Rutgers just can’t seem to get it right. After video showed brutal abuse by the men’s basketball coach Mike Rice, he was fired and their athletic director Tim Pernetti quit. They hired Julie Hermann as the new AD to clean up the mess and it turns out she has some issues of her own. Read more after the jump.
The woman hired to clean up Rutgers’ scandal-scarred athletic program quit as Tennessee’s women’s volleyball coach 16 years ago after her players submitted a letter complaining she ruled through humiliation, fear and emotional abuse, The Star-Ledger reported Saturday night on its website.
“The mental cruelty that we as a team have suffered is unbearable,” the players wrote about Julie Hermann, hired May 15 as Rutgers’ athletic director after serving as the No. 2 athletic administrator at Louisville.
In the letter submitted by all 15 team members, the players said Hermann called them “whores, alcoholics and learning disabled” and they wrote: “It has been unanimously decided that this is an irreconcilable issue.” The players told The Star-Ledger that Hermann absorbed the words and said: “I choose not to coach you guys.”
The 49-year-old Hermann, set to take over the Rutgers’ program June 17, told The Star-Ledger she didn’t remember the letter. The newspaper said when it was read to her by phone Wednesday, she replied, “Wow.”
Hermann, the first woman to head Rutgers’ athletic program and one of three female ADs at the 124 schools that make up college football’s top tier, has promised a restart for the program following the ouster of its men’s basketball coach and the resignation of other officials.
After a series of interviews with many of the former Tennessee players about Hermann, The Star-Ledger said:
“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.
“Several women said playing for Hermann had driven them into depression and counseling, and that her conduct had sullied the experience of playing Division I volleyball.”
The Star-Ledger asked Hermann about the players’ lingering grievances.
“I never heard any of this, never name-calling them or anything like that whatsoever,” she told the newspaper. “None of this is familiar to me.”
