking a job as the under-12 team coach for Cerritos Synchronettes in 2005. A year later Kang went out on her own, starting the Long Beach Aquabelles. Two Aquabelles won national age group titles that first year. The club relocated to La Mirada in 2007. The club trains at Splash! La Mirada Regional Aquatic Center.
Kang was named USAAS age group developmental coach of the year in 2008. In 2011, she received her first Team USA post, named U.S. junior national team coach. She coached the U.S. at the 2013 and 2014 Junior World Championships.
A demanding coach in a demanding sport
Kang’s coaching stock continued to rise in the ensuing decade as the sport became more physically demanding and technical in the decades since it was introduced as an Olympic sport at the 1984 Los Angeles Games as “synchronized swimming.”
“I think a lot of people still think it’s like with the flower caps and side dives and things from way back then,” Field said. “But it’s evolved.
“Imagine having to hold your breath do 50 jumping jacks, 20 burpees, dance around and then after a minute and a half you can breathe.”
And in an increasingly more demanding sport, Kang was considered a game changer by athletes, their parents and top levels of U.S. Artistic Swimming.
“By adding Hiea-Yoon’s technical expertise, I anticipate a significant improvement in our execution under her guidance,” Fuentes said when Kang and Abarca were named to her U.S. national team coaching staff in January. “I value unity in a team, and it all begins with the coaching staff. Bringing on coaches developed in the United States system adds an extra layer of excitement, contributing to the team’s culture and strength. It’s an exciting phase ahead, and I can’t wait to witness the positive impact they’ll make!”
Kang has already had an impact.
Team USA won a pair of bronze medals at the World Aquatic Championships in Doha in January clinching a spot in the Olympic Games for the first time in 16 years. Doha was the first World Championships contested under a new scoring system implemented by World Aquatics, the sport’s governing body, in 2023. In an attempt to make judging more objective, the sport adopted a scoring system similar to those used by figure skating and gymnastics where point values for certain elements are pre-determined and technical panels decide whether an element is fully performed.
World Aquatics described the judging overhaul as the “biggest change in the history of the discipline.”
Kang’s emphasis on technique and “going back to basics” Field said was “a huge help” to Team USA’s success in Doha.
Yet Kang’s rise up the Team USA coaching ranks has also coincided with her increasingly abusive coaching methods, swimmers and parents allege in SafeSport complaints and interviews.
An Aquabelles swimmer told SafeSport that “I noticed more dangerous mental and physical abuse patterns between” Kang and the athletes she coaches.
Nevertheless, USAAS described the U.S. performance in Doha as a “fairytale.”
It was the pursuit of that Olympic dream that led Marquez and a group of her Riverside Aquattes teammates to join the Aquabelles in the summer of 2011 after their Aquattes coach retired.
“We all wanted to be on the national team,” Marquez said. “That was the goal and Hiea Kang, the coach of the La Mirada Aquabelles was the coach of the national team so we all decided this would be the best course of action. We’d get to know the coach, we’d get the results from nationals from many previous years that proved if we trained we’d get on national team, best team in the nation.
“We were the kind of people who were like, ‘Fabulous, that is exactly what we want. We want to be pushed to be the best.’”
Other families made similar decisions as Kang’s athletes piled up the national titles and Team USA selections, leaving their previous clubs, in some cases driving two hours each way to training or relocating to Orange County from the East Coast, ignoring or tuning out the coach’s reputation for abusive behavior, convinced that Kang would make all of it worth it.
Field and her mother relocated from Delaware to train with Kang when Field was 10 after meeting the coach at a U.S. national team development camp.
“After (my) first year I was not good, not anything,” Field said of her introduction to the sport. “But I immediately knew I wanted to go to the Olympics so for me from there, how was I going to take the next step to get there?
“It was a huge step for our whole family. She was the coach. She’s so strict and really good with basics. But I was so mesmerized by her and couldn’t stop staring at her. So you’ll see these pictures of when I was 9 and in all the pictures I’m looking up to her.”
“My daughter made the conscious decision to transfer to La Mirada Aquabelles from another team to challenge herself,” an Aquabelle mother said in a SafeSport complaint. “We were fully aware of Hiea-Yoon Kang’s reputation as being tough and demanding, but were under the impression that she was fair and respectful of the athletes.”
