B.C. soccer coach Bob Birarda's sentencing listening to to renew in fall

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The sentencing listening to for the previous Canada Soccer and Vancouver Whitecaps girls’s coach who pleaded responsible to 4 intercourse offences involving former gamers, will proceed in September, a provincial courtroom decide has confirmed.

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Attorneys for the defence and Crown appeared earlier than a decide at B.C. Provincial Court docket in North Vancouver on Tuesday to repair a date for the continuation of Birarda’s sentencing listening to, which started final week. It’ll now proceed Sept. 2, the lawyer and decide agreed.

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Within the first day of the sentencing listening to, Crown prosecutor Linda Ostry detailed the assertion of details the defence agreed to as a part of Birarda pleading responsible to 4 of the ten expenses he initially confronted. She requested decide Deanna Gaffar to condemn Birarda to 2 years much less a day of imprisonment, plus three years’ probation.

The defence has but to current their sentencing request.

Birarda pleaded responsible in February to a few expenses of sexual assault and one cost of sexual touching in opposition to 4 girls from 1989 to 2008. All have been youngsters on the time of the offences, enjoying for soccer groups the place Birarda was serving on the teaching workers.

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In response to the agreed assertion of details, in all 4 instances Birarda would befriend his victims, providing them ideas and steering as gamers, however would pursue nearer relationships over time. He would ask them about their college and their boyfriends and what they did with their time.

All 4 victims thought of Birarda to be a outstanding and vital coach and felt trapped by his advances. He was 21 originally of the time-frame coated by first offence, 39 originally of the time-frame of the fourth offence.

Finally he would inform them he cherished them and spoke in additional specific sexual phrases, each in particular person and on the telephone.

All 4 girls mentioned they discovered it very troublesome to make him cease his behaviour, which progressed to him kissing them and initiating sexual contact, together with intercourse in a single case.

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“You didn’t have an opportunity to inform him to screw off as a result of that will have an effect in your profession,” Ostry mentioned one of many victims instructed investigators.

One other sufferer instructed investigators she was “caught with the residue of getting had these encounters.”

Birarda was dismissed from his positions with Canada Soccer and the Whitecaps in 2008 after complaints from gamers on each groups, however he was not banned from teaching and continued to teach youth gamers till early 2019, when the allegations of impropriety have been made publicly by girls who performed on the Canadian U20 workforce whereas he was nonetheless teaching a decade earlier than.

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