Carolyn Kieger didn’t always make an outstanding first impression.

When she recruited for her women’s basketball programs at Marquette and Penn State, players didn’t feel that Kieger, Penn State’s head coach since 2019, stood out much from other coaches. Either her assistants did most of the recruiting or she came across as just another college basketball coach to the high schoolers she spoke to.

Still, for one reason or another, those players found themselves playing for Kieger.

In interviews with Onward State years later, many of those players said they regretted their decision to play for Kieger at Marquette and Penn State.  

Three players and two assistant coaches spoke positively about Kieger. Ten players described the experience of playing for the coach as one of the worst of their lives, saying the culture Kieger instituted in her programs hurt many players’ mental health, made multiple players suicidal, and incorporated aspects of racism, body shaming, bullying, and more. 

Of those 13 players, five spoke on the record with Onward State, while the remaining eight spoke on the condition of anonymity, with several citing fear of retribution from Kieger. Eight played for Marquette, and five played for Penn State.

In conversations with former Penn State and former Marquette players, Onward State learned that student-athletes at both institutions had similar experiences. Several players said they left their respective programs because of Kieger’s conduct. 

Several players said their mental health suffered while playing for Kieger, and two former players said they had suicidal thoughts. 

“In my senior year, I was dealing with depressive thoughts and suicidal thoughts,” former Marquette player Danielle King said. “I was talking to [Kieger] about it, and she dismissed it. And she basically talked me down to go into seeing the student counselor, or the counselor on campus, or whatever. And she was like, ‘I just think you need to go to the gym more,’ and basically shamed me in saying my work ethic was the reason why I was depressed.”

“My mental health declined very quickly,” a former Marquette player said. “The year that I was at Marquette, I was suicidal for the first time in my life, I was taking medication, too. And after leaving Marquette, I never once have dealt with that since then. And I was taking medication for depression for the first time in my life. And she knew some of these things about me, and I just didn’t feel like she was concerned.”

Another former Marquette player said it was “genuinely surprising” that no player at Penn State nor Marquette committed suicide.

In the case of Kayla Thomas, a former Penn State player, she was able to handle one season playing under Kieger, but not two.

“My freshman year was bad, but it wasn’t terrible. It was bearable,” Thomas said. “I was just thinking I was having the freshman hiccups. My exit meeting my freshman year was fairly good as well. This past year (2022-23) around December was when I knew in my head there’s no way I’m staying.”

Thomas and another former Penn State player confirmed several of their teammates went into therapy as a result of their experience with the program. The anonymous former Penn State player said she drank “a lot” due to the impact playing for Kieger had on her mental health and briefly attended therapy after leaving the Lady Lions.

While many players struggled to play for Kieger, not everyone had a negative experience under the coach. 

“Carolyn’s got a high, high standard and is very competitive and very intense,” former Penn State assistant coach Aaron Kallhoff said. “That’s going to look a different way to different kids. Some kids, it might be too much. Some kids, that might be exactly what they need.”

One former Penn State player, Jaida Travascio-Green, spoke highly of Kieger and said the coach helped her through a difficult time in her life.

“I was a senior when she was hired (2019-2020 season), and about a month into her first summer, I tore my ACL for the second time,” Travascio-Green wrote in an email. “It was ultimately decided between me, [Associate Chief Medical Officer] Dr. [Wayne] Sebastianelli, and Kieger that the best decision for me and my life would be to take a ‘medical disqualification,’ which just means they keep me on the team, I stay on scholarship, but it’s been decided that medically I shouldn’t continue playing. Kieger gave me the role of ‘student assistant coach’ and still made me feel important to the team even though I wasn’t able to play.”

“At the same time, my dad was terminally ill,” Travascio-Green said. “Kieger was incredibly understanding and supportive. She gave me a ton of flexibility in my responsibilities with the team, always checked how I was doing, helped me organize getting home to Indiana from State College on a few occasions, and gave me additional time off during the holidays, all while making me feel like I was still important and a valued member of the team even though I was not always around.”

