For a school that recently experienced a scandal involving inappropriate (to say the least) language and behavior from a now-former basketball coach and the administration’s months of inaction, Rutgers has made an unusual choice when they hired a new athletic director last week. Julie Hermann, a former NCAA women’s volleyball coach, has been involved in two notable issues of her own. Earlier this week, USA Today reported that Hermann was named in a discrimination lawsuit filed against the University of Tennessee by former assistant coach Ginger Hineline, alleging that while she wanted to have children soon after her 1994 wedding, Hermann pressured her to wait and insinuated that becoming pregnant could cost Hineline her job. In fact, the Newark Star-Ledger has a video from Hineline’s wedding on its website that shows Hermann, who apparently a bridesmaid, saying the following:
” “So, I’m very proud of you, I’m very happy for you, I love you very much, I’m very excited about this day. I hope it’s good tonight because I know you’ve been waiting awhile [Ed. note: Ew, creepy!] but I hope it’s not too good but I don’t want you to come back in February with any surprises, you know, in the office and all, and it would be hard to have a baby in there and babysitting. Well, actually I wouldn’t mind it so much but I don’t know. Anyway, have a great honeymoon. I love you. Hope it went well. See you soon.”
This isn’t exactly “Don’t get pregnant or you’re fired”, but according to Hineline that’s exactly what happened when she did become pregnant in 1995. (In what is a recurring theme, Hermann says she doesn’t remember attending Hineline’s wedding). Hineline filed suit for employment discrimination, and in June of 1997 a jury awarded her $150,000.
That was the first issue.
The second, and more disturbing, issue is the allegations of abuse by several of Hermann’s volleyball players at Tennessee. In the late 1990s, all 15 of Hermann’s players wrote a letter (it’s not clear to whom; my guess would be the athletic director) claiming that she routinely used humiliation, fear, and emotional abuse to rule the team; the young women claimed to have been called ‘whores, alcoholics, and learning disabled’. According to the Star-Ledger, which talked to several of the players on that team, Hermann said, “I choose not to coach you guys”; however, when the paper asked Hermann about the letter and the meeting, she claimed to remember neither. The conclusion the Star-Ledger came to was this:
“Their accounts depict a coach who thought nothing of demeaning them, who would ridicule and laugh at them over their weight and their performances, sometimes forcing players to do 100 sideline push-ups during games, who punished them after losses by making them wear their workout clothes inside out in public or not allowing them to shower or eat, and who pitted them against one another, cutting down particular players with the whole team watching, and through gossip.”
When the paper asked Hermann about the allegations, her response was, “I never heard any of this, never name-calling them or anything like that whatsoever… none of this is familiar to me.” (Hey, at least this time she didn’t claim not to remember).
I’m all in favor of second chances, and I’d be okay with Hermann being given a chance to coach again, provided that the proper supervision was in place. But I think making her the athletic director, particularly at Rutgers, is a huge mistake. This is a school that, until recently, had the kind of administration in place that allowed an abusive coach to flourish in men’s basketball coach Mike Rice. If ESPN hadn’t obtained a video of him throwing basketballs at players and calling them offensive names, he’d probably still be there. Now you’re giving control of that athletic department to a woman with an alleged history of being that kind of coach? No matter how confident Rutgers is in Hermann’s abilities, it looks as though everything the school has said about cleaning up the athletic department was just lip service.
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