RICHMOND, Calif. — At a meeting in Chicago in September 2014, the head of the United States Olympic Committee took note that a new initiative to protect athletes from abusers had support from every sport’s governing body except one: the United States Tennis Association.

Gordon Smith, the tennis association’s executive director and chief operating officer at the time, stepped forward to explain, according to minutes of the meeting. He objected to a “single mandatory national entity” overseeing abuse cases across federations and, over the objections of representatives for gymnastics, volleyball and wrestling, he said that a sport should be able to “opt out of the centralized structure” if it could police itself.

Whether the U.S.T.A. could police itself, though, was another matter.

Just months earlier, a prominent U.S.T.A. coach from the Bay Area had been arrested a second time on charges of abusing one of his teenage players.

That coach, Normandie Burgos, would go on to coach for three more years, until 2017, when yet another abused player, working with the police, secretly recorded him admitting to having sex with a minor. Convicted last May of 60 counts of child molestation, Burgos, 56, is now serving a 255-year prison sentence.