A group of UVA Softball parents and alums reached out to UVA President Scott Beardsley in a letter dated April 2 to report “a concerning pattern of unethical conduct” by head coach Joanna Hardin, detailing “ongoing mental and verbal abusive behavior toward her athletes,” and requesting that the University conduct its own investigation into Hardin and her program.
The group reached out to me in May to ask me to look into the situation, expressing in a letter the hope that reporting on the matter could encourage “the University to step up to do the right things for the individuals involved.”
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“Hardin’s contract has not been renewed at the time of this message,” the group wrote – incorrectly, as it turns out.
UVA Athletics reported on June 5 that Hardin had signed a three-year contract extension, but we learned, through a FOIA request, that Hardin had actually signed the extension on March 5.
ICYMI
- UVA Softball: Coach Joanna Hardin signs three-year contract extension
- UVA Softball: Details on the three-year extension signed by coach Joanna Hardin
“We fear once again this could be covered up,” the group wrote. “We cannot gain traction or openly push this internally. This renewal must not happen. We must end this issue for the University.”
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I reached out to UVA Athletics to ask if there was any active or recent investigation into UVA Softball regarding the matters alleged in the communications that I’d received.
I also asked if the department wanted to offer comment on behalf of Hardin or Carla Williams, the athletics director at the University of Virginia.
The word back was: no comment.
Note: the response wasn’t “no, there is no investigation,” “you’re barking up the wrong tree,” anything like that.
Just: no comment.
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Want to stress here, I didn’t jump right in to go public with what we’ve been told.
First and foremost, I needed to independently verify that what is being alleged here is at all accurate.
I know what the April 2 letter to President Beardsley says; UVA Athletics isn’t talking; independent verification, turns out, wasn’t easy.
My first reach-out regarding the allegations was to a high school friend whose daughter played for four years for Hardin at UVA.
The word back from him: his daughter had a great experience, and she remains close friends with several teammates.
I’d also reached out to my high school buddy back in 2023, back when I received an anonymous email from someone claiming to be close to the program raising similar issues with Hardin’s treatment of players.
More on that a little later in this report.
The timing of that contact with my high school friend was also around the time that Hardin’s contract was set to expire; though UVA Athletics announced that she had signed an extension on June 27, 2023, we learned through a FOIA request that Hardin actually signed her side of an offered three-year contract extension on Aug. 17, 2023, and that Jim Ryan, at the time the president of UVA, finalized the deal on Sept. 13, 2023.
I will note here that the language of the contract reports that “the Coach’s term of employment under this Agreement shall begin on June 15, 2023,” intimating that she was working for nearly three months without the terms of the extension having been finalized.
Getting back to my friend: in 2023, he gave me the same sense about his family’s perception of the program that he has now, three years later.
Not being able to find anybody with a different view who was willing to talk back in 2023, I dropped the matter.
Hindsight being 20/20, I should’ve tried a little harder.
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My thinking on this matter now is, three years ago would have been a better time to complain, if that’s what people wanted to do – just complain.
Three years ago, Hardin had just wrapped her seventh season as the head coach at UVA Softball, with a 139-197 overall record, a 51-112 mark in ACC games, and a 54-132 ledger in games with Power 4 opponents.
Now in 2026, Hardin’s program is coming off a run of three NCAA Tournament appearances, with season finishes at 34-20 in 2024, 37-17 in 2025 and 40-15 in 2026.
By my count, the recent success gets Hardin’s overall record at Virginia to 250-249, one game over .500.
She’s winning now; I don’t know that we can just dismiss a push from people around the program to take action as being sour grapes.
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Hardin was announced as the new head coach for the UVA Softball program on June 10, 2016.
The first issue with her coaching would come to the fore just three months later, in September, in a fall practice session with a sophomore pitcher, in which Hardin grabbed the pitcher’s hair – Hardin, in an email, called it the “holding hair drill,” which she said was intended to “help with body awareness and understanding how to get into a good reversed posture position.”
The problem being: Hardin hadn’t communicated to the pitcher that she was going to initiate this “holding hair drill,” and the pitcher’s father, a long-time, and successful, travel-team coach, raised issue with the practice in an email to administrators, saying he had “never heard of it being acceptable to lay your hands on a player, no matter the intent, especially if that action causes pain and possibly injury.”
Others from the early years told me a story, that I was able to confirm, about a freshman, in her first career start, in 2018, severely injuring her ankle on a slide as she tried to stretch a single into a double in the second inning of a 14-2 win over Southern U. in the finale of the Cowgirl Classic, which was played at McNeese State, where Hardin had been the head coach before taking the job at Virginia.
