'Bullied, manipulated, psychologically abused:' Inside Colgate's women's lacrosse turmoil

• Twenty players have left the Colgate women's lacrosse team since Kathy Taylor took over as coach in 2019. They allege her coaching practices hurt their physical and mental health.
• Several players received medical retirements after injuries that shortened their careers.
• Several players skipped a team banquet after the 2021 season after Coach Kathy Taylor said two of their teammates would not be invited back for the 2022 season.

Colgate University women’s lacrosse coach Kathy Taylor ridiculed players over their weight, dismissed their mental health concerns and pushed them to play through injuries that shortened their careers, according to players interviewed in a months-long USA Today Network investigation.

Twenty players have left the team before graduation since Taylor took over the program four years ago, according to a list provided by former Colgate players and a review of team rosters.

Some players say they were pushed out by Taylor, a legendary figure in upstate New York lacrosse circles who became a leading voice for fellow coaches as president of the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association. Others left on their own due to injury or because they didn’t want to play for Taylor, according to their firsthand accounts.

The USA Today Network interviewed 10 former players, and several of their parents for this story. Six of the women agreed to have their names used.

If you've had a negative or hurtful experience with a college-level athletics coach in New York, we want to hear from you. Fill out this online form, and your response will go directly to a USA Today Network reporter.

Since the start of this school year, seven players have quit the team − among them one of the team’s top goal scorers and a Patriot League standout – following an investigation begun after a Manhattan law firm detailed six players’ allegations in a letter to university president Brian Casey.

Taylor “bullied, manipulated and psychologically abused numerous players, with severe consequences to their physical and mental health,” and referred to one player as a “refrigerator on wheels,” according to a March 2022 letter from Andrew Celli of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel.

In response, the university hired a Buffalo law firm that specializes in equality issues in women's athletics to interview players, coaches and others connected to the program. Over the summer, the firm produced a report the university declined to share with players or their parents.

In August, Colgate promised positive changes were coming to the program − but Taylor would remain on staff.

“However, it is clear to all of us, including Coach Taylor, that additional adjustments are necessary to improve and elevate the program,” wrote the university’s then-athletic director, Nicki Moore, in a letter to returning players. Moore has since left Colgate for a similar post at Cornell University.

Colgate said it would allow players to keep their athletic scholarship if they chose to leave the team. A deputy athletic director was appointed team administrator, and an assistant coach was elevated to associate head coach.

The decision to keep Taylor rankled several players, prompting them to leave the team.

“Our team was so miserable,” said Gracie Bowers, a Colgate senior from Smithsburg, Maryland, who left the team in the fall after injuries. “There's no way that you can look at this 200-page report on how poorly this woman is treating these girls and not do something about it. But that didn't happen.”

(Bowers was estimating the length of the report. It has not been released.)

Taylor has declined multiple requests for comment for this story.

The team opened its 2023 season Feb. 16 with an 11-7 loss to Siena College. The team record as of Tuesday was 1-5 − including Colgate's loss to the University of Florida Tuesday, with a score of 18-5.

The Raiders are scheduled to play Boston University later this week.

Colgate issued a statement to the USA Today Network in January, saying the school takes the players’ concerns seriously.

“We identified specific actions to improve the women’s lacrosse student-athlete experience and address concerns from student-athletes and parents regarding leadership approach and player development, and have been implementing these measures with the full commitment, involvement and support of Coach Taylor and the Athletics Department leadership and staff,” the statement read.

Shifting standards for coaches

Colgate University, a high-priced, academically rigorous liberal arts school in the upstate village of Hamilton, attracts some of the best women’s lacrosse players in the Northeast.

But their desire to play at a high level repeatedly clashed with Taylor’s style of coaching – raising the question of whether Taylor’s plan to turn Colgate into a winning program went too far, and caused the team to crumble.

“It’s just been a nosedive in terms of how they’ve done as a team,” Celli said. “And I think that coaching that devalues people can lead to worse outcomes.”

The turmoil around the program comes amid heightened scrutiny of the treatment of women athletes in college and the professional ranks.

Several heavily publicized cases – most recently involving the coach of the women’s hockey team at Harvard and the swimming and diving coach at the University of California at Berkeley – have sparked calls for the NCAA to intervene.

