Harvard & Penn Coaching - Alleged Harassment & Misconduct

It's 2024 and coaches are still touching athletes inappropriately? Yeah they deserve to get fired.

Any athlete with mental health issues can destroy a team?? What? This is a coach’s belief? You can’t really have been a coach . . . Sorry, an NCAAD1coach.

this part is so stupid:
"At the end of the season, Lindner was left off the team’s roster for the Ivy Heptagonal Championships despite ranking as one of the conference’s top throwers — her season-best mark of 49.07 meters in the hammer throw would have placed 14th out of the 23 athletes at the championships. Lindner also alleged that Penn fell short of the roster limit for the meet, meaning the team chose to send fewer athletes than it could have."

placing 14th out of 23 is awful!! further confirms that she simply didn't need to be there.

NOW- I'm on her side with the volunteer. If he's causing problems, just get rid of him. easy. not like he gets severance or there's paperwork really. But when you piggyback this bs and the girl that took a year off for mental health then got let go, you are undermining the sexual misconduct just so you can say "plus all this other crap wasn't fair!" not worth it.

This sport at this level can be cutthroat. if you want everyone to participate all the time, go to a non-elite D3 school.

Here are the FACTS:

1. The volunteer assistant coach should have been fired IMMEDIATELY. The response from Dolan was insufficient. Maybe some of you didn't see the comments that Pavlenko made because they are in white text with an orange background, but they are disgusting. Any head coach that allows those comments is complicit.

2. Brooks should have been FIRED IMMEDIATELY. Touching someone in the upper thigh IS NOT OK. Grabbing and massaging her hip from behind, without asking for permission, IS NOT OK.

3. Brooks' behavior towards her after the complaints was childish and immature. Nobody with that temperament should be coaching.

If you had a daughter, you would be furious if one of their coaches did these things.

My advice to these students is to FILE A SAFESPORT REPORT AGAINST EACH COACH. Title IX offices generally end their reports once the employees are gone. Safesport will take these allegations more seriously and could offer much more strict penalties.

Will be interesting to see if Harvard takes any action or if this just gets swept under the rug

I know they were hypersensitive about these issues in the wake of the Patrick Wales-Dinan incident (how did Saretsky dodge all consequences for that btw, lol) but maybe there's enough time passed since then

Agreed. If there are facts to support the harrassment and misconduct--state them. In this case they seem to have some substance. But they undermine those claims with the whiny and very biased interpretations of a conference roster selection. That sounds like an entitled kid yelling “not fair!” Any experienced coach has had their share of those kids and understand what kind of problems they can cause.

You are probably right about that but the issue here is that some of the throwers were being cut because they were injured and not treated properly, while others were getting constant sexual comments along with unwanted touches. Now if you show provocative pictures and get 300,000 followers on social media, that's going to get you unwanted harassment and touching. Nonetheless, coaches need to remember who they are and what their roles are. They cannot be harassing their athletes under any circumstances.

For the men, there were no issues.

Please remember Madison Holleran who killed herself while a track athlete at Penn. The pressure was horrible for her. RIP

You are the problem. I'm a male. Not a coach. Hobby jogger in his 50's who is the traditional football and beer type guy. I'm not into feelings and complaining and was not on any particular side until your post.

You need to read what you just wrote slowly and carefully.

You just dismissed this whole thing by saying (and this is going to be non-polite and I really don't care who gets offended): Throwing chicks are fat and they are upset because they're not skinny like the runner girls. This causes them to get into their feelings and blow things up out of perspective.

In other words they are emotional about being fat in are taking it out on their coach.

Bruh! Let me put it in terms like you just did. You're a fat, probably bald middle aged man who's bitter at the world and blames people because you feel you and people like you are being victimized. See what I did there and how that comes across? ;)

Ask Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott how seriously Harvard takes such matters.

Lighten up Francis.

