by Fitzgerald Cecilio

New Brunswick, NJ

Rutgers' incoming athletic director Julie Hermann had to address questions about her supposedly abusive past.

She was asked in a press conference about a 1997 jury verdict that found Hermann firing an assistant coach at Tennessee for becoming pregnant since it 'would interfere with job performance'.

Ginger Hineline, now 45, was awarded $150,000.

Remarks Hermann made at the wedding were caught on tape and would become central to the discrimination lawsuit against the university in 1997.

"I hope it's good tonight," said Hermann, a bridesmaid at Hineline's wedding, into the camera. "Because I know you've been waiting for a while, but I hope it's not too good, because I don't want you to come back February with any surprises, you know, the office and all, and it would be hard to have a baby in there."

Hineline claimed that Hermann had said previously that she could lose her job due to pregnancy and that she was eventually fired in January 1995 after she had told the latter she was pregnant.

Hermann, 49, insists the assistant was fired before she learned of her pregnancy and because she was underperforming.

Furthermore, Hermann had to explain complaints from members of the University of Tennessee women's volleyball team that

Hermann, their coach, had ruled through humiliation, fear and emotional abuse some players charged.

In a 1996 letter, they said the coach had called them "whores, alcoholics and learning disabled."

They still depict Hermann as a demeaning coach who would ridicule and laugh at them over their weight and their performances, sometimes forcing players to do 100 sideline pushups during games, who punished them after losses by making them wear their workout clothes inside out in public. Some contended she would not allowi them to shower or eat, and who pitted them against one another, cutting down particular players with the whole team watching, and through gossip.

Following the stormy departure of basketball coach Mike Rice, amid revelations he had physically and verbally abused his players, and the resignation of athletic director Tim Pernetti, Hermann was depicted by Rutgers president Robert Barchi as a healer and visionary.

"How ironic," said Kelly Hanlon Dow, a sophomore on the 1996 team, "that Rutgers had an abusive coach and they're bringing in someone who was an abusive coach."

Richard Edwards, Rutgers' vice president of academic affairs and the co-chair of the search committee, said that the school had investigated the lawsuit through university lawyers.

Two of her former bosses extolled Hermann as a leader.

Joan Cronan, the former athletic director at Tennessee, called Hermann "one of the most outstanding administrators in the country."

Louisville's athletic director Tom Jurich said that in 17 years of working with Hermann, first at Northern Arizona where she was a first-time head coach, then at Louisville, "I've never seen anything but impeccable behavior."

 

The school's scandal-ridden athletic department named Julie Hermann its new athletic director, but she has a few scandals in her past, as well

Another Scandal for Rutgers' Athletic Department?

Copyright © - All Rights Reserved

Rutgers Getting Another 'Abuser' in New AD Julie Hermann?