By FRED KRONER
fred@mahometnews.com
It has been five weeks since Bonnie Moxley was relieved of all coaching duties associated with the girls’ cross-country and track and field teams at Mahomet-Seymour High School.
In May, she will retire from the district as a physical education instructor, a position she has held for more than two decades.
Those who know the reasons for Moxley’s early exodus as a coach aren’t talking.
It’s understandable.
School board members and district administrators are lawfully forbidden from speaking about “personnel matters.”
What has emerged are the existence of two distinctly different groups of ex-athletes coached by Moxley.
There are those who are solidly in the coach’s corner and lavished her with praise at the March 12 Mahomet-Seymour School Board meeting and in a recent Mahomet Daily article.
The other group includes those who say their experiences while a member of teams coached by Moxley were not positive.
Some of those athletes ended their sports participation before graduation. Others were four-year squad members.
Their comments centered around a wide array of issues and concerns, many of which are related to weight, dieting and body image.
Over the next two days, the Mahomet Daily will report on the problems they raised to help provide insight into the environment of the programs Moxley coached, but not to draw conclusions about what led to her dismissal on Feb. 26, six weeks into the girls’ indoor track and field season.
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‘Cutting, starving, purging’
Olivia Meyer, who graduated in May 2017, understands that Moxley has a great many supporters.
“People who are singing her praises were her favorites, they never saw Bonnie the way I did,” Meyer said. “These people would be foolish and ignorant to believe that their teammates weren’t struggling.
“We were cutting, starving and purging to get to the top of Bonnie’s list of favorites. Our coach, someone we should have looked up to, was our downfall.”
Liv Turner, a 2016 M-S graduate, was on the track and field team as a freshman and sophomore and ran cross-country as a sophomore and junior.
“It started off well,” Turner said. “It didn’t start turning sour until my sophomore year of track when I realized she would target certain girls, girls who were not the absolute best, but had potential to be an asset to her team.”
Turner said the primary issues centered around eating and weight loss.
“At the start of every season, she would bring a tub of ice cream and say, ‘This is the last time you’ll eat ice cream,’ “ Turner said. “It started me realizing how much food would come into play.
“She would get girls — me included — to watch what we were eating. She’d bring in snacks that were on the healthier side and say, ‘If you’re not skinny, you don’t look good in your uniform.’ “
Turner said even while she was still a member of Moxley’s teams, she didn’t follow through on everything she was hearing.
“Sometimes I’d pick up a sweet and eat it in spite of what she said,” Turner said. “I’d rebel. I didn’t want her to think she was in control.”
Megan Perrero, a 2015 M-S graduate, recalled a negative reaction to the ice cream event.
‘It…stressed me out’
“One of the first things we touched on was food and what our diets should look like,” said Perrero, now a junior at Chicago’s Columbia College. “No matter how it was intended, it immediately stressed me out.
“I had already been counting calories and analyzing what I was eating, and now it was going to continue to happen, but at a much more serious level.”
Hannah Turk, a 2014 M-S graduate, participated in track and field until her senior season.
“I know I wasn’t the best athlete or the most in shape, but I love the sport and I wanted to do the thing I loved and be a member of a team,” Turk said. “On Bonnie’s team, I always felt like the outsider.
“She wasn’t very kind to many of us. She was hard on me about my weight, and she urged me to go against medical advice on more than one occasion, and eventually, I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Another former Bulldog who was impacted was 2008 graduate Jessica Butcher.
“Bonnie yelled at our team, belittled us, and attacked our character,” Butcher said. “I remember the shameful ‘weight talks,’ being told after bad races that I performed poorly because I had gained weight that season, and feeling humiliated in the weight room as Bonnie weighed us before dip contests (in the weight room).
The athletes were weighed at least twice every season. Butcher said that part of the weight analysis was to calculate the percentage of body weight an athlete could lift.
The athletes then received a spreadsheet with the percentage, reps and fellow athletes’ weight.
“It was uncomfortable, as everyone had access to each other’s weight,” Butcher said.
“I was encouraged to follow the infamous ‘cereal diet,’ which consisted of eating only one bowl of cereal for breakfast and lunch, followed by a normal dinner.”
Though Butcher didn’t want to reveal specifics about her eating disorder, which she sought treatment for after high school, she said, “it was serious and personal. In high school, I began to develop an unhealthy relationship with food and my body. I restricted meals and calorie intake in hopes that it would improve my athletic performance.
“The ‘cereal diet’ was encouraged despite running 50-plus miles per week. As a teenager, the message I received from that was simple: eat less, lose weight, run faster.
“As a runner, I understand the importance of being at a healthy body weight, proper nutrition, and appropriately fueling your body for workouts and races. But this is not what was encouraged nor taught to me in high school by my coach. I was a teenage girl with a fragile self-esteem, already at a low body weight, being told that I needed to lose weight. It had an impact.”
Beyond the food talks, Turner said there were other unsettling moments.
Telltale scales
“You would go in (to her office) individually and stand on a scale,” Turner said. “She would take your weight and at the end of the season, she would do the exact same.
“If I didn’t lose weight, she would get frustrated, but that is silly. During the season, you build muscle and muscle weighs more than fat.”
When she was weighed in the preseason, Turner said she was given a target weight.
“She said if you lose three pounds, you’d be so much faster and could get on the 4-by-400 relay,” Turner said. “So it was not only creating competition within our own bodies, but with one another to lose weight to try and beat this girl out.
“We should support one another (teammates) and not get caught up in what we weigh. You can be fit without meeting a specific number. She made it a toxic atmosphere. She would always say, ‘it’s better to weigh less and if you weigh less, you will be better.’ I’d call her a bully.”