This board is for opinions. His opinions are not wrong because you only consider your own to be the universal truths. His experiences are different from yours and they are not "wrong". His frame of reference is different from yours. Grow up snowflake. Stop the personal attacks under a cowardly pseudonym.

Lighten up Fargo! Kinda funny how you responded to my post and not his and called me cowardly.

He is the one who said, "You are the problem" to another poster. And yet, you act like a victim and say "grow up snowflake." Seems like you can't take criticism or perhaps I hit a little too close to home with my description of your buddy.

So I'll say, take it easy and "grow up snowflake." This isn't the safe space you want it to be so if you can't take criticism, stfu you whiner and take it some place else. And btw, "stop with the personal attacks under a cowardly pseudonym."

I wondered if the Harvard student newspaper will do any follow up...

It is so difficult to bring these issues forward & the immediate response from so many men is to victim blame/try to put doubt in their stories. Read the article. Think about what is being alleged. Think about the kind of culture a college track program should have. It's really not that hard. We don't just have to accept things like this & immediately try to pick it apart because acknowledging harassment somehow is a condemnation on all men, or something.

I don't think there is any need for victim blaming here - it's just that based solely on what's in the story - as that's all the info we have - there wasn't much going on here.

Oyebode quite literally does not allege anything meriting news coverage. Her claim is that she strained her knee one time but Brooks "treated her like she was faking it." What does this mean? We have literally no more information that this. She also claims that if Brooks couldn't cut you he would make your life as difficult as possible. Again, there is no additional information about how Brooks made her life "as difficult as possible." It is also unexplained why Brooks would not have been able to cut someone from the team, especially a noncontributor. Finally, she states in December of 2021, Brooks threatened to cut her from the team and that she had not been given a "fair chance" to prove herself. But Oyebode threw for Penn in their first meet of the season on December 10th. And she had thrown for Penn in 2020 and 2021. So, as a third year team member she clearly had the opportunity to prove herself. And if Brooks didn't want her on the team, why did she throw in the first meet? Why not cut her (or threaten to cut her) before the season? Or perhaps he did threaten to cut her in December 2021 over an issue that is not addressed in the article? Regardless, Oyedobe quite of her own accord in January 2022 - she was not cut. I'm honestly not sure why this was even part of the article.

Regarding Osezua, there is not much here either. She starts at Penn and throws in the 21 outdoor season. She then throws in the 22 indoor season before leaving school for her year-long mental health leave. She then returns to school and throws in the 23 outdoor season apparently without issue (none is stated in the article). Then she gets hurt in October of 23, goes to the trainer who tells her she can't get a free MRI because the injury was off campus, and then seemingly goes AWOL from further communication with the coaches or training staff - as none is mentioned or alleged in the article - and instead decides not to pursue an MRI and drop her course load, making her ineligible. She then met with the coaches on January 12, 2024, one day before Penn's first meet of 2024, to discuss rejoining the team. Again, we have no detail about what may have transpired in the interim, but it seems bizarre that there was no communication between the parties prior to this. In the article, she states that the coaches told her they were unaware of her injury, which she seems to think they would have known about via the trainer, which strongly suggests that she never spoke to anyone on the coaching staff about her injury. Regardless, it seems odd to tie the coaching staff's reluctance for her to rejoin the team to her mental health leave, when she had already rejoined the team for 2023 outdoor when she returned to school from her leave. A more natural understanding would be that this person was MIA for entirety of the lead up to the season and then the day before the first meet of 2024 asks to rejoin the team. As a non-contributor it is not shocking the coaches may not have wanted this person back.

Again there are two sides to every story.

Not saying the coaches are in the right but usually we only get the athletes perspective in these situations.

I used to work at a program where a walk on jumper went on a big campaign against the head coach in the school new paper and different media outlets. Everyone was shocked the director was fired.

what no one saw was that behind the scenes everything was investigated and the athlete was kicked off the team due to repeatedly failing drug tests. Not some big conspiracy