A former Marquette player echoed Travascio-Green’s sentiments, stating Kieger supported and cared for her during an injury that forced her to medically redshirt.

“Her unwavering support and loving spirit is what I appreciate about coach Kieger to this day. She will always be someone I know I can turn to and will always be there for a conversation, a laugh, or a cry. I’ve played basketball now for more than 20 years, it’s safe to say I’ve had a lot of coaches in my time of playing little league basketball all the way to now playing professional basketball overseas,” the player wrote. “Coach Kieger is truly one of the most caring individuals I have ever met and will ever meet. The impact she has had on me is far greater than those three years together at Marquette University. It is a lifetime of gratitude that I will have for her and I know she is my coach for life.”

“She’ll give you the shirt off her back,” former Marquette assistant coach Scott Merritt said. “She’s a great person to the core. She’ll do anything for anyone on her staff.”

As far as the accusations former players made against Kieger, Merritt said he wasn’t surprised.

“I’m not surprised because kids nowadays when it doesn’t go their way, they’re going to look for someone to blame,” Merritt said.

Allazia Blockton left Marquette as one of its best-ever players. She was the 2018 Big East Player of the Year, a 2018 Meyers Drysdale candidate, a 2018 All-American, the 2016 Big East Freshman of the Year, and the 2019 Big East Sixth-Woman of the Year. Her name is etched across the Marquette record book, holding the most all-time career points (2,204), most field goals made (852), third-best scoring average (17.4 points per game), and 11th-most rebounds (768).

“She was our biggest enemy, our biggest hater, and she tried her hardest to tear us down,” Blockton said. “Every single day we walked into that Al McGuire Center, every single day, you just had a negative feeling. And a lot of people didn’t want to play basketball, and that messed up a lot of people’s mental and careers because of how she treated a lot of people. But a lot of people just pushed through it, and decided to just prevail, because they didn’t want her to control their stories. But in each and every way, she affected somebody’s career in a negative way at Marquette.”

“What didn’t go their way?” a former Marquette player said. “They had winning seasons. They were ranked in the top 25… Yes, playing in the WNBA would be nice. And also, so would having good mental health and a positive college experience.”

When speaking with Onward State, several of Kieger’s former players said the coach fixated on weight and body type. Kieger, they said, was obsessed with molding them into lean, fast players.

“I feel like every comment that she made to somebody…either being overweight or underweight, and it was always physique,” one former Marquette player said. “It was always like she wanted this dream athlete, and she wanted to mold everybody into that person.”

“I just feel like she always had comments to make about what I was eating,” another former Marquette player said. “I don’t know if she wanted me to be a certain body type or whatever, but I just know that she constantly made comments towards me about my weight and where I should be at.”

Other times, players said they felt Kieger simply didn’t like them. It wasn’t about basketball, but intangible issues that players couldn’t figure out.

“I understand that basketball and things like that affected the way that she felt about me,” former Marquette player Amanda Maqueia said. “But I would say that 80% of the way that she treated me was not because of basketball. It was personally. It was personal. She really just did not like me. It got to a point that she just hated my guts. She could not look at me.”

“She told me, ‘fuck you’ because — I don’t know, actually. I really would just stare at her half the time. But she literally stopped and yelled, ‘fuck you’ across the practice,” another former Marquette player said. “And I said, ‘Damn, what the fuck did I do?’ And to this day, I could not tell you what I did.”

Several players of color said that while Kieger wasn’t directly racist, they were often uncomfortable because of racial statements made around them.

“We’d also have conversations and just in talking and film and stuff like that. As far as it goes for her Black players, it was, ‘We want you to make hustle plays and we want you to get the rebound. But once you get the rebound, pass it up to Makenna [Marisa] to shoot it or to Anna [Camden] to shoot it,’” Thomas said. “She always referred to her African American athletes as more of dirty work players. We get the rebounds. We get on the floor for loose balls, but then Makenna, or Anna, or anybody else takes the shots.”

