Date: November 24, 2022
Would Recommend
Tags
Coach Clarkson coaches through fear and intimidation. She is verbally abusive and berating while constantly dropping F-bombs and criticizing players instead of mentoring and coaching players as human beings. To be in good standing she dictates that your friends should only be on the lacrosse team and she does not want the lacrosse players to have friendships with players on other sports teams or have friendships with other students on campus. She claims players can't have any kind of social life and play D1 lacrosse and if you want any kind of social life transfer to a D3 school, which happens to be what she played in college. Her former wife, Theresa Walton, a D1 player in college, was the former head coach up until this summer and Clarkson originally got the assistant coaching position through nepotism as Walton's wife, then got the Head Coaching position when Coach Walton left to accept the head coaching job at ODU by blaming Coach Walton for any past issues on team and trying to take all the credit for the successes, including recruiting but the players on the team say Coach Walton was the lead coach that recruited them not Clarkson. After fall ball this season, she pressured players to voluntarily quit the team even via a text to her and she would respect that. If people she deemed as not all in, didn't match her her same level of "obsession" with lacrosse and did not voluntarily leave she was going to pull scholarships and/or cut them in the spring. Keep in mind these are the same players from last years 8-2 conference team. She is way over head after recently being named head coach, team is in total disarray and players are miserable under her abusive and threatening coaching style. She also plays favorites big time, so if a player wants to earn play time based on practice performance and merit, forget about it. She also crossed the line by "blank" shaming players in front of the team for hooking up with dudes on the football team, she said F-that and if it happens again your gone. Way out of bounds and none of her business... She also never hired an assistant coach coach all fall season, probably because she didn't want any other coach's eyes on how the program was being run or simply can't get anyone to work under her. There is much, much more to report but you get the idea...