rutgers softball transfers

Note: Not all players will transfer and play softball. Other players said they noticed they handed in their phones turned off, only to find them on when they got them back in the morning. The Rutgers softball team had gone $6 over its food travel budget during a stop at a Cracker Barrel in early March 2019.The punishment? According to NJ.com, Cruickshank was making an official visit to Rutgers … Two players said Butler would even physically push players in the back to make them run faster in drills.Six players said they were physically abused at practice, including one drill in which they were intentionally hit by pitches thrown by assistant coach Brandon Duncan.

During one, players said, Butler hit grounders at an infielder so quickly the player was repeatedly hit by a ball and scratched from diving to the ground. If someone messed up, the timer started over. After Butler was hired at Rutgers in 2018, Smith appears to have joined her staff immediately, according to the Rutgers athletics website. “That being said, the things we endured this season made us miserable. Butler called her in for a meeting on May 20, and, according to Moy, “she just flat-out said, ‘We don’t want you back anymore.’”Moy said that Butler instructed her to leave the room “to go sign the transfer papers.” She declined, but Rutgers’ office of financial aid issued Moy a letter two days later saying her scholarship was cancelled, according to the document obtained by NJ Advance Media.Another scholarship player said Butler did the same with her, citing a list of complaints in their exit meeting and presenting the player with transfer papers to sign.Butler and the university said no single coach has the authority to revoke scholarships.“Scholarships may be reevaluated for a number of reasons, including, but not limited to, when student-athletes engage in serious misconduct,” Butler said.In January 2015, months after the Big Ten announced a commitment to scholarship protections, Power-5 Conferences adopted an NCAA rule that prohibited reducing or not renewing scholarship aid based on a student’s “performance or contribution to a team’s success; an injury, illness or physical or mental medical condition; or any other athletics reason.”Tim Nevius, a former NCAA investigator who serves as the executive director of the College Athlete Advocacy Initiative, said Rutgers’ actions appeared to contradict the Big Ten’s 2014 proclamation that an athlete’s scholarship “will neither be reduced nor cancelled provided he or she remains a member in good standing with the community, the university and the athletics department.”“They say these are four-year, guaranteed scholarships, but the fact is coaches and schools find ways to get out of their commitments,” Nevius said. Three others, including Collins, filed transfer paperwork on consecutive days after the season ended in May. Her teammates just kept running and running. All rights reserved (Seven players said the team was regularly punished for menial transgressions with conditioning drills that veered into abuse. Only three starting position players remain from last year’s team.Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our © 2020 Advance Local Media LLC. At some point, another player also collapsed and had to receive care from the trainer, Collins and other players said.The episode was one of numerous troubling incidents in a program ruled by fear, intimidation and abuse, Collins and six former Rutgers players and five parents told NJ Advance Media.Butler, 35, had been hired from the University of Toledo in June 2018 to revive one of the university’s worst athletic teams, bringing along her husband Marcus Smith as a volunteer assistant coach. For months, Rutgers players said they heard him utter inappropriate comments. An eighth player entered the portal in July, and two more players left the program but remain enrolled as students at Rutgers, bringing the total of defections to 10.The eight names submitted to the transfer portal since October 2018 makes for the highest total of any school in the 14-team Big Ten Conference, and twice as many as the next two highest schools.Butler said turnover is “typical during a coaching transition.”Moy is still on campus and has her scholarship, but she has no support from Rutgers athletics.She doesn’t know if she’ll ever play softball again.The same goes for Erin Collins, an outfielder who started 45 games in 2019. Ward is a grad transfer as well and has experience playing on the big stage as he scooped up two ground balls in the national championship in 2019 against Virginia. Butler called allegations players were intentionally hit with softballs “categorically false” and denied all claims of physical abuse.Moy, who tore a knee ligament during a game in the spring, said Smith and other coaches demanded she let pitches hit her injured knee during the drill.“I got punished a couple of times and I got hit,” Moy said. “He’s just done so many horrible things to these girls.”Bridgette Piccirilli Braun, another parent of a former Owens player, said Smith “treated these young girls like trash.”According to internal school emails, the school investigated Smith and determined “the complaints, with few exceptions, do not involve the sorts of alleged behavior that rise to the level of a policy violation or otherwise concern practices which are clearly wrong.”Owens athletic director J.D.

They also qualified for postseason play for the first time since 1996. The Rutgers softball team had gone $6 over its food travel budget during a stop at a Cracker Barrel in early March 2019. The players, however, said that those improvements came at a cost that was far too great.“Looking at our stats and photos from all our success this season, you would think we loved every second of it,” one player wrote in the legal notice obtained by NJ Advance Media.