But the mother, echoing other Aquabelles parents and swimmers, said Kang’s treatment of young athletes crossed the line between tough and demanding and abusive and physically and emotionally damaging.
Marquez was asked how soon after joining Aquabelles did Kang’s alleged abuse start?
“Immediately,” Marquez said.
“We were forbidden from speaking the entire time (at practice),” she said. “And she would hold that over our heads that we wanted to be on the national team and she said any amount of talking was absolutely unacceptable. We couldn’t greet each other (at practice). We couldn’t say we were on this number lap or if someone lost track (of the number of laps or reps). It was so far beyond anything we’d experienced. And then we got punished if we talked.”
Team USA competes in the preliminary of the Team free artistic swimming event during the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka on July 20, 2023. (Photo by Philip FONG / AFP) (Photo by PHILIP FONG/AFP via Getty Images)
‘Blacking out is not an excuse’
One practice shortly after Marquez and her Riverside teammates joined Aquabelles, she said, “sticks out the worst for me.”
“We were all having a good day. We were all coming directly from school after and we all carpooled together and we were talking setting up our mats and that really set Hiea Kang off and she was like, since everyone wants to talk today we’re going to work out so hard you can’t talk,” Marquez said. “And again, I was no stranger to hard work. So instead of, oh, you’re going to do a hundred of this, you’re going to do a hundred of that, as in like a hundred repetitions, that practice she had us do four hundred of each and there were like 10 different exercises so we were doing like 4,000 reps.”
The exercises went on for 3 1/2 hours, Marquez said.
“Almost the entirety of practice and Hiea Kang was saying things like, ‘blacking out is not an excuse to not finish the exercise or the drill.’”
It’s not just the physical pain from Kang’s workouts that stand out to current and former Aquabelle swimmers.
“I don’t want to get emotional,” Marquez said. “And she would yell at us during this whole time saying, ‘If you’re talking, I don’t think you’re that serious about what it is you want. I think that you’re liars. I think that if it really mattered to you, you would shut up.’ We spent a lot of time together. We spent a lot of time driving at that point an hour and a half in one direction for those practices. And she would get very emotional.
“She basically said our goals were not obtainable because of who we were as people and we didn’t take things seriously. And she’s really into withholding attention from anybody she thinks is not taking it seriously enough and (administrating) physical punishment at the same time as well.
“And the punishments would get worse and worse. She would just start off right off the bat with an insane level of physical punishment.”
The physical punishment was usually accompanied by verbal abuse, swimmers and parents allege in interviews and USAAS and SafeSport documents.
Kang on an almost daily basis screamed at swimmers for mistakes while practicing routines or struggling during conditioning. All the swimmers interviewed said they were verbally abused by Kang but interviews and documents also reveal a pattern of the coach allegedly targeting specific swimmers for almost daily bullying.
“She had favorites,” Meza said. “I was one of her favorites so I never got the brunt force that other kids did.”
In addition to screaming at a swimmer or belittling them in front of the rest of the team, Kang regularly tried to turn the rest of the team against certain swimmers the coach had targeted for bullying, swimmers and their parents allege, creating what one parent described as “Lord of The Flies” environment within the team, according to interviews and documents.
“I didn’t really worry about my other teammates,” Meza admitted. “I think that was everybody’s mindset, which was just survive. If you don’t survive you get the brunt of the force and that’s it.”
Team USA competes in the preliminary of the Team free artistic swimming event during the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka on July 20, 2023. (Photo by MANAN VATSYAYANA / AFP) (Photo by MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP via Getty Images)
Turning swimmers against each other
One of the frequent ways Kang tried to turn swimmers against a targeted teammate was to require the team to do additional excessive amounts of training or conditioning when a targeted swimmer made a mistake, swimmers and parents said.
“During a team routine when an athlete who was not on her top favorite list messed up she would embarrass them in front of the whole team and make us do punishments such as run-throughs for an excessive amount of time because a teammate may have misunderstood the correction or was nervous because the amount of pressure that has been placed upon her to not mess up or we would continue to do run throughs,” Meza said.
One incident in particular stands out to Meza.
