Cal swimmers allege coach bullied them for years

Her first few months on Berkeley campus were dominated by a singular obsession that consumed every moment, every aspect of her life.

All Danielle Carter wanted to do was to make Cal women's swimming head coach Teri McKeever happy.

“I was trying so hard trying to please Teri,” Carter said. “In every way.”

But nothing worked. McKeever, the 2012 U.S. Olympic women's team head coach, accused Carter of lying that she had epilepsy, according to Carter and five other people. Then McKeever accused Carter, then a freshman, of lying to Cal coaches during her recruitment, saying she concealed the illness from them.

McKeever was screaming at Carter at almost every practice, usually in front of the rest of the team, according to Carter and five others.

She was “lazy,” Carter and the others recalled McKeever yelling at her.

She was “worthless.”

She was “a waste of time.”

She was “a piece of (expletive).” Carter was unable to eat, unable to sleep. She couldn't focus in class. Sometimes she was so exhausted from the stress, from the lack of sleep she fell asleep in class. She had panic attacks on an almost daily basis. There were mornings when she couldn't find the strength to get out of bed. All of which led to an increase in her seizures, according to Carter and her parents.

“Teri made me feel so little,” Carter recalled “and I didn't want to feel like that anymore.”

So one night in the fall of 2019, Carter went into her dorm bathroom with an X-acto knife intent on slitting her wrists.

“It got to the point where I literally couldn't take it anymore from Teri,” Carter said. “I can't do this anymore. I don't want to be alive anymore. That night I literally didn't want to be alive. It was like, `OK, I'm ready to die. I want to kill myself. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to be alive.'”

Carter got scared at the last minute and texted a teammate.

Cal swimmers told McKeever about the incident and the coach confronted Carter the next morning at practice, pulling her out the pool.

“Did you try and kill yourself last night?” McKeever asked her, Carter said. Three other people confirm that Carter shared details of the conversation with them.

“Yeah,” Carter responded. “I don't want to live.

“Teri literally laughed in my face and said, `Do you know how pathetic that is? How stupid that is? How selfish that is?'”

McKeever was particularly enraged, Carter and teammates remembered, that the swimmer had confided to a teammate that she was feeling suicidal. Carter had no way of knowing that the teammate had a sibling who had earlier attempted suicide. McKeever, however, brought it up in berating Carter, yelling that she had created a distraction for the teammate, Carter said.

“You just totally messed up her (practice),” McKeever said, according to Carter.

Carter is one of at least six Cal women's swimmers since 2018 who made plans to kill themselves or obsessed about suicide for weeks or months because of what they describe as McKeever's bullying, according to a Southern California News Group investigation.