After representing New Zealand at the 2010 and 2011 World Championships, Sophia Batchelor was pursued by several top U.S. college programs including Cal.
In 2012 Batchelor and her mother took a recruiting trip to Berkeley. The Golden Bears had just won back-to-back NCAA championships under Teri McKeever, their third national team title in four years. That same year McKeever became the first–and still only–woman to serve as head coach of the U.S. Olympic swim team.
Cal put Batchelor and her mother up in the historic Fairmont Claremont Hotel & Spa at the foot of the Berkeley Hills. Later on a tour of campus, McKeever showed the pair a board that lists Cal swimmers who have competed in the Olympic Games, the coach pointing specifically to Lauren Boyle, a Golden Bear swimmer who had participated in three Olympics for New Zealand.
“I make Olympians,” McKeever told the women, according to Batchelor.
Shortly thereafter Batchelor accepted an athletic scholarship offer from Cal, convinced that McKeever was the coach to guide her to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
“I … support swimmers,” Batchelor recalled McKeever telling her.
Instead, according to a lawsuit filed against the University of California regents Monday, and from reporting by the Southern California News Group, McKeever bullied Batchelor on an almost daily basis, subjected her to verbal, emotional and physical abuse, pressured her to take a drug banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and to swim and compete while injured, body shamed her, and required her to file weekly food reports. Batchelor complained to Cal senior executive associate athletic director Jennifer Simon-O’Neill about McKeever’s abuse only to have the administrator set up a meeting in which McKeever berated Batchelor in front of Simon-O’Neill, who took no action to intervene, according to the lawsuit and interviews with SCNG.
McKeever’s bullying, according to the court filing, led to Batchelor having panic…
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