“There was this other girl, the scapegoat of the team,” Meza said. “She made a mistake and Kang punished us as a team.
After practice, Meza continued “We all go in to shower and we all ganged up on her. We’re all young, we’re all frustrated because we see our coach bashing on this kid, so we started bashing on her too, thinking that it would work so we wouldn’t have to be doing all this (expletive) we’re doing.
“‘Why aren’t you getting it?’ ‘We’re having to do all this over because of you. Why can’t you just follow her orders?’ But Kang wouldn’t give her good corrections on how to fix it.
“So we’re going into showers to yell at her because she was getting us all in trouble and Kang would be yelling at her all the time. Pitting us all against her
“So that occurred a lot.”
Meza was asked if Kang knew about the girl being bullied by her teammates in the showers?
“She was well aware of it,” Meza said.
Did Kang ever tell the swimmers to stop harassing the girl?
“No,” Meza said.
The girl quit the team soon after the showers incident and no one from the club checked up on her after she left, Meza said.
Meza was asked if looking back if she felt badly about the incident and other similar confrontations.
“One hundred percent,” she said. “I get really sad when I think of the kids who have quit the team over stuff like that.”
Injuries not allowed
Mistakes weren’t the only thing that sent Kang into a rage, swimmers and their parents said.
“Hiea-Yoon was always heavily irritated when an athlete gained an injury,” Meza said.
“Any time a kid got an injury or any time someone wouldn’t be able to make to practice she wouldn’t talk to them for a a good amount of weeks. So the kid would be going to practice but she just wouldn’t pay attention to them.
Another Aquabelles swimmer agreed.
“Injuries were another big issue for Kang and her swimmers,” the athlete said.
“If there’s an injury she can’t control,” an Aquabelles parent said. “If there’s a girl out with concussion, she takes it out on the other girls because she can’t do anything about this girl. Because this girl, the doctor says she cannot do it because she has a concussion, so then that’s it.”
But a former Aquabelles swimmer recalled a training session when a group of athletes on the club’s Under 12 team were covered with KT tape because of injuries.
Some of the girls were as young as 10.
“I just knew these girls were far too young to be going through such physical problems. Nevertheless, practice was still enforced, and those who tried to get out of it faced verbal and emotional consequences in the most demeaning way,” the swimmer said in a SafeSport complaint.
The swimmer told SafeSport that Kang pushed her to train despite severe back and shoulder injuries.
“Both led me to the ER,” the swimmer wrote. “Specifically for my back injury, Kang was quite upset at me due to my limitations in the water and would pressure me into doing everything she had our team do, despite the pain. Throwing up or tears were not an excuse to stop training.”
An Aquabelles swimmer suffered a severe knee injury in practice during the 2021 Junior Olympics in Colorado Springs, according to two Aquabelles parents who were with the team at the competition. Crying and in pain, the swimmer said she couldn’t do the routine in competition, the two parents said in an interview.
Kang “wanted to cancel the competition,” a parent of one of the team’s older standouts said.
The parents suggested to Kang, “Let’s calm her down.”
Kang responded, a parent said by saying, “No, she’s lying. Don’t even bother.’ And I said, ‘No, even if she’s lying, we need to show concern.’ (Kang) didn’t want to talk to the athlete, didn’t want to deal with anything. This went on three or four hours.
“The coach was literally ignoring her,” the parent of a young swimmer interjected.
At that same Junior Olympics competition another Aquabelles swimmer fainted on the way to the competition, the two parents said.
“She had breathing issues during the warm-up,” a parent said.
Kang, the women said, was enraged.
“(Kang) isolated her from other girls,” the parent of the younger swimmer said. “Nobody was allowed to approach her. Nobody was allowed to talk to her.”
The girl, the parent of the older swimmer recalled “wasn’t called to the team meal. Kang gave her a dirty look. She didn’t ask her how she was. (Kang) completely ignored her and isolated her. People were told (by Kang) not to help her.”
Kang, the two parents said, had a similar reaction when a member of the Aquabelles junior team suffered a concussion shortly before a competition.
Kang said, “It’s so annoying,” the parent of the older swimmer said. “She said it so that people know she’s upset. Kang got real upset.”