Male and female athletes in greater numbers are speaking out, calling out coaches and the institutions that are supposed to protect them. The name-calling, in-your-face approach that was once a regular feature on sidelines from youth leagues to the professional levels is today more likely to be viewed with suspicion than admiration.

“There are a lot of great lacrosse players that ultimately had to decide between their well-being and playing a sport,” said Jacklyn Hooey, a 2022 graduate recruited from Canada to play for Colgate. “And now they're no longer playing,” she said.

After the investigation of Taylor's alleged behavior with players concluded, players say she didn't apologize, but instead told them they ruined her reputation.

“(She) was crying in front of all of us saying ‘you guys embarrassed me, and you made me look like a terrible person when half this stuff isn’t true,”’ said Eliza Soutter, an all-Patriot League player from South Carolina. “She didn’t apologize for anything.”

'We didn't choose you as our coach'

After a 2021 season when the Colgate Raiders went 5-6, ending with a 17-6 loss to Loyola, the six graduating seniors sent Taylor an email.

The June 2021 message detailed their frustration with Taylor’s decision to tell two players – a freshman and sophomore – that they weren’t invited back on the team for the following season. The six seniors, in protest, would not attend the end-of-season banquet, they said.

They questioned how such a move squared with what Taylor preached to them during their time on campus: that every player – from the stars to those down the end of the bench – had a role.

They praised the targeted players for the strides they’d made, the energy they brought to the team.

“They deserve the respect and honesty of the statement you made to our whole team,” the email said. “If you do not reinstate them, you are effectively confirming all the reasons of doubt we have entertained about you since day one. You are showing this team (and current alums) that you simply cannot be trusted and that you are incapable of leading by honest, sincere example.”

They ended it this way:

“While we understand and appreciate what you are doing to ‘change the lacrosse culture at Colgate,’ we respectfully request you re-examine your choices in the wake of your past statements about ‘team’; and thoughtfully reconsider. This decision has the potential for some very debilitating consequences for the program going forward. As we all know and realize, you didn’t choose any of us as players...but, with all due respect, we didn’t choose you as our coach either.”

Kathy Taylor arrives at Colgate

Taylor, a former star player at Cornell, began her tenure at Colgate in mid-2019, after coaching stops at Le Moyne, where she won a Division II national championship, and SUNY Cortland, where her teams reached the Division III national semifinals four times. Colgate is her first Division I job.

The Colgate team Taylor took over went 8-10 the season before she arrived, one in a string of mediocre seasons. In the 13 years before Taylor arrived, the team notched a .500 winning percentage – 111-111.

Taylor built teams that regularly won nearly 80% of the games they played. Before Cortland, she led Fayetteville-Manlius High School to two New York state championships over 18 seasons.

Ex-players said Taylor’s approach turned her teams into national powers.

Among them is Erica Geremia-Mathers, who played for Taylor at Cortland and Le Moyne between 2012 and 2016. She is now an assistant women’s lacrosse coach at nearby Hamilton College.

“I enjoyed every moment of my playing days with Kathy who led both programs to tremendous success; reaching a combined four Final Fours!,” Geremia-Mathers wrote in an email. “I valued her coaching style and rapport. I thrived under her expectations which weren't unfamiliar for me as I was raised to have very high expectations of myself. I truly believe that I grew from being a part of her teams. All of the lessons I learned have helped shape me into the coach and parent I am today.”

Hannah George, who played under Taylor at Le Moyne from 2017-19, concurs. She acknowledged that Taylor had high expectations of them, and that injured players had to fight their way back into the starting lineup upon return. But none of that bothered players, she said.

“They knew they'd have to make their way back because you are replaceable,” she said. “We all signed up for the same job, and you can’t stop the whole season because one player gets injured.”

Colgate players' weight, eating habits under microscope

At Colgate, Taylor inherited a group of players she hadn’t recruited and the challenges that went along with that. In the fall of her first season, she had to deal with first-year players who got in trouble for underage drinking, according to player accounts.

Still, the players say they were eager to play for a coach with a reputation for winning. Among them was Soutter, a star at the Potomac School in McLean, Virginia where she tallied 237 goals and was named a U.S. Lacrosse All-American in 2019.