“I feel like she only asked the Black athletes certain questions because I could think of two instances when she asked me. It was about my family. She was just checking up on them,” King said. “She would always ask, ‘Well, is your sister with her baby father?’ Or like, ‘Is a dad in the life?’ And it just made me uncomfortable because I feel like she wouldn’t ask that to anybody else.”

Two former Marquette players said Kieger made them play through injury.

“My leg was broken, and she called my dad and tried to tell my dad that I was lying about my injury. She wouldn’t allow me to use crutches,” King said. “She called the trainer because the doctor had ordered me to use crutches because on the X-ray, you could see the crack in my shin from her running us all summer and not giving us a break. And she called my dad and told him I was faking the injury and all of this stuff.”

Multiple former Marquette players said that, at times, players would simply start walking away from campus with no end goal in mind. They just wanted to get away. Their teammates had to find them in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

“We gotta go find them in Milwaukee because they feeling some type of way and might do something crazy…” one former Marquette player said. “You a basketball coach. But at the end of the day, you got kids that you trying to shape. And right now, what you’re telling them is that if you’re not good at basketball, if you’re not the greatest at basketball, nothing else fucking matters. You might as well just dump it. And that’s what a couple of our teammates felt.”

At both institutions, players said they felt Kieger didn’t accept criticism of the culture or her coaching.

“Some games, we lose and she’d ask us, ‘What can I do better?’” Thomas said. “And we tell her honestly what we think we need from her and she’ll be like, ‘Well, I can’t give you that.’ Or she’d be like, ‘Well, that’s not my job to give you.’”

At Marquette, one player who transferred away from the program met with the athletic director, Bill Scholl, and told him what she experienced, emphasizing Kieger’s intense coaching style. Kieger maintained her job with Marquette, and after that meeting, several players said they were punished for the comments the departing player made. The departing player was removed from the Marquette Athletics website.

Scholl did not respond to a request for comment from Onward State through a Marquette Athletics spokesperson.

Thomas said to her knowledge, Penn State Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Pat Kraft was never informed about Kieger’s actions. Another former Penn State player said to her knowledge, no player told former Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Sandy Barbour about Kieger’s conduct.

At points, players said, Kieger tried to turn players against each other and make them hate each other.

“It was character attacks,” one former Marquette player said. “It was psychological damage. It was definitely way more than a coach trying to help somebody out. It was definitely a more serious tactic to get into somebody’s head.”

“Everything was just pushing the boundary enough, but she never overstepped that boundary into legalities or anything like that,” the same player said. “She always knew where to stop. I think that’s what this psychotic manipulation comes from. It always affected everybody in a sense that it wasn’t measurable.”

Multiple former Marquette players said Kieger used to have players rank each other in meetings. She would then show players how their teammates ranked them, though the rankings were sometimes altered.

“She told me my teammates hated me, that I wasn’t coachable, that I wasn’t a good athlete, that I was this, this, and that,” one former Marquette player said. “And it was really the craziest thing ever. She was telling everybody the same thing, that they were all hated, that they were all ranked last, that they were all this and that.”

At another point, multiple players said Kieger made them go through a Marine-esque workout regimen.

“They had these Army people who came in. It was 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning, and we are in a freezing cold pool. It’s during midterms. It’s 3 or 4 a.m., and she has 14 to 17 of us in a pool. Half the team can’t swim, but only one girl can hold on to the side of the pool at once. So everybody else has to be picked up by their teammates in the pool. We had to wear hoodies in the pool and take them off ourselves and put them on our teammates,” one former Marquette player described.

“So we’re in the pool, half of us can’t swim,” the player continued. “We’re basically being waterboarded… Meanwhile, people can’t swim, so we’re holding up our teammates. People are screaming. People are drowning.”

Kieger, a former Marquette basketball star in her own right, played for the Golden Eagles from 2002 to 2006. She flipped between jobs at Miami and Marquette in the two years after she graduated before settling down at Miami from 2008 to 2014 as an assistant coach.

Kieger returned to Marquette in 2014 as its head coach. She coached some of the best Marquette teams in program history, reaching three NCAA Tournaments and delivering the Golden Eagles their first Big East title.

