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Latest ‘perv’ coach

Another sex-scandal bombshell has dropped on the world of sports.

The president of one of the largest and most powerful youth sports organizations in the United States allegedly molested two former basketball players, ESPN reported yesterday.

The players told the sports network they were molested as teens by Amateur Athletic Union head Robert Dodd during the 1980s — and that news reports about the Penn State child sex-abuse case prompted them to independently confront Dodd last month.

Dodd, 63, who suffers from colon cancer, retired from the AAU on Nov. 29. The AAU told ESPN he would not be returning as it investigated the shocking claims against him.

One of the players, Ralph West, 43, told ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” that Dodd assaulted him in the ’80s. He accused Dodd, who was then a YMCA director in Memphis, Tenn., of groping him and masturbating in various incidents at Dodd’s home, the AAU Junior Olympics in South Bend, Ind., and tournaments in Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee.

The other player said the alleged sicko collected swatches of boys’ hair — and glued them to his dashboard with petroleum jelly.

“He would want to wrestle or put you like in a headlock, and I started noticing him pulling, pulling my hair out,” the unidentified player told ESPN.

“I started noticing that he would have the hair in the car. That he’d pick me up for school and there’d be a hair on the dashboard and it’s a blond hair.”

Both players alleged that they also saw what they described as a sickening collection of keepsakes, including images of the clothed behinds and crotches of what looked like hundreds of young AAU players, the network said.

They also accused Dodd of keeping bags filled with underwear bearing names and dates, and that the undergarments appeared to have once belonged to teen boys, ESPN reported.

West told ESPN there were six incidents from 1983-85 in which Dodd either molested or attempted to molest him and that in each incident Dodd would sneak into his room “in the middle of the night and you don’t hear anything . . . and he’s trying to reach his hand in your underwear, basically.

“I was afraid to even fall asleep when he was around,” West said. “It got to where I would barricade [myself in the] hotel room. I would take the table and chairs and I’d block it all against the door.

“And it got to where he couldn’t assault me but he would push his way in the room and he’d lay at the floor of the bed masturbating. You just lay there horrified. But you don’t know what to do. What, are you going to blow the lid off of this at 14 years old? All you want to do is pretend it didn’t happen and not address it at all. You want to hide and bury it.”

West is married with two children and works as a chef in Miami.

Dodd wouldn’t respond to ESPN’s request for comment.

cathy.burke@nypost.com