New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
‘Coach Rudy’ news shocks my daughters
“What happened to Rudy?”
That’s the question my two daughters and their friends who were coached by Rudy Meredith in a Connecticut premier soccer program for high schoolers are asking each other in the wake of his alleged involvement in a nationwide college bribery scandal.
We all learned last week about the shocking federal allegations that Meredith, while he was coaching the Yale women’s soccer team, conspired with William Rick Singer, who ran a college networking company, to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars as an avenue to enable parents to get non-soccer players into Yale.
Yale officials, who say they had been unaware of the alleged scam, issued a statement acknowledging one student involved in the scheme was admitted and the other was denied admission. Yale’s leaders have vowed to set up new oversight procedures to make sure athletic recruits receive “close scrutiny.”
When the FBI told Meredith last year they knew about the alleged scheme, he reportedly became a cooperating witness. He has agreed to plead guilty to two counts of wire fraud and another count of conspiracy, according to prosecutors.
This is a tragic story. As my younger daughter Charlotte said to me over the phone this week, “He was the king of women’s soccer in Connecticut. He had one of the best jobs at Yale. He was beloved by everyone. What happened? What happened to Rudy?”
My elder daughter Natalie and her friends from that premier team, who had Meredith as an off-and-on coach in 2010, are having that same troubling conversation.
“He was a great coach!” Natalie told me in a long text message. “He was energizing, passionate and inspiring, brought the team together, knew the game well.”
She added: “I remember one practice I was having a really hard time getting this one play right, and he took the time to coach me individually and helped me get out of my own head.”
Natalie said Meredith was “the best male coach I ever had.”
Were there any hints that all was not right with him? Natalie pointed out one disappointment from back in 2010: “The only problem was he wasn’t there as often. I don’t know why.” We soccer parents also noticed Meredith wasn’t always at our CFC (Connecticut Football Club) practices and games but that was probably because he was so busy coaching at Yale. Nor have I seen any federal allegations going back that many years.
Charlotte said she is especially shocked to hear these charges about Meredith. “My memories about Rudy are so unbelievably positive. Sometimes there are rumors about coaches; there was never an inkling of anything about him. Of all the people to have a scandal, he’d be the last one I would’ve thought this would happen to. He had what seemed to be such a clean track record. This is so crazy.”
Charlotte felt fortunate to have had some time being coached by Meredith at
CFC around 2012. “Rudy couldn’t commit to being full-time but he was the best coach at CFC. If you had asked any CFC player who they wanted their coach to be, they would
have said: ‘Rudy!’ He was the main attraction.”
“I really wanted to have him as a coach,” she said. “He was so engaging. He had that aura about him. He was friendly but authoritative. You wanted him to like you. You just wanted to be around him.”
Charlotte recalled, “It wasn’t until Rudy started coaching us that we began to reach our potential. He had an effect on players that I’d never seen a coach have.”
Meredith showed an interest in both of my daughters as potential players at Yale. But both of them made it clear to him they didn’t want to go to Yale because they had grown up in New Haven and wanted to live somewhere new. Natalie went on to play soccer at NYU and Charlotte played for Brown University’s team.
Charlotte remembers telling Meredith she was not interested in Yale. “He said, ‘OK, where do you want to go?’ I said, ‘Brown’ and he got in touch with the Brown coach. I think Rudy really went to bat for me and I’ll never forget that. Good players don’t always get recruited without someone in their corner — and he was in my corner.”
Charlotte was also helped with her Brown application by the fact she was second academically in her class at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven and distinguished herself in the writing program at the Educational Center for the Arts. She didn’t get into Brown just because she was an excellent soccer player. I feel I need to make that clear because there have been so many allegations and revelations recently about corrupt admission procedures at elite colleges and universities.
Whenever Charlotte’s team played Yale, Meredith would personally greet Charlotte after the game. “He always said, ‘Good game’ and he’d joke about how it was a bummer I was on the other team.”
I was able to reach a parent of one of the players on the Yale team from that period. She asked me not to use her name nor her daughter’s name in this column. She was also reluctant to say anything about Meredith because he has those charges pending against him.
The mother said she and her daughter have been “inundated” with text messages since the news broke about Meredith. “Everybody’s asking: ‘Can you believe this?’ I’m telling them: ‘Not really.’ It really bothers me. It should bother everyone.”
“My personal opinion is it’s a tragedy,” she added. “I feel sorry about the whole process. But I’m happy this has shown there’s inequity in the system. We need to recognize the problem and take some steps to resolve it.”
Meredith resigned from his Yale coaching job last November, saying “It is time to explore new possibilities and begin a different chapter in my life.” At that point, we didn’t know about the charges hanging over him. Meredith might never coach again, and as you can tell from the comments of my daughters, that’s a loss to many future players who will never get the benefits of his skills and inspiring attitude.
But if the charges are true, he has let down a lot of the young players who looked up to him as a role model. He has particularly let down his recent Yale players who should have had the chance to play alongside every possible top caliber teammate. It seems they were deprived of this because of a nonplayer who allegedly had help scamming her way into Yale.
And what about the good player and student who deserved to be on the field and in the classroom but never got that chance, who was deprived of a Yale education because her spot was offered to a bogus player?