During the 2018-19 season, Kieger gained attention as one of the nation’s top head coaches and reached a third NCAA Tournament. Her Golden Eagles fell in the second round to Texas A&M on March 24, 2019. On April 3, 2019, Kieger became Penn State’s sixth head women’s basketball coach.

Even though many players didn’t remember Kieger’s time as a coach fondly, they didn’t appreciate her exit, either.

“She said that she was going to help me with the next steps, and that I wouldn’t be alone, and that she’ll help me get back on my feet and just everything,” one former Marquette player said. “And then for her just to leave, that really hurt my feelings.”

Several former players said the way Kieger treated them affects them to this day. 

“Some people have kids, some people are married, there’s all these things you carry with you,” one former Marquette player said. “It definitely makes an impact in people’s lives, good or bad, and that’s the power that these coaches hold.”

“I don’t know if I don’t want to say trauma, but it really is trauma,” Thomas said. “Some of the things that we went through were actually traumatizing. We were so used to being hurt.”

“It really didn’t take me until after I graduated Marquette to really realize what I did at Marquette and really celebrate myself because I had went through each year just like, ‘OK, now what’s next? Now, what’s next? What can I do next?’ Because that’s the mentality that she had put upon me,” Blockton said. “So I never really celebrated myself when I was there, to be honest. And that’s hard. That’s hard when you’re doing all these great things, and you just still feel like I need to do more.”

“The repercussions of my year at Marquette, I still feel them,” a former Marquette player said. “I’m not bitter about playing time or anything basketball-related. I feel I was deeply wounded by that experience. I just want to make it clear: It’s more than about basketball or a coach that didn’t feel fair. It’s about people who are really, really hurt emotionally by experiencing her.”

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Update, 11:26 a.m. on Tuesday, November 12:

Kieger commented on Onward State’s story on Tuesday morning.

“I read the story, and I was disappointed and sad that a few of my former athletes didn’t have a positive experience,” Kieger said on a Zoom call with media. “However, I am proud that many of my former players did have a positive experience and remain close to me to this day. I tell our players every day that every opportunity, whether it’s good or disappointing, is an opportunity to learn and grow and elevate and get better, and this is what that opportunity presents myself.”

Update, 5:22 p.m.:

A Penn State Athletics spokesperson commented on Onward State’s story on Monday afternoon.

“Penn State and Penn State Athletics takes seriously any allegations of misconduct, and any reports are thoroughly reviewed,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “In addition, Intercollegiate Athletics conducts annual student-athlete surveys of its programs, as well as exit interviews with student-athletes and staff members departing their respective sport programs. Based on direct feedback from student-athletes, Coach Kieger and the women’s basketball staff provide a positive and inclusive environment with a focus on their development on and off the basketball court.”

Original post:

Onward State offered Kieger an opportunity to comment through a Penn State Athletics spokesperson on Friday, November 8. Neither Kieger nor Athletics commented before publication, but on the night of Sunday, November 10, a Penn State Athletics spokesperson and Kieger requested a hold on the article from Onward State through Monday to consider the request for comment.

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Onward State began looking into claims of misconduct surrounding the Penn State women’s basketball program in February 2023 when an anonymous individual reached out, mentioning that “reports of verbal abuse, body shaming of the players, and overall negativity surround the program.”

“The body shaming is real. The negativity around the program is real,” the individual wrote. “The number of players that are in some form of counseling as a result of the culture of the program is real.”

The email also cited the firing of Syracuse head women’s basketball coach Quentin Hillsman, saying Kieger’s conduct, while not exactly the same, was similar. Hillsman was accused by former players and those around the team of unwanted physical contact, threats, punishment, and more.

Onward State reached out to more than 40 of Kieger’s former players and five of Kieger’s former assistant coaches. Onward State spoke to Thomas in September 2023, one former Penn State player in April 2024, and all other players in October and November 2024. Onward State spoke to Kallhoff in May 2024 and Merritt in October 2024.

Onward State heard many negative stories and claims about Kieger during the course of its investigation. Those claims were only published if Onward State received corroboration from another player or if stories from two players were similar enough to show a correlation.