But during a practice in her freshman year, after a Thanksgiving break, Taylor commented on her weight, telling her it appeared like she didn’t eat Thanksgiving dinner, Soutter said.

At first, Soutter assumed that was how most Division I coaches acted. She scored 12 goals in seven Colgate games during a 2020 freshman season impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But Taylor’s interest in her players’ weight continued. One cried after Taylor told her she spent more time snacking than in the weight room, Soutter said.

And, according to one former player, during a one-on-one drill in the spring of 2020, Taylor told the player she needed to get better leverage against a practice opponent she dubbed “a refrigerator on wheels.”

Players say the harsh comments had an impact on their mental health, leaving them feeling isolated in the wake of a pandemic.

Soutter was spared for a time. “If you weren’t injured, if you weren’t taking mental health breaks, you were on relatively good terms with her,” Soutter said.

That changed during her junior year when, Soutter said, Taylor told her to visit a school nutritionist.

She was told she would need to gain weight, despite her own physician deeming her weight perfectly healthy.

In the shortened 2021 season, she led the team in scoring with 34 goals and was named Second-Team All-Patriot League.

At times, Soutter said she felt pressure from Taylor to finish all the food on her plate. During a winter 2021 trip to Tampa, Soutter discreetly threw away the food remaining, so Taylor believed she finished everything.

She would be named All-Patriot League again for a second consecutive year after she tied the team lead in goals with 27 in her junior year.

Taylor’s treatment towards her teammates and Colgate’s decision to retain Taylor eventually became too much for Soutter.

She took a two-week break early in the fall and quit the team shortly after, along with Bowers and Lauren Marandett, an attacker from Wellesley, Massachusetts, who arrived in Hamilton in the fall of 2019.

Injured players sidelined amid grueling training

Taylor’s reputation for building well-conditioned teams that could outlast competitors – a trait that earned praise at other stops – became a constant source of tension as players broke down, several former players said.

Morning runs were scheduled for days when the team had a two-hour practice in the afternoon, players said.

Players said Taylor did not appreciate the punishment their bodies were taking from playing year-round.

“It’s not like we weren’t running with the other coaches,” said Kyra Weiner, a 2021 graduate recruited out of Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School in New Jersey where she was an All-Shore selection. “But when it’s every day, and kids are constantly getting injured, that’s when it starts to become an issue.”

Bowers, a senior this year, said she decided to medically retire from the team in August after feeling pressure to play in games even after a trainer told her to sit out.

For Bowers, the injuries kept coming – multiple hip labrum tears, a slipped disc in her lower back. But she would play through the pain because she feared being one of the injured.

Taylor “treats injured people like nothing,” Bowers said.

Players said that, even though trainers cautioned not to play while injured, those trainers weren’t always around to intercede with Taylor.

The team’s former trainer, Morgan Gillis, left the school two years ago and declined to comment for this story.

Marandett tore ligaments in both knees during her first two seasons, which required surgery. She didn’t get onto the field until 2022.

She played well, scoring four goals in a game against Lafayette College, and expected a larger role on the team come senior year.

But over the summer, Marandett underwent surgery to repair scar tissue buildup. Even though she fully recovered by fall practice, Taylor pushed her to the bottom of the depth chart.

The senior hoped something would change as practices continued. Nothing did.

“I lost two seasons, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, but then I realized no matter what I did on the field, nothing changed, and I had to come to that acceptance,” Marandett said.

Marandett was allowed to medically retire in the fall, after her knee began re-swelling. The decision, which required school approval, allowed her to keep her scholarship.

'What do they think of you now?'

Like Marandett, injuries kept Danielle Van Calcar off the field, and pushed her to the bottom of the depth chart. She remained on the team her senior year but didn’t play.

She was among the six seniors who signed the email after the 2021 season.

Over winter break that year, an MRI showed she had a break in her foot. That fall, she missed two practices because of pain in her ankle.

“Once a third practice came along, she (Taylor) said, ‘how do you feel about your teammates, the people that voted you to become captain playing on the field. What do you think they think of you now?,” Van Calcar recalls.

An X-ray was negative. A few days later, she tried to jog through a mile warmup and limped her way through it.

Taylor told her to go home, she said. It would be the last time Van Calcar took the field for Colgate, the end of a career that started out with great promise.