Maria Ross, a 2017 M-S graduate, said Moxley “was definitely the reason,” she stopped running, adding, “if not for the coach, I probably would have done it all four years.
“She’d weigh us between cross-country and track and if we gained one pound, and she’d say if you wanted to be a good 400 runner, you needed to watch your weight.”
Ally Sheehy, a 2016 M-S graduate who is now a sophomore at the University of Kansas, saw both the good and bad sides of Moxley.
Hurtful times
“Bonnie did teach me a lot about life and how to be a fierce competitor, but she also broke me down time and time again,” Sheehy said. “She wouldn’t even acknowledge you if you were injured or sick. One track season, I fell pretty hard while running hurdles at a meet. I was in a lot of pain, so I went to the urgent care doctor and they told me that I broke a part of my nose and strained my neck.
“The doctor instructed me to rest and not practice for a few days. When I told Bonnie, she reprimanded and ignored me for at least a week because I saw an urgent care doctor instead of a sports medicine doctor, telling me that sports med would have allowed me to keep running through my injuries.”
Meyer said she had a similar experience while battling a medical condition.
“Freshman year cross-country I struggled with my asthma,” Meyer said. “I had one of my worst asthma attacks during the race, and looking back, I am amazed I didn’t pass out.
“Bonnie sat the whole team down afterward and yelled at me in front of the whole team. It was my sole fault we didn’t place well as a team; that maybe if I practiced harder I would have done better. Getting screamed at in front of your peers for something you can’t control.”
Turner said she felt pressured to compete while injured.
“I had tendinitis in my lower calf my junior year cross-country season,” she said. “She (Moxley) told me to keep running on it even though I was injured.
“My mother is a physical therapist assistant and advised me to take a break and seek medical care. During one race when the injury was at its peak. I was competing and limping for an entire 3 miles.
“It was so painful that I had tears in my eyes,” Turner added, “but she (Moxley) was standing on the side screaming at me to run faster even though I could have injured myself much worse. I can still feel a dull pain from this injury to this day.
“I witnessed her tell other teammates that their injuries weren’t bad enough to stop running and she made others run on injuries far worse than mine. There were constant stress fractures and shin splints on that (2014) team.”
Turk’s specialties were the shot put and discus, but she noted, “Bonnie made all of us participate in running events and workouts. Whenever I was injured, she always acted like she thought I was faking it. She would get frustrated when I wouldn’t participate, even though I had a doctor’s note excusing me.
‘Balance’
Sheehy was frustrated by policies that she considered counter-productive to doing well academically.
“She wouldn’t allow us to leave meets early or do homework at meets that we would get home from at midnight on a school night,” said Sheehy, who stuck with track all four years. “The main reason I never quit was because of my amazing teammates who stayed by my side and constantly encouraged me.
“The level of pain that I experienced during my four years of track and field is unexplainable. I would’ve never imagined a sport I once loved would become something I absolutely dreaded, but couldn’t bring myself to quit.”
Perrero acknowledged that part of the problem could have been her perception of the situation.
“I understand not every girl sees Bonnie in this light, but this is how I feel about the situation,” Perrero said. “I may not have been able to handle the pressure as well as the other teammates, but I honestly think that’s where the problem lies.
“During school, all I would be able to think about was practice. I’d be stressed and anxious all day and would be dreading the end of the day when practice would start. If it was a meet day, I could hardly contain my anxiety. The environment created for the team was that we were winners and anything short of that was unacceptable.”
Perrero dropped out of track following her junior year.
“I ended up stopping track going into my senior year because it was causing me too much anxiety,” Perrero said. “It was making me incredibly unhappy and I was sick of being in an environment that influenced negative thoughts about myself and never feeling good enough.
“I felt like the environment she created for the team was unhealthy competition and comparison. Honestly, I was still having pretty bad nightmares from anxiety until sophomore year of college. It somehow always involves track, Bonnie, and being forced to run when I didn’t want to. I still constantly compare my body to other girls and continue to feel ashamed for eating unhealthy food and not being as skinny as I could be.
“Me and a few of my teammates used to sit in the car after practice and just ask ourselves why the heck we were putting ourselves through it. But honestly, I felt like I couldn’t leave. One girl left the team and was basically shunned and made to seem like she gave up and couldn’t handle it.”
‘One of the best decisions’
And yet, Perrero said it reached the point where she left the track program before her eligibility was up.
“Quitting the team my senior year was one of the best decisions I could make,” Perrero said. “It had taken such a toll on me, my mental health and my happiness.
“I felt drained and sad. I wrote a whole letter to read to Bonnie the day I told her I quit. It was one of the hardest and scariest things I’ve done. I was upset and was trying not to cry.
“I didn’t want to be in that position, but I felt like I had no other choice. After all our time together, the only thing she said was something along the line of ‘OK’ and showed me the door. To this day I’ve never had another conversation with her.”
Turk will graduate from Illinois College in May, and will finish student teaching in the fall and will then be certified to teach and coach.
She hopes to be the role model that she found missing during her time with the M-S track and field program.
“Now that I, myself, am an educator and a coach, I hope that my words and actions can always show support of a positive body image and high self-esteem in others,” Turk said, “and that I can help my students and athletes become the happiest, healthiest, and best people they can be; something that I feel was sometimes lacking on Bonnie’s team.”
Though Moxley’s coaching tenure ended prematurely, Meyer doesn’t believe the former coach understands the ramifications of her actions.
“I honestly don’t think Bonnie will ever realize what she has done to some of her athletes,” Meyer said. “Administration should have taken action years and years ago, but now with new people in charge, they are deciding to change everything.
“Firing Bonnie three months until she retired has done nothing for the girls. I get no validation from this, besides this story so people can realize and know the full story.”
TOMORROW: Part II, the struggles continue.
