I felt he had control over everything: scholarship, meals, everything. “I learned later, and I know now, that everything has to be justified (to pull someone’s scholarship). “If I go home, I lose my scholarship, and I would go back to the situation with the person sexually harassing me. “After the year was over, I wanted to go home and he told me I can’t go home,” Ogunnorin said. Ogunnorin said she got through that second year with the help of assistant coach Carrick DeHart, who was an advocate for the players but left after that season. Ogunnorin went home to Greece after that freshman year and had decided not to come back, she said, but Margaritis got on the phone with her mother and convinced her things would be OK.
I talked to him about being sexually harassed as a child … My biggest fear was for me to lose my scholarship or whatever reason not make it in the United States, and have to go back to those circumstances.” “I talked to him about my dad leaving when I was 3 months old. He really likes to dig in and get personal. He comes out as if he cares about where you’ve come from and he wants to know more about you. “He knew a lot about my past,” Ogunnorin said. Margaritis did not respond for requests for comment on this story. She said Margaritis, who stepped down Friday as UCR coach after numerous former players went public with allegations of mistreatment, used personal information to get into her head. “She tells us, ‘Basically, he just told me I’m not worth anything and I should go back to Greece.’”Īctually, Ogunnorin said, it was worse. “He starts talking to her in Greek, and who knows what he’s saying then?” teammate Natasha Hadley said in a 2012 interview. “It turned out to be the worst thing ever.” “The whole benefit of going there was him speaking Greek,” Ogunnorin said this past week in a phone conversation from New York. She spoke Greek, and so did her new coach, John Margaritis.
RIVERSIDE - Jessica Ogunnorin arrived on the UC Riverside campus in the fall of 2010, a 5-foot-11 basketball forward recruited out of the American CMTY School in Athens, Greece.
0 kommentar(er)
