NEWNow you can listen to Pak Gazette articles!
Discontent continues to pour out of Yale’s athletic department.
Yale University’s student newspaper, The Yale Daily News, reported that eight former university coaches and athletic staff members “endorsed” complaints shared in a letter from former Yale hockey coach Keith Allain to President Maurine McInnis.
The letter, which was first reported by Pak Gazette Digital on March 23, alleged that Yale athletic director Vicky Chun fostered a “toxic environment.”
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON PakGazette.Com
Yale Bulldogs coach Keith Allain stands behind the bench during a game against the Boston University Terriers at Agganis Arena in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 13, 2016. The Terriers won 5-2. (Richard T. Gagnon/Getty Images)
“Vicky Chun is the absolute worst leader I have ever met. She is dishonest, self-centered and unapproachable. Vicky’s singular talent is self-promotion and she has created a toxic environment within the department where she is isolated by a group of administrators whose primary task appears to be to silence any dissent,” Allain’s letter said.
The Yale Daily News reported that eight of 12 anonymous former coaches and staff members interviewed agreed with Allain that Chun has created a “culture of fear.”
McInnis told the student newspaper that “many people” have sent letters about Chun as the university considers renewing his contract.
The status of Chun’s contract renewal has become a topic of uncertainty following a Pak Gazette Digital investigative series into the Yale athletic department under his leadership. Yale has not responded to Pak Gazette Digital’s inquiry about the status of Chun’s contract renewal.
The Pak Gazette Digital investigative series also found that, under Chun’s leadership, attorneys for former Yale strength and conditioning coach Thomas Newman alleged that he was unknowingly recorded and “ultimately expelled”; a track athlete left her program due to an alleged “toxic culture”; and that two of Yale’s top athletic officials bought a house together a year before one of them was hired by the university, and a former employee was allegedly forced into retirement to open a job for one of those officials.
Yale Deputy Executive Director and Director of Athletics Operations Ann-Marie Guglieri and Assistant Director of Athletics Mary Berdo, who hold the second- and third-ranked positions in the athletics department under Athletic Director Victoria Chun, bought a home together in Milford, Connecticut, in June 2018, the deed shows. Berdo was then hired by the university in April 2019.
FORMER WYOMING VOLLEYBALL STAR REVEALS HOW SJSU’S TRANS SCANDAL PERMANENTLY RUINED FRIENDSHIPS ON HER TEAM
Yale fans watch their team’s loss during the Ivy League college football decider between Harvard and Yale at Harvard Stadium in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 22, 2014. (Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
Two former Yale athletic department employees have alleged that Guglieri and Berdo are in a romantic relationship. Other former employees have alleged that a former administrator was pressured to accept a voluntary retirement package, which then created a vacancy for Berdo.
Two former employees said the athletics department couldn’t increase its staff to hire Berdo at the same time it hired Guglieri. But Pak Gazette Digital learned that a former athletics department administrator reluctantly accepted a voluntary retirement package, and Berdo was hired soon after.
The former senior associate athletic director was allegedly “given no choice” but to accept the voluntary retirement package in the fall of 2018, creating a vacancy in the department’s front office prior to Berdo’s hiring, according to a former Yale Athletics employee with firsthand knowledge of the situation.
“In October 2018 they called a senior associate athletic director and pressured him to accept a retirement package, and this person had no choice but to accept this retirement package and give 90 days’ notice, and right after the 90-day notice, they hired Mary Berdo,” the former employee said.
Allain told Pak Gazette Digital that the former employee’s recollection of the forced retirement and eventual hiring of Berdo is consistent with what he had been told by people within the athletics department.
While Yale declined to comment “on individual personnel issues,” a spokesperson for the university president’s office told Pak Gazette Digital, “We can confirm that Yale has a robust set of personnel and disclosure policies that it followed.”
MOM OF FORMER YALE SWIMMERS ALLEGES THE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT ‘TERRIFIED’ ‘EMASCULATED’ WOMEN AND MEN: ‘LIKE NORTH KOREA’
Yale’s Kira Garry and Madeleine Meyers compete in the water jump in the women’s steeplechase at the 2012 USA Junior Championships at the Indiana University Robert C. Haugh Track and Field Complex. (Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports)
Chun, a former volleyball player and then head coach at Colgate University, took over as Yale’s athletic director in 2018 after serving in the same position at Colgate from 2012 to 2018.
In an interview In early March with the Yale Alumni Association, Chun admitted to making a mistake that brought her to tears in her first year as Yale AD.
“I was talking to football alumni, you know, there’s this great helmet I had at my previous institution. And I thought if Colgate can afford it, we can definitely afford it. So I announced that we were getting these cooler, custom-made Riddell helmets. Then my deputy came up to me and said, ‘What are you thinking? Do you know how much these helmets cost?’ And I said, ‘Yes, we had them at Colgate.’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, like six or seven,'” Chun said in the interview.
“And I cried. Because I thought, ‘Wow, this is going to be the shortest-lived athletic director,’ and, you know, here I am!”
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE Pak Gazette APP
Pak Gazette Digital reached out to Yale for further comment but did not receive a response.
