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Discontent continues to seep out of Yale’s athletics department.
Yale University’s student newspaper, The Yale Daily News, reported that eight former university coaches and athletic staff “endorsed” the complaints in a letter from former Yale hockey coach Keith Allain to President Maurine McInnis.
The letter, first reported by Pakinomist Digital on March 23, claimed Yale athletic director Vicky Chun fostered a “toxic environment.”
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Coach Keith Allain of the Yale Bulldogs 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 manager I have ever been around in my life. She is dishonest, self-centered and unavailable. Vicky’s unique talent is self-promotion and has created a toxic environment in the department where she is isolated by a cadre of administrators whose main job seems to be to silence any dissent,” Allain’s letter read.
The Yale Daily News reported that eight of 12 anonymous former coaches and staff interviewed agreed with Allain that Chun has created a “culture of fear.”
McInnis told the student newspaper that “a lot of people” have sent letters about Chun as the university considers whether to renew her contract.
The status of Chun’s contract renewal has become a point of uncertainty following a Pakinomist Digital investigative series about Yale’s athletic department under her leadership. Yale did not respond to Pakinomist Digital’s inquiry about the status of Chun’s contract renewal.
Pakinomist Digital’s investigative series also found that under Chun’s leadership, former Yale strength and conditioning coach Thomas Newman’s lawyers claimed he was unknowingly recruited and “ultimately forced out;” a woman’s athlete left her program because of 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 pressured to retire to open a job for one of those officials.
Yale Executive Vice President/Chief Operating Officer of Athletics Ann-Marie Guglieri and Vice President of Athletics Mary Berdo, who are the second and third top officials in the athletics department under Director of Athletics Victoria Chun, bought a house together in Milford, Conn., in June 2018, the deed shows. Berdo was then employed by the university in April 2019.
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Yale fans watch their team’s loss during Harvard vs. Yale college football Ivy League playoff game 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. Additional former employees have alleged that a former administrator was pressured to accept a voluntary retirement package, which then created an opening for Berdo.
Two former employees said the athletic department could not increase its headcount to hire Berdo at the same time it hired Guglieri. But Pakinomist Digital learned that a former athletic department administrator reluctantly accepted a voluntary retirement package, and Berdo was hired soon after.
The former senior associate athletic director was reportedly given “no choice” but to accept the voluntary retirement package in the fall of 2018, which created a vacancy in the department’s front office prior to Berdo’s hiring, according to a former Yale Athletics employee with first-hand knowledge of the situation.
“A senior associate athletic director was called in October 2018 and was pressured to accept a retirement package, and that person had no choice but to take that retirement package and give 90 days’ notice, and right after the 90 days’ notice, Mary Berdo was hired,” the former employee said.
Allain told Pakinomist 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 individuals in the athletic department.
While Yale declined to comment “on individual personnel matters,” a spokesperson for the university president’s office told Pakinomist Digital, “We can confirm that Yale has a robust set of personnel and disclosure policies that it followed.”
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Kira Garry of Yale and Madeleine Meyers compete over the water jump in the women’s steeplechase at the 2012 USA Junior Championships at the Robert C. Haugh Track and Field Complex at Indiana University. (Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports)
Chun, a former volleyball player and later Colgate University head coach, took over as Yale athletic director in 2018 after serving in the same position at Colgate from 2012-18.
IN an interview earlier this 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 the football alums, you know, there’s this amazing helmet that I had at my former institution. And I thought, if Colgate can afford it, we can definitely afford it. So I announced that we’re getting these coolest custom Riddell helmets. So then my vice president comes to me and says, ‘What do you think? Do you know how much these helmets cost?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we had them at Colgate.’ She says, ‘Yeah, like six or seven of them,'” Chun said in the interview.
“And I cried. Because I was like, ‘Wow, this is going to be the shortest-lived athletic director,’ and you know, here I am!”
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Pakinomist Digital has reached out to Yale for further comment, but has not received a response.
