A third-party investigation is ongoing, according to a member of the Wasatch County School District Board of Education.
Morgan told KPCW Nov. 21 he is on administrative leave. He said he was advised not to comment further on allegations that his behavior toward numerous students had been abusive.
A number of families told KPCW their teens have allegedly experienced emotional and verbal abuse while part of the Wasatch High School football team over the past year. They said they are aware of about a dozen families who have complained to the district about the coach’s behavior.
Three of those families have allowed KPCW to share their stories, even though all voiced fears of backlash and retaliation.
In hours of conversations with KPCW, parents said Morgan created an atmosphere of intimidation, humiliation and fear that goes far beyond what could be considered aggressive coaching.
According to one father, who only wanted to be identified as A. to protect his family’s privacy, Morgan “was doing everything he could to just break them down and destroy them.”
This was Morgan’s first season with the program.
Parents also claimed their concerns were brushed aside by high school and district leaders. Their complaints date back to as early as March 2024.
KPCW obtained copies of emails sent to the school board documenting parents’ complaints. In response to records requests for additional emails related to allegations of abuse, the district only confirmed the matter is under investigation. Utah law does not require the district to release records related to personnel or to ongoing investigations, and some personnel records are protected under the law.
KPCW contacted the superintendent, every member of the Wasatch County School District Board of Education, the principal and an assistant principal at Wasatch High School, as well as the athletic director. All either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
In an email Nov. 21, the district spokesperson told KPCW the district had no comment on the matter.
Families allege their children have suffered physical, mental and emotional consequences, including self-harm and suicidal thoughts for several players, as a result of the coach’s behavior.
One mother told KPCW through tears that the situation has reached a crisis point. She’s being identified only by her middle initial, J., to protect her family’s privacy.
“We have kids suicidal, and if you’ve never had a kid, there’s nothing worse,” J. said. “We’re desperate. We’re lucky that no one has died.”
Parents wept as they described how their teens endured months of alleged abuse. Another mother – who asked to be identified by her middle initial, L., for privacy – described how the coach allegedly cycled through one boy after another on the football roster.
“[It’s] near-daily verbal assault, physical intimidation, systematic public humiliation and extensive bullying, rotating his selection of target,” L. said. “He will harass, humiliate and totally rip down – and then he’ll move on to the next target.”
The Wasatch County School District hired Morgan in December 2023 after the former head football coach, Steve Coburn, retired. On social media, the high school football program announced Morgan was chosen “after an extensive nationwide search, which included multiple interviews, countless phone calls and reference checks, stakeholder surveys, and a very thorough process.”
Parents said problems began to surface shortly after Morgan took over the team in January 2024.
“There is no love for the kids”
J. said at first, when her son said Morgan yelled at him, she dismissed it as normal coaching. But she realized it was serious when another mother on the team called her with a troubling story during preseason training last spring.
The other parent said her son witnessed Morgan screaming at J.’s son after a weightlifting class.
“He gets in my son’s face, about a half-inch away, almost touching, and he screams, ‘You’re worthless, you’re a loser, you break all the rules, you’re too weak,’” J. said.
J. said the other boy told his mother he wanted to intervene to protect his teammate, but he was scared Morgan would hit him.
J. said that in late March 2024, then-assistant principal Tara Jarvie also called her to report Morgan was bullying her son.
“Six students and one mother had called [the school] to say they were so disturbed that one kid in the football weights class was being targeted and yelled at, that they came forward,” J. said.
Along with Jarvie, J. said she and her husband met with Principal Justin Kelly, assistant principal Ryan Bishop and Morgan about the alleged bullying a few days later.
J.’s husband said he also raised concerns about the coach’s one-on-one interactions with players, including individual texts from Morgan’s personal cell phone and closed-door meetings with students.
“You’re a teacher, and that’s a minor – like, you should know better than this,” J.’s husband said.
District policy defines bullying as “causing physical or emotional harm” to students and “creating a hostile, threatening, humiliating, or abusive educational environment.” One-on-one interactions with students are a violation of the district’s employee code of conduct. Staff are required to report it anytime they suspect bullying or abuse.
J. said administrators denied the number of bullying complaints, while the coach was red-faced and defensive.
After Morgan left the meeting, J.’s husband said he asked administrators whether the coach’s behavior was acceptable.
“Bishop was like, ‘Nothing about this is OK,’ and that’s when Justin [Kelly] also was like, ‘No, this is not OK,’” J.’s husband said. “So they kind of changed their timbre to the whole thing. I don’t know if it was just to appease us.”
J. and her husband said they left the meeting thinking the school would address Morgan’s behavior. Administrators offered to place their son in yoga instead of football. They never heard anything more.
J. said she wishes she’d done more last spring to get the district to investigate the coach. For her son, fear persists.
“He’s scared Coach Morgan is still going to come and find him and put him in a room,” J. said.
The second mother who spoke to KPCW, L., said it was common for Morgan to pick on one boy in front of all the others.
“It’s often, purposely, in front of as many boys as he can corral, because he wants to make a point that you’re a miserable effing human being and nobody wants to be like you,” L. said. “Everybody’s standing there hoping to not be the one ever to get on that list.”
L. said her son told her he was too terrified of Morgan to stand up for himself.
Parents repeatedly told KPCW the behavior went beyond what’s acceptable from a high school coach.