La Mirada Aquabelles perform during the 2013 eSynchro Age Group Synchronized Swimming Championships in Riverside on June 22, 2013. (Photo by MILKA SOKO, Contributing Photographer)
Screaming in pain
Sometimes the injuries were inflicted by Kang herself, athletes and parents allege in complaints to SafeSport and in interviews.
“The final straw and definitely the worst moment of all was during a normal practice, Coach Kang called us all to the wall of the pool and said we would be doing toe point stretches and warned us that she wasn’t going to let our feet go until each of us was literally screaming in pain,” Marquez wrote in her complaint to SafeSport. “I thought she was joking. We all did.”
She wasn’t.
“I told her that no one had been able to make toe point stretches hurt me yet and I had trained with Cirque Du Soleil and the French national team and no one had been able to stretch me so I probably wouldn’t scream,” Marquez wrote. “My teammates giggled and backed me up saying that was true. They had been there for it. Coach Kang said nothing, just glared at us for talking and giggling. One by one we put our feet out of the water to be stretched and discovered that she was not joking at all about making us scream.”
Swimmers were instructed to hang onto the pool wall, do a vertical split with one leg out of the water straight up with their toes pointed and their pelvises flat up against the wall, according to SafeSport complaints and interviews.
“Hold onto the wall by your knee and when you hold onto the wall you’re pressing, you’re pulling forward so basically your stomach touches your thigh and your thigh and your pelvis touch the wall so you’re very, very flat with the toe out of the water up over the edge of the deck,” Marquez said.
Kang had one more instruction.
“No talking,” Marquez said.
“We all laughed because we all thought that was a joke – that’s the most ridiculous thing to say and I think (when the first swimmer) went first it became very clear that she was not joking,” Marquez said in an interview referring to an athlete the Register is not identifying because she was a minor at the time.
The first swimmer “stuck out her foot and Kang grabbed her and pushed her feet until (she) really did scream in pain
“And then Hiea Kang made her switch and I can never forget the look of fear on (the swimmer’s) face as she switched her legs and gave Coach Kang the other leg to do the same thing. We were all 15 and 16. We had no idea what we were supposed to do and did not have the ability or the courage to say no, stop it. So then Shea (Ramsey) went and she did the same thing until Shea was in so much pain she was trying to rip herself away from Coach Kang and I think that was the only time I saw Coach Kang happy and she went, ‘Yeah, that’s how we do it,’ when Shea was reeling in pain.”
Shea Ramsey, later a standout at Ohio State, declined to be interviewed for this article.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said in an email.
Finally it was Marquez’s turn.
“I went last, unafraid because I had hyper-flexible feet,” Marquez wrote to SafeSport. “She stretched me and tried and tried and I contemplated screaming just so it would stop because Coach Kang was getting frustrated and angry.
“Then, suddenly, in front of all of my teammates, she yanked on one of my big toes and dislocated it. I screamed and ripped myself away from her and she spat at me, ‘NOW they’ll hurt!’ My toe popped back in on its own but my teammates and I were all shocked into silence. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what just happened.”
Marquez, concerned about Kang’s influence in the sport, said she did not report the incident to anyone in the sport.
“When I got home I had a huge deep purple ring around the socket of my big toe,” she said in an interview. “I was scared if I said something I would never make it to the national team. Not ever and that was my dream. So I didn’t tell anyone.”
The bruising eventually faded away. The physical and emotional pain from the alleged incident, however, have continued to stay with Marquez.
“Today, 12 years later, my dislocated toe still hurts weekly,” she wrote to SafeSport. “My toe point was ruined irreparably. I used to be able to walk around on my folded over toes and to this day, I cannot point it without pain on that toe’s tendons and ligaments. It has never been the same.
“None of me has been the same since.”
Elisa Marquez confirmed her daughter’s dislocated toe.
“Coach Kang broke her (toe) trying to prove a point,” Elisa Marquez said alluding to Miranda telling Kang about her flexibility. “She did it just out of spite.”
A nine-year Aquabelle suffered a hyper-extended knee when Kang pushed on the girl’s leg during a similar exercise in July 2020, the girl’s parent told SafeSport.
