“Psychological Warfare”: Over 14-Year Career, 韺 Red Volleyball Coaches
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“Psychological warfare”: Over 14-year career, red volleyball coaches “operated on a platform of fear” The Centerpiece May 2, 2017 Courtesy of Delaware Athletics Former head coach Bonnie Kenny (left) and associate head coach Cindy Gregory (right) instruct their team at the Bob Carpenter Center. BY TEDDY GELMAN, MANAGING SPORTS EDITOR AND BRANDON HOLVECK , ASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR Former Delaware volleyball players feared Wednesdays. That’s when Bonnie Kenny, the former Delaware head coach, and Cindy Gregory, the former associate head coach, met with players for weekly meetings. “We’d talk about it like, ‘Good luck, I’m praying for you to come out of it alive,’” Mackenzie Olsen, who quit the team in 2013 after two seasons, said. “If you were with Cindy, you were going to come out of that meeting crying.” Kenny and Gregory were fired on Oct. 16 following a weeklong suspension mid season. At the time of the firings, athletic director Chrissi Rawak and the Delaware athletic department did not comment on the situation. When approached by The Review in April, the department again declined to comment. A sevengame losing streak preceded the suspension of the two coaches. Players, however, do not believe that this losing streak contributed to the suspension. Olsen was one of 15 former players to share her experience playing under Kenny and Gregory with The Review. She was one of 34 players to leave the team for non graduation reasons during Kenny and Gregory’s tenure at Delaware. “I think the more further removed I am from that whole situation, it’s a laugh or cry situation,” Olsen said. “You’re going to laugh or you’re going to say, ‘what the hell?’ Still to this day, I can’t believe that I would even let myself stay there for two years, because it was just wrong. As a professional, that’s not how things should ever go and I can’t believe that things were ignored like that.” After speaking with former players, The Review attempted to contact Kenny and Gregory in April. According to former Delaware players, the two women are in an intimate relationship. Messages to the home they shared in Elkton, Md., according to public state records, were not returned. The Review learned that this property was recently sold. The coaches’ cell phone numbers, provided by former players, were out of service. Messages delivered to their university email addresses were not returned. Inquiries for comment directed toward properties under Kenny’s name in Rehoboth Beach, Del., Belchertown, Mass. and Meridan, Conn. were not returned. After their firings, Director of Operations Brian Toron and Assistant Dana Griskowitz served as the team’s interim coaches. Under their leadership, the team won 10 of their final 14 matches, reaching the CAA championship for the first time since 2012. “I was very angry for a very long time at this program and everything that happened and the way that we were all treated,” a senior on this year’s team said. “I really wanted to do something about it, there was a lot that we were all very angry about. And then Dana and Brian stepped up and it opened my eyes to see that volleyball was just a game, it wasn’t my life anymore… I do think that Chrissi [Rawak], our new athletic director, is very invested in players, whereas past athletic directors were more interested in money and status and so on.” Kenny and Gregory were hired in 2002 by longtime Delaware athletic director Edgar Johnson. They had previously coached together at the University of Massachusetts from 1995 to 2001. When UMass cut their women’s volleyball program in 2002, UMass athletic director Bob Marcum, a friend of Johnson, recommended the coaches. They were also endorsed by former Delaware head coach Barbara Viera, who had led the team since 1973. “I thought that one, they were good coaches and two, they were good people,” Johnson said. “I was stunned. I was surprised,” he said in reference to the firings. “Lack of Commitment” In another 2012 meeting, Gregory told freshman Liz Brock that Brock “had made the biggest mistake of her life.” Brock had just broke up with her high school boyfriend. Gregory told Brock that she had a psychic dream: Brock was going to marry him. Brock was then instructed to call, apologize to her ex Courtesy of Delaware Athletics boyfriend and tell him that he needed to Associate head coach Cindy Gregory. drive 10 hours to Delaware to make up. “I kept telling her ‘no,’” Brock said. “I ended up leaving her office crying that day. She [Gregory] would manipulate me to cry, like as a control thing, and then once I was crying, she’d want to make up.” The same year, Kenny held “transparent meetings” –– an attempt to eliminate cliques on the team. In one meeting, Kenny ordered Brock to stand in the middle of the room while Kenny divided the team into groups. “She made some kind of comment like, ‘Liz, why don’t you just go stand in the middle of the room by yourself because you don’t really fit in anywhere,’” Brock said. “She was ostracizing me to make me feel like I had no friends. So I’m looking around the room and there’s groups of four, five, two and then here I am, by myself, the only one in the room who didn’t have a group of friends. She literally would try to pull me apart from even my best friends and didn’t want me to have any personal life at Delaware whatsoever, trying to get me to leave.” Kenny succeeded. Brock, who said she dealt with kidney stones, ovarian cysts and staph infections from the stress induced by her volleyball experience, quit the team in the spring of 2014. Three years prior, freshman Alyssa Walton broke her wrist in an Aug. 27 match against Stanford. She wore a cast for two months. As she recovered, the coaches designed separate workouts for her as she could not participate in normal volleyball activities. According to Walton, one day Gregory asked her to do a conditioning exercise, running 300 meters allout. She said the team had not done this exercise since before preseason. In the locker room after practice, when Walton ran slower than instructed to, Kenny ordered her to meet with Gregory. “Obviously I knew they were pissed at me, because she was acting mad about my time,” Walton said. “So I walk in and they sit me down and Cindy is yelling at me — she’s right next to me, really close to my face — and Bonnie is just in her head coach chair behind the desk, just watching this all happen. I’m being yelled at, and Cindy’s like, ‘You’re the most disappointment we’ve ever had in a scholarship athlete.’” Walton went home for winter break and followed a teamissued program of weight and conditioning exercises. Working with her dad for the winter months, she “really committed” herself, knowing that she would be tested when she returned. One of the first days she was back, the team participated in another running drill. Walton felt like she outperformed expectations. “So everything was good, I felt great, whatever, and I didn’t have any inkling in my head that my coaches were mad at me,” Walton said. When she returned to her dorm room after practice, Walton received an email from Kenny. The subject line read “Lack of Commitment.” In the email, which was obtained by The Review, Kenny said “I cannot imagine your lack of strength and fitness being a DI player. You have so many clubs and beaches to play volleyball on and your choices to not play for over six weeks and not stay in shape and lift is not the type of student athlete we want in our program. Either make your mind up to be a DI s/a (on the court and in the classroom) or you need to go somewhere else.” This was Walton’s breaking point. “I was so done feeling like, depressed. I have never had such a low point in my life, being there,” Walton said. “And I’m like, finally, I work my ass off over winter, my wrist was healed and then they say I didn’t work hard, that I didn’t look like I worked out a single day over winter break. Like, are you f—ing kidding me, this is a joke.” Walton’s father put her on a plane back home to California the next day. She was done. Two days after Walton left, Mackenzie Olsen joined the team after graduating high school a semester early. While playing as the starting setter in fall 2012, Olsen said she was diagnosed with a concussion. She said she never received a baseline concussion test and believed she returned to play too soon, causing the symptoms to persist. Olsen said the coaches doubted the validity of her injury and accused her of lying. “I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t read, I ended up not being able to go to class,” Olsen said. “They thought I had a chemical imbalance in my brain, which, you’re not a doctor so you can’t say that about a kid.” Olsen was the first of four players to leave the team in a fourmonth span. Wednesday meetings Lexie Duch was recruited in what turned out to be Kenny’s secondtolast recruiting class in 2015. After one season, she transferred to St.