Seems that the consensus on Facebook to the reporting that we did this week on allegations involving UVA Softball coach Joanna Hardin is:
- Kids today don’t like to be coached hard.
- The parents are ruining things.
- They’re all a bunch of crybabies.
Guess it’s time to take the gloves off.
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“We discussed your being upset at the holding hair drill as an attempt to help you maintain your posture. As we discussed yesterday in my office, the intent of the drill is to help with body awareness and understanding how to get into a good reversed posture position. I have used the drill at all ages, and typically it is met with some laughter and fun. Now that I know the drill is not effective for you, I will surely steer clear of it.”
That’s from a Sept. 28, 2016, email from Hardin to a pitcher on her first team at UVA, who raised issue with the “holding hair drill” that the pitcher said then and maintains now wasn’t done with her consent or foreknowledge – basically, the way the pitcher described it, she was in the midst of a pitching drill, and Hardin, unannounced, grabbed her by the hair.
Is it “hard coaching” to yank somebody by the ponytail unannounced while that person is in the midst of the act of trying to violently throw a softball?
Is the pitcher’s father, a travel coach on the West Coast, bringing up the episode in an email to UVA Athletics administrators, a “parent ruining things?”
***
An April 2 letter that a group of UVA Softball parents and alums sent to UVA President Scott Beardsley reported “a concerning pattern of unethical conduct” by 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 letter was sent to me in May; I worked over a period of six weeks after receiving the letter to talk with people around the program, including former players and parents, to attempt to debunk or verify what was being alleged.
What I heard back was a mix, but certainly enough in the direction of, there’s something to this, to move forward to present what I learned toward being a matter of public record.
ICYMI
As things moved in that direction with the reporting, I reached out to UVA Athletics earlier this week 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.
I’ll be square with you here: if the person in the media relations office at UVA Athletics, who I’ve worked with for the past 14 years, had gotten back to me with, Chris, there’s nothing to any of this, that would, at the least, have given me pause, if not had me sit on this story, like I did three years ago, when the matter of the culture within the UVA Softball program was first brought to my attention.
Back then, there was one person writing to me, multiple times, to ask me to look into the same manner of issues that were raised in the April 2 letter to Beardsley; difference between 2023 and 2026 was, I couldn’t find additional people to corroborate what was being alleged, so, I moved on.
This time, I was able to track down several people who were willing to talk with me at length about their experiences – and, no, their experiences aren’t along the lines of, I didn’t get to play, my daughter didn’t get to play, we’re going to take Coach Jo down.
***
The “holding hair drill” – there is such a drill, but it doesn’t involve a coach grabbing a pitcher’s hair, but rather, the pitcher herself gripping her ponytail with her glove hand and holding it behind her back during the windup and delivery – was one questionable instance cited in our first story on the UVA Softball allegations.
A second involved 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.
Is that just “hard coaching”?
Is the player here, being told that she needed to work through what turned out to be a broken ankle that needed surgery, a “crybaby”?
A third issue that we brought up in the first report:
“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 April 2 letter that prompted our inquiry 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.”
I talked with student-athletes who said they were the aforementioned “punching bags” – denied not only playing time, but even participation in team drills, herded into strength and conditioning sessions with other designated outcasts, left with the feeling that there were being actively run off by the coaching staff.
The notion being advanced by some of the commenters on the thread associated with our first report on our Facebook page ID’g themselves as former players at UVA, under Hardin and under Hardin’s predecessors, is that this isn’t anything they had any experience with and don’t remember, which is great for them, but also, perhaps, a function of these individuals not having been singled out to be a “punching bag,” and also a lack of situational awareness on their part.
***
Among the criticisms to the reporting is that I didn’t identify any of the accusers by name, which, when you see the abuse that I’m taking online just for being the messenger, maybe you can see why I took that approach.
The student-athletes that I spoke with all completed their degrees at UVA, and that wanting to complete their degree at UVA was a key motivating factor toward not just up and quitting the program, or transferring out to another school to finish out their college softball eligibility.
Which is what we tell kids today, right, when it comes to the transfer portal – those of us who pine for the good old days when people were tougher lament the culture of, The going got tough, so I got going.
The “going getting tough” is tough enough for a D1 scholarship college athlete, who is asked to juggle year-round strength and conditioning, a busy in-season that includes practices, games, lots of travel, and doing all of this while also maintaining progress toward completing degree requirements.
Add to that the unnecessary baggage from being singled out as a “punching bag,” being made to feel like you’re sandbagging your way through what turns out to be a broken ankle, or being told you’re not a team player because you raise issue with being assaulted in the name of a “laughter and fun” pitching drill.
I’ll note here: fresh allegations have been communicated to me subsequent to the publication of the first story that I’m in the process of vetting.
A big thing that I don’t get is from the folks who commented not to deny that any of this happened, but to justify it as being the way we make people tougher.
It wasn’t right when Bear Bryant was denying his players water breaks and Bobby Knight was punching his players in the face and choking them, as much as people wanted to mythologize the Bear Bryants and Bobby Knights, and it’s not right now, when we had a kid in the baseball program who had to be rushed to the hospital after passing out during a running drill, when we still employ a swim coach on probation from a national sanctioning body after admitting to emotional abuse of his athletes.
***
I’m not trying to be judge, jury or executioner here with Joanna Hardin, but from what I have come to know – from the April 2 letter that went to the UVA president, and from talking with former student-athletes and parents of former student-athletes, and emails that have been made available to me that were written by Hardin and by UVA Athletics administrators – there’s something worth looking at here.
I know that issues were first raised with Hardin to UVA Athletics administrators as early as 2019, and that a concerted effort was attempted in 2023 to get the administration to consider cutting ties with Hardin over allegations related to the culture of the program.
I was square with you earlier in this missive, and I’ll be square with you here again: I don’t foresee UVA Athletics taking any action here.
What I’d really like to know at this stage is what had to have been going on behind the scenes with the women’s basketball program for UVA Athletics to actually cut ties with Amaka Agugua-Hamilton, given how the athletics program has made it a point to sweep other issues under the rug as a matter of practice.
The most I think that could be expected to happen with UVA Softball would be a quiet, i.e. not publicly acknowledged, internal review leading to a directive to Hardin to write a memo addressing changes to handling HR issues with her staff and student-athletes, maybe the assignment of a new associate athletics director for her to report to, just to freshen things up there.
The harshest sanction, such as it is a sanction, likely ends up being the stories that we will have published on this issue here on AFP.
By the time next February rolls around, whatever attention there is on UVA Softball will be on the quest for a fourth straight NCAA Tournament appearance, and the push to get to a program-first Super Regional.
I just hope I’m not having to revisit this same issue again in another three years.
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Chris Graham