The freshman would find out three weeks later that the injury was a fracture that would need surgery.
Day of the injury, Hardin, per the young woman, who is now a UVA alum, and others who corroborated the story, didn’t allow teammates to help the obviously seriously injured student-athlete make her way through the airport on the trip home, and until the diagnosis was upgraded to fracture, she was required to participate in return-to-play drills that included jumps and sprints.
Injuries would go on to accumulate during training – it was described to me that the strength and conditioning program for UVA Softball was similar to that in place for the UVA Football team, with an emphasis on Olympic-style lifts and heavy weights, leading to a run of injuries to shoulders, lower backs and hips that led a parent to ask Hardin, in a 2019 email, “How many need surgery this year?”
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The letter that prompted my inquiry alleges that the injuries were not just limited to the physical.
“Over her tenure, Coach Hardin has created a toxic environment, routinely singling out at least one student-athlete each year to serve as a ‘punching bag’ in front of the team,” the letter alleges. “These athletes, who bear the brunt of her bullying, experience severe mental stress, loss of confidence and other emotional harms because of her behavior. This strategy, designed to intimidate, humiliate and silence athletes from challenging her authority, not only affects the targeted student-athletes, but fosters a culture of fear and intimidation across the team.”
It was described to me that the culture of bullying was a year-round thing – from offseason strength and conditioning sessions through in-season practice sessions, travel and gamedays.
Early on, student-athletes who had been recruited by Hardin’s predecessor felt that they were singled out because the new coach was trying to get them to transfer, to open up roster spots.
If that was the intent, it didn’t work, by and large – one student-athlete told me that she vowed to herself that no one was going to make her give up on something she’d worked to achieve since she was 6 years old.
I know, from communications with student-athletes and parents from the early years under Hardin, that efforts were made to bring these issues to the attention of Carla Williams, the AD, as early as 2019.
A separate effort in 2023 was of a more organized nature – several people went to Williams with “a strong demand for the removal of Coach Hardin based on her radical personality and manipulative behavior,” according to the letter sent to Beardsley on April 2.
I’m assuming now that it was likely someone associated with this effort who reached out to me in 2023 to get me to look into what was going on behind the scenes in the UVA Softball program – the one that I initiated, but then dropped, because I couldn’t get in touch with anybody to be able to independently verify what one person was telling me.
This most recent attempt to try to get the University to address these issues appears to me to be distinct from the 2019 and 2023 efforts.
The letter references internal matters from the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic school years to a degree that, again, appears to me to be student-athletes and parents describing experiences unique to them.
If I’m reading this right, that would be three different groups – representing the years 2016-2019, 2020-2023, and 2023-2026 – raising issue with Hardin.
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The letter to Beardsley referenced “similar issues” in UVA Athletics – with former UVA Baseball pitching coach Karl Kuhn, now the head coach at Charleston Southern, with a stop in between at Radford, where he resigned as the head coach amid allegations that he had created what his players described as “an atmosphere of mental and verbal abuse that occasionally turned physical.”
We here at AFP reported on allegations that there were similar issues with Kuhn dating to his days at UVA last summer.
ICYMI
The other issue addressed in the letter was that of Gary Taylor, the associate head coach of the UVA Swimming program, who we reported last summer had been placed on probation for two years by the U.S. Center for SafeSport after admitting to emotional misconduct while coaching swimmers from 2015 to 2022 at NC State, Auburn and Cavalier Aquatics, the latter being the competitive youth swim team at the Piedmont Family YMCA.
We also broke the story on Taylor here at AFP.
ICYMI
Left unaddressed in the April 2 letter, because it hadn’t happened yet, was the decision of UVA Athletics to dismiss Amaka Agugua-Hamilton as the head coach of the UVA Women’s Basketball program – a shock move, because Agugua-Hamilton had just led Virginia to a surprise Sweet 16 appearance two weeks prior.
The dismissal of Agugua-Hamilton was made public on April 4.
ICYMI
USA Today reported that “four people familiar with the situation at Virginia, including a staff member inside of the program with direct knowledge” – further identifying those people as “an NCAA women’s basketball head coach, two assistant coaches and an administrator” – had told the paper that Agugua-Hamilton had been the subject of an internal investigation that included allegations of staff mistreatment within the program.
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“We cannot stand by and allow these issues to continue,” the April 2 letter goes on, toward reaching a conclusion. “Our former or current student-athletes, or any person, should not be exposed to this type of abuse from a coach on Grounds at the University of Virginia.”
“We must do better and stop this for our students now; we must step in and end this abuse.”
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Chris Graham