“Coach Kang made my daughter’s one leg against the wall and pushed her knee to be overextended even though she screamed in pain and told her to stop multiple times,” the parent said. The girl “was in pain for the next three weeks, and the knee pain came back easily.”
A U.S. national team member recalled another incident that she alleged demonstrated Kang’s alleged lack of concern for athletes’ safety. Kang was running a timed work-out when lightning began striking near the pool, the Team USA member said.
“And she wouldn’t let them get out of the pool,” the swimmer said. “The lifeguard told them to get out of the pool and Kang just ignored (the lifeguard) and then pretended she didn’t hear them. ‘What? I can’t hear you.’”
Parents of an Aquabelles swimmer informed Kang when the girl joined the club in 2019 that their daughter had previously sustained several concussions and continued to be pre-disposed to headaches,” the girl’s mother wrote in a SafeSport complaint.
“We knew water breaks were vital to helping prevent headaches, be they related to concussion or dehydration,” the mother continued. “Despite that, Kang often blamed my daughter for drinking water and refused to let her refill her bottle. Lunch breaks did not provide much respite either, as they were usually minimal (a five-minute lunch during an eight-hour weekend practice was not uncommon).”
The short meal breaks, swimmers and parents allege, are reflective of Kang’s obsession with food, weight and physical appearance.
Body shaming
Kang regularly made critical comments about swimmers’ diets and bodies, according to SafeSport documents and interviews. Lunch breaks were limited to 15 or only five minutes during practice sessions that could last eight hours, swimmers and parents allege.
“Kang would make inappropriate remarks about their body and food during lunch breaks. She would say in her condescending tone to the girls who were practicing eight hours and in their lunch break: ‘Do you need to eat all of the food?’ or, ‘Don’t bring that kind of food because you are not skinny enough,’” the mother of a former Aquabelles swimmer told SafeSport. “By the way, all the swimmers always brought healthy lunches.”
Meza said she had a similar experience.
“It’s an eight-hour practice, you need to eat,” Meza said. “And she’d make comments like, ‘Oh, that’s a lot of food you’re eating. Are you sure? That might be too much.’ Make a lot of comments about people’s weight in front of the team. It didn’t make sense. All of us are really skinny, we’re training 8 hours, eating for 15 minutes.”
Said another Aquabelles mom in a SafeSport report, “Kang also body-shamed my daughter and the other athletes by critiquing their body fat and criticizing their food choices – no matter how healthy. After Kang reprimanded the swimmers for having carbohydrates (even a balanced amount), my daughter increased the protein in her salads, only to be ridiculed for eating too much red meat.”
On April 4, 2020, Kang sent a text to Aquabelles team members.
“Please send me a photo of yourself in your bikini top/sport bra and leggings, flexing your arms and abs. I want to keep a progression log for the next month.
“Like this…”
Below the text was a photo of a woman wearing a sports bra and flexing her right bicep.
This is a screen shot of a text message request from Hiea-Yoon Kang to Aquabelles team members.. (Contributed image)
Marquez said Kang made it clear that she didn’t have the body type Kang was looking for.
“I’m Hispanic and the rest of the girls are white and that was always a problem with every coach but for her, she even mentioned at one point, ‘How am I supposed to pair you up with anyone on this team when your body looks like that?” Marquez said in an interview. “I was so unbelievably muscular.
“I had, basically my back muscles rippled like a horse. And at my previous team, I was able to, I was so strong, that I was able to do things other girls couldn’t do, or it would take teams of girls to do, so I worked hard. Nobody’s touching the bottom of the pool and they could lift girls out of the water with two or three people working at once and I could do it by myself. I didn’t have any body fat on me but I had breasts and I had a butt and that is not the synchro body type. So she said, ‘How am I supposed to pair you up with anyone to do a routine when your body looks like that?’
“I can’t possibly imagine speaking to little girls or doing to little girls,” Marquez continued, her voice breaking as she began to weep, “at that age what she did to us. Just using our dreams and hopes and aspirations against us, saying that we’re not the kind of people that would ever succeed. Or we didn’t look like the people who could ever succeed because I had a very different body type from the rest of the girls as well.”
Inattention to youngest swimmers
Kang did not display a similar attention to detail with young children, some pre-school aged, she was being paid to teach to swim, swimmers and parents said.
