Former Yale coaches speak out against athletic director to student newspaper

Disgruntlement continues to leak out of the Yale athletic department.

Yale University’s student newspaper, The Yale Daily News, reported that eight former university coaches and athletic staff members “backed” the complaints shared in a letter from former Yale hockey coach Keith Allain to President Maurie McInnis.

The letter, which was first reported by Fox News Digital on March 23, alleged Yale athletic director Vicky Chun fostered a “toxic environment.”

“Vicky Chun is the absolute worst leader I have ever been around in my life. She is dishonest, self centered and inaccessible. Vicky’s singular talent is self promotion and has created a toxic environment within the department where she is insulated by a cadre of administrators whose main task seems to be silencing any dissent,” Allain’s letter read.

The Yale Daily News reported that eight of 12 anonymous former coaches and staffers 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 whether to renew her contract.

The status of Chun’s contract renewal has become a topic of uncertainty after a Fox News Digital investigative series into Yale’s athletic department under her leadership. Yale has not responded to Fox News Digital’s inquiry on the status of Chun’s contract renewal.

Fox News Digital’s investigative series also found that, under Chun’s leadership, former Yale strength and conditioning coach Thomas Newman’s lawyers alleged that he was unknowingly recorded and was “ultimately forced out”; a woman’s track and field athlete left her program due to an alleged “toxic culture”; and two of Yale’s top athletic officials bought a house together a year before one of them was hired by the university, while a former employee was allegedly pushed to retire to open a job for one of those officials.

Ann-Marie Guglieri, Yale’s executive deputy director/chief operating officer of athletics, and Mary Berdo, deputy director of athletics, the second- and third-ranked positions in the department under Chun, purchased a house together in Milford, Connecticut, in June 2018, the deed shows. Berdo was then hired by the university in April 2019.

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Two former employees of the Yale athletics department have alleged that Guglieri and Berdo are in a romantic relationship. Additional former employees have alleged a former administrator was pressured to accept a voluntary retirement package, which then created an opening for Berdo.

Two former employees said the athletics department could not increase its headcount to hire Berdo at the same time it hired Guglieri. But Fox News Digital learned that a former athletics department administrator reluctantly accepted a voluntary retirement package, and then Berdo was hired shortly thereafter. 

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.

“A senior associate athletic director was called in October of 2018 and was pressured to accept a retirement package, and this person had no choice but to take this retirement package and give 90-day notice, and just after the 90-day notice, Mary Berdo was hired,” the former employee said.

Allain told Fox News Digital that the former employee’s recollection of the pressured retirement and eventual hiring of Berdo is consistent with what he had been told by individuals within the athletics department.

While Yale declined to comment “on individual personnel matters,” a spokesman for the university president’s office told Fox News Digital: “We can confirm that Yale has a robust set of personnel and disclosure policies that it followed.”

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Chun, a former volleyball player and later head coach for Colgate University, took over as Yale athletic director in 2018 after serving in the same position at Colgate from 2012-18.

In an interview earlier in March with the Yale Alumni Association, Chun admitted to making a mistake that made her cry in her first year as Yale AD.

“I was talking to the football alums, you know, there’s this great helmet that I had at my previous institution. And I thought if Colgate can afford it, we definitely can afford it. So I announced, we are getting these coolest, custom-made Riddell helmets. So then my deputy comes to me and says ‘What are you thinking? Do you know how much these helmets cost?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we had them at Colgate.’ She goes, ‘Yeah, like six or seven of them,’” Chun said in the interview.

“And I did cry. Because I thought, ‘Wow, this is going to be the shortest-lived athletic director,’ and, you know, here I am!”

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Fox News Digital has reached out to Yale for further comment but has not received a response. 

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