So About Rutgers

Hey, at least she doesn’t look like a raving bitch or anything…

In case you missed it over the weekend: the athletic director Rutgers hired to clean up the publicity nightmare that was the Mike Rice scandal has a history of “abusing” her own players: [CNN]

Julie Hermann promised to help Rutgers’ athletic program bounce back after an abuse scandal rattled the university and drew national attention.

But a group of former volleyball players said Hermann used a different approach when she coached them at the University of Tennessee in the 1990s: “mental cruelty.”

In a letter written in 1997 and obtained by the The Star-Ledger newspaper, members of the team purportedly claimed that Hermann called players “whores, alcoholics and learning disabled.”

Verbal abuse from Hermann became so intense, they claimed, that the team banded together to write the letter, calling the situation “irreconcilable.” After the team presented the letter to Hermann, she chose to stop coaching them, according to the newspaper’s report.

Stop it, World. You know who else had whiny players force their ouster as coach? Larry Bowa. Good luck finding a former college coach who didn’t berate their players that one time 15 years ago. “Mental cruelty”? That’s… what college coaches do. How else do you get a bunch of in-shape and driven 18-21-year-olds to focus on practice instead of getting really drunk and having sex with beautiful people, which is what every other college kid does (minus the beautiful people part). It’s sports. Coaches yell, sometimes they threaten to fuck their players in the face. It happens. My sophomore year of high school I had a hockey coach who non-ironically instructed us not to beat-off the night before a big JV tilt so we didn’t zap our energy (Sports Science has shown that beating off may have helped us that day, but that’s besides the point). You talk about cruelty– you try telling a bunch of 15-year-olds lathered up in testosterone after an hour-long hockey practice to keep their hands where someone can see them for the next 24 hours. Waterboarding seems humane by comparison. So if the worst thing Hermann with two Ns did 15 years ago was call her volleyball players a bunch of whores, she was probably the most coddling coach the girls had had since second grade.

But.

But of course Hermann didn’t just berate her players… she also told her assitant not to get pregnant: [NJ.com]

A lawsuit in 1997 alleged that Julie Hermann, who was a head volleyball coach at Tennessee at that time, discouraged an assistant coach from getting pregnant. The coach, Ginger Hineline, won $150,000 in the suit against the school. Hermann, during her introductory press conference as new Rutgers athletic director, was asked about the lawsuit, specifically the comments that she had made that was caught on camera during Hineline’s wedding.

GAH. How, if your Rutgers, do you not know this and know that a video exists which proves your new hire is basically lying bitch? Watch the video after the jump put together by NJ.com. Not only did Hermann lie about being caught on video joking about not wanting to get Hineline pregnant, but she also lied about being at the wedding where the video was shot(!) and where she caught the bouquet(!!!!!!!).

This all comes on the heels of Rutgers hiring Eddie Jordan, whom they claimed graduated for the school… but didn’t. New Jersey education FTW!!!!!