Instead of teaching the children herself, Kang would have some of her artistic swimmers supervise the children, some of them not much older than the child they were watching, while Kang worked with the Aquabelles, according to SafeSport complaints, interviews and two videos. Sometimes Kang ordered Aquabelles swimmers to supervise the small children as punishment for mistakes during practice or being injured, according to SafeSport complaints and interviews.
The mother of two Aquabelles students wrote to SafeSport that she removed her children from the club in 2022 because of “safety concerns that I have personally witnessed.”
Kang, the woman wrote, agreed to teach her 5-year-old son how to swim. Instead, the boy and other small children were left by Kang to be supervised by grade school and middle school-aged artistic swimmers while she coached the Aquabelles teams.
“This situation was not only unfair to (her son) but also the students who were told to watch (her son) who had yet to learn to swim on his own,” the mother wrote.
“I was later made aware that Coach Kang did not have a regular assistant coach to handle the many young children like (her son). The young students who were told to watch and assist (her son) in swimming had no experience in teaching. Coach Kang did not properly monitor the young kids as she was too busy coaching the older kids. (Her son) at times were left in the water for long periods of time unsupervised by her which I think was very unsafe. I believe Coach Kang created an unsafe environment for the young novice swimmers as Coach Kang primarily concentrated on the synchronized swimmers.”
One incident in particular angered the woman “very much.”
“One day, (her son) was in the pool holding on to one of the students for a long time because he did not know how to swim on his own. He was scared and was crying. (Her son) was floating on his back and Coach Kang told the student to help (her son) to swim on his stomach. (Her son) began crying and wanted to get out of the pool. However, Coach Kang made (her son) stay in the water and had the student help (her son) to stay afloat and flip him on his stomach. (Her son) continued to cry wanting to get out of the water. All the students including Coach Kang all laughed at (her son) when he was crying wanting to get out of the water. This incident was video recorded.
“It seems like Coach Kang and the older students were getting a kick out of (her son) struggling in the water.”
On a video of the incident obtained by the Register, Kang can be heard instructing a swimmer, appearing to be grade school or middle school age, to approach the 5-year old who was flailing while trying to float on his back.
“Come over here and flip him over,” Kang said.
“What are you doing?”
Kang is then heard laughing.
“Just flip him over on his stomach,” she said before continuing to laugh.
“OK,” she said.
She then continued laughing.
Three parents confirmed it is Kang’s voice on the video.
The 5-year-old, the mother wrote, consumed a lot of pool water. After this incident, (her son) was sick for three days with fever and missed school. He had stomach pains and vomited numerous times. I believe this was due to (her son) drinking a lot of pool water. It is fortunate that there were no serious accidents during the practice sessions.
“I strongly believe Coach Kang should have regular assistants that are properly trained to handle the novice swimmers. Otherwise, there is bound to be consequences.”
USAAS Senior National Team assistant coach Hiea-Yoon Kang is pictured (far right) with the U.S. national team staff. (contributed photo)
Long-lasting scars
Meza and other Aquabelles swimmers said they already bear the physical and emotional scars of their time training with Kang.
“We were good but at what cost? Because in the end, a lot of kids quit and were unhappy. It was just hard,” Meza said. “A lot of kids didn’t want to quit because our friends were on the team. We didn’t want them to be suffering through that alone, so we kind of just put our heads down and just kept going and there wasn’t a lot of teams around that did synchro.”
Meza was a national Junior Olympic champion at 12. Two years later she left the sport, physically and emotionally broken she said.
“There was a time where I was really going through it mentally where I was like, ‘Yay, we won!’ But I just wanted to go home. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I was just ready to go home because I was so tired mentally and physically.
“I did quit in the end because it was too much for me and it just sucks because I did love the sport so much but it was just with the wrong coach.”
Meza later switched sports. She is now a freshman at UC Santa Cruz where she is a member of the swim team specializing in the backstroke. She still trains at Splash when she’s in Orange County and sometimes sees Kang.
“It hurts that a lot of kids quit that team because of her,” Meza said. “I still go to that same pool. So I see her and it still hurts because she doesn’t look at me anymore. I gave my blood, sweat and tears for her and I don’t even get a ‘Hi’ from her.”