After leading all of New Jersey in scoring with 181 points her senior year at Ramapo High School, Van Calcar adjusted quickly to Division I lacrosse. She started all 17 games as a Colgate freshman in 2018, with 22 goals and 19 assists. In three years, she tallied 68 goals in 42 games.

When Taylor arrived in Van Calcar’s junior year, she had tallied 18 goals in just seven games.

Her teammates voted her captain for her senior year. She remained on the sidelines injured, supporting them throughout.

Her doctors told her that if she had sat out and not tried to play, she might be alright, Van Calcar said. But she wanted to get back on the field. Taylor was telling her “leaders play through aches and pains,” and said she’d likely lose her starting spot if she didn’t return.

“For me, and a lot of the girls on the team, I so badly wanted to satisfy all of her expectations of me, as a player, as a leader on and off the field,” she said. “I desperately wanted that reassurance that I satisfied all of her needs. And so she definitely took advantage of that. And that's what she would do with all the injured players.”

After Soutter quit, Van Calcar called her and commended her courage.

“She said, ‘You are so brave for doing this, I wish I had bit the bullet and quit sooner rather than sticking it out all four years,” Soutter said. “’You’ll be so much happier; this experience doesn’t define a person.’”

Van Calcar graduated in 2021 and works in marketing in New York City. She has had three surgeries on her left ankle and is not sure if she will ever be able to run again.

'That fancy scholarship'

In 2019, her first year at Colgate, Hooey led her class in scoring with 15 goals and three assists.

She’d spent the summer back home, trying out for the Canadian national team. Though she didn’t make the cut, the experience put her in the “the best shape of my life.”

Taylor’s coaching was in full swing by Hooey’s sophomore season in 2020, and it wasn’t long before the coach brought up the “big fancy scholarship” she didn’t deserve, Hooey said.

“At that time, I was pretty focused on ‘Oh, well, I'm gonna prove myself,’” Hooey said. “I was still pretty motivated about lacrosse at that point. But then, things never got better.”

Taylor introduced a three-strike rule for players. Each off-field offense − underage drinking, academic discipline, even parking violations – counted toward the total. Three and you were off the team.

Hooey got two parking tickets – one when she was driving and another when her friend parked her car. “Well, that’s two strikes,” Hooey said Taylor told her. “One more and you’re off the team.”

“For me, that was losing my scholarship,” Hooey said. “I would not be able to afford Colgate or afford an education without my athletic scholarship. It was really real for me, like if I got a parking ticket, and that was it. At the time, my future would have been over. I would have had to go home back to Canada – and it's crazy to think about as a 19 or 20-year-old.”

Hooey said her family interceded and called Moore, the athletic director, during the winter break in her sophomore year. They were assured that “my scholarship wouldn't be used as a threat, or it wouldn't be dangled above my head anymore. But that wasn't the case,” Hooey said.

But during finals week the next year – and after having knee surgery that summer prior – Hooey said Taylor approached her with a proposition: instead of spending her senior year pushing through inevitable knee injuries, she could medically retire and keep her scholarship.

Hooey felt she had little choice.

She decided to retire. By then she’d spent her life focused on lacrosse. She graduated in 2022 and is working a full-time job.

She still watches the sport when she can.

“We're all still so scared to talk about it and scared of the repercussions,” Hooey said, “because those who did talk about it, and those who did start the investigation, or whatever – it didn't work out for them, or nothing changed, rather. There was no benefit or resolution.”

Despite their travails in lacrosse, Hooey and others said they value their time at Colgate.

“I love Colgate,” Hooey said. “It's such a special place. It's a great institution. It’s a great place to go to school. But I don’t think, with Kathy Taylor there, I can tell someone, like a younger player, ‘Yeah, go play lacrosse at Colgate,’ and I wish I was able to.”

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Melanie Anzidei is the Sports Enterprise reporter at NorthJersey.com and The Record. Reach her at anzidei@northjersey.com or on Twitter @melanieanzidei.

Noah Ram is the sports reporter for the Utica Observer-Dispatch. Reach him at nram@gannett.com or on Twitter @Noah_ram1.

Thomas C. Zambito is a reporter on The USA Today Network's New York State Team. He can be reached at tzambito@lohud.com.