“We expect a level of aggression in football, but there’s still a love for the kids,” L. said. “And in this circumstance, there is no love for the kids.”
“His concern for the athletes is nonexistent”
Parents said some boys normalized the coach’s behavior.
“They want to be on a winning team,” J.’s husband said. “And maybe at this young age, they don’t know what we know, as parents, is totally inappropriate. Maybe this is what Coach Belichick is like for the Patriots – maybe this is the way it’s done.”
But J.’s husband said coaching students is different from coaching professional players.
Other students left the team when faced with Morgan’s alleged verbal assaults.
Parents including A., the first father KPCW spoke with, said Morgan compelled those who remained on the shrunken roster to play through injuries to make up for the lost depth.
A.’s wife said that to leave the field, “you had to go in an ambulance, pretty much.”
In one case, the coach allegedly punished two players for their injuries. A. said the coach ignored the explicit directions of doctors and athletic trainers and forced the injured athletes into tasks that exacerbated their pain.
“[My son] said he was to the point where he was crawling with tears in his eyes,” A. said.
The next day, A. said his son couldn’t get out of bed because he was in so much pain.
For that couple, seeing their son physically suffer was the tipping point. A. said he tried to reach high school administrators for days before they replied.
“What kind of person could force this amount of pain on [my son]?” A. said. “And so I told [them] about the whole situation – told [them] how heinous this coach has been to my son the entire time, all season long. And [they said], ‘Wow, you’re the first parent who has ever complained about this coach.’”
That was at the end of October – more than seven months after J. and her husband had met with high school administrators about Morgan’s behavior.
J. said a number of parents were told the same thing.
“Almost 10 months of ignored complaints from many parents being told by admin that they were the ‘only one’ to come forward about Coach Morgan’s abusive behavior,” J. wrote in a Nov. 13 email to district leaders that she later shared with KPCW.
“[They] made me feel like I was a weak parent, because I was the only parent who had ever called and complained against this precious coach,” A. said of the district’s response.
Other students allegedly faced emotional abuse when injuries left them on the bench, as multiple boys told their parents.
“My son said that his [Morgan’s] concern for the athletes is nonexistent,” L. said. “There’s an expectation to play through injuries, regardless of personal future consequences to the athlete’s own body.”
A. concurred. He said his son’s injury this fall turned the teen into a target.
“The second [my son] went to school and started saying, ‘Coach, I can’t play,’ that is when it plummeted,” A. said. “That is when he became the punching bag.”
And L. said the extreme stress of being on the team manifested as physical symptoms. A doctor told the boy his body was trapped in the fight-or-flight response.
“He wasn’t sleeping, he was having nightmares, he wasn’t able to eat,” L. said. “There were lots of psychological things happening.”
“I saw a total change in my son”
For some students, the psychological consequences of Morgan’s alleged behavior have been dire.
A. said his son has been harming himself and dealing with suicidal ideation as a result of the alleged abuse.
“He told his therapist that he has been getting in our car and driving as fast as the car could take him, and he didn’t care if he flew off the road and died,” A. said. “We need to get this story out, because he is not the only one.”
He said children’s safety is at stake.
“[My son] is a strong-minded, loving, happy kid,” A. said, “and if we don’t get this out and let other kids know, they’re going to hurt themselves.”
J. said ordinarily, her teenager is tough and uncomplaining. But his personality transformed last winter once Morgan took the helm.
“He’s like, ‘I don’t want to go to class anymore, I don’t want to go, please don’t make me go,’” J. said. “I saw a total change in my son in February, where he was terrified to go.”
And like J., L. said her son became someone she barely recognized under Morgan’s coaching.
“What we noticed at home was that our happy-go-lucky, really friendly, nice kid was super emotional, super moody, aggressive towards us and our family members,” L. said. “We tolerated it for a few months, not knowing what was going on.”
When L. pressed her son about why he was acting out of character, the truth came out.
“And that was the first day that he broke down in tears,” L. said. “He started bawling and yelling. He was so emotional about what had been happening to him at practice: the constant humiliation, the constant assault.”
L. said Morgan flip-flopped unpredictably between punishments and rewards.
“If there would be a really bad day, then the next day, the boys would show up to football and he’d be like, ‘Oh, we’re taking everybody to the pool to swim,’ like it was a reward,” L. said. “And that’s what an abuser does, right? They beat you down, and then they surprise you with a gift, and then they beat you down.”
L. said Morgan’s behavior masked the alleged abuse from the parents.
“The parents are going, ‘Look at this coach, he’s doing this fun activity with our kids’ – not knowing that they were being abused at practice,” L. said.
J. and her husband said they and the other parents are speaking out about Morgan’s alleged abusive behavior because they want to prevent it from happening to other athletes in the future – both in Wasatch County and in other districts.
“He’ll go somewhere else and he’ll do the same thing,” J.’s husband said.
“And our boys are the collateral damage,” J. added. “I don’t want anybody else to suffer what we’re suffering.”
As of Nov. 22, the district had not communicated with families about the coach being on leave, though families told KPCW they had been contacted by the attorney conducting the investigation.
Instances of abuse can be reported to the Utah High School Activities Association at submit@uhsaa.org.
To learn more about how to prevent, recognize and respond to abuse in youth athletics, visit the U.S. Center for Safesport website.
