Players allege embattled ex-Oregon State volleyball coach used same abusive tactics in Australia

Updated Nov. 25, 2024 1:16 p.m. ET

Associated Press

Reporting by The Associated Press about abusive culture in Oregon State's volleyball program led to an outpouring of similar stories from the coach's homeland of Australia, where a four-year process led officials there to apologize to athletes who had played in his program.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation published a story Saturday quoting players who read the AP reporting in 2020 about Oregon State's Mark Barnard and, according to one, felt "it was like reading one of our own training sessions.”

“I just started shaking, my heart started racing,” one player, Selina Scoble, told ABC.

Scoble said her difficulties on the team “snowballed into depression and bulimia, and I have a lot of shame and guilt around that.”

The AP investigation cited more than a dozen players who told of an abusive culture at Oregon State. Among their allegations were that Barnard, who left the program in 2022, pitted players against each other in team meetings while he was there and pushed them past health warnings in practice as punishment.

The so-called coach-on-one drills the Oregon State players described — in which coaches make players dive after difficult-to-retrieve balls they throw — were the same drills Barnard ran as both an assistant, then later the head coach at what was then Australia's nascent women's volleyball program being run by the country's Institute of Sport.

“On any given day, we were fearful for our physical being, for our emotional being,” Elizabeth Brett, one of the first players recruited to the Australian team, told ABC.

Brett quit volleyball after the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where the Aussie women finished ninth.

“I still don’t sleep on Sunday nights,” Brett said. “That physiological response stayed with me and the anxiety around it.”

ABC said the day after the AP report came out, Volleyball Australia, which oversees elite and Olympic volleyball in the country, published a letter of support for Barnard on its Facebook page, and that the letter galvanized the players and motivated them to speak up.

“That post itself was infuriating for the group, because it was without any consultation with any of the past players,” said one of the players, Rowena Morgan.

Players say coach changed after he got top job

Morgan described Barnard as a coach who could diffuse situations when he served as an assistant but said his personality changed once he became the man in charge.

“He would yell abuse and nothing was good enough,” Morgan told ABC. “You know: ‘You’re (expletive) useless. You’re weak. If you played any other sport, you’d never get anywhere. You’re pathetic. You disgust me.’ That sort of thing.”

The players' outpouring triggered a review by Sports Integrity Australia, which included interviews with 27 participants, including medical staff, and 16 written submissions.

The review, completed in 2022, found the program from 1997-2005 fostered a culture of fear and punishment, unacceptable training practices, an inadequate complaints-handling procedure, a lack of coach accountability and limited athlete support.

It took two more years for Volleyball Australia to issue a public apology to the players. Without mentioning Barnard or Brad Saindon, who served as head coach of the Aussie program before him, with Barnard as his assistant, the apology acknowledged the former players suffered through “an environment of fear."

Oregon State defended Barnard

As part of the AP reporting, Oregon State disputed allegations that players were pushed past their physical limits as punishment and said “appropriate action was taken” after an internal investigation into Barnard's program.

The OSU players said they never felt heard by the university and that their complaints were either swept under the rug or not looked into appropriately.

Two of the players who spoke to the AP said they considered suicide. One of them, upon reading the first AP story in the series, said she “genuinely thought the article was written about me,” even thought it was about a different player.

Both those players were among more than a dozen who quit or transferred from the Oregon State program during Barnard's tenure, with some saying they were forced out.

The coach, who came to Oregon State as an assistant in 2005, then went 70-132 over seven seasons as head coach, left the school after the 2022 season. The school thanked him for his “long-time commitment to our athletic department” but made no mention of the abuse allegations.

Barnard did not immediately return messages left by the AP seeking his comment about the ABC report. Saindon told ABC, “I’m not that kind of a coach, I’ve never done that in my whole coaching career, let alone to the young women on the national team in Australia.”

After the first two AP stories were published, Oregon State went to court to fight the AP's efforts to obtain documents related to Barnard's case. The AP received a favorable ruling from the local district attorney when it first pressed for the documents, but the university spent more than two years fighting the disclosure. Oregon State ultimately paid the AP’s legal fees in exchange for AP agreeing to drop the request.

During the legal wrangling, Oregon State spokesman Steve Clark said the school fought the disclosure because if records were released, it "would have a chilling effect and potentially stymie people with concerns from ever reporting allegations of wrongdoing.”

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