Two women lived with the secret of an assault by the same tennis coach. Then they found each other

That’s what Caroline Ullring kept telling herself through the final days of March 1999.

She had accused her college tennis coach of sexually assaulting her in a Texas motel room during a spring break trip with the team. In late March, she had told athletic department officials about it, including a counselor and the senior women’s administrator, who briefed the athletic director about the allegations. The message Ullring felt she was getting from officials at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was that it would be best to keep this quiet.

The coach, Lew Gerrard, told the same officials what he told earlier this year. He admitted to drinking in the presence of the team, perhaps touching Ullring’s thigh and giving players massages. Nothing else.

He agreed to resign. He denied assaulting Ullring.

Ullring says she was told that if she took her story to the police or other authorities, it would be her word against his. Everything would become public. There was only one way to ensure privacy.

For the next 20 years, that’s largely what she did.

A teammate who heard rumors about the reasons behind Gerrard’s departure asked Ullring about them shortly after he resigned. She said she couldn’t talk about it. She didn’t share details of the alleged assault with her parents or her friends. In 2006, after her boyfriend died suddenly, Ullring was hospitalized, and received treatment from psychologists and psychiatrists. But she hardly discussed the incident with Gerrard, so doctors didn’t diagnose her with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I was a good girl,” she said during a recent series of video interviews from her home in Norway.

Gerrard, an 87-year-old from New Zealand who has spent most of his adult life coaching tennis in the U.S., said during a phone interview in May: “I’ve never had any sexual relationship with any player I have been teaching.” He described being presented with the allegations as “a shock,” and said he remembered thinking Ullring had “made it up.”

In a second phone interview in November, Gerrard said that Wake Forest officials had never told him about any allegations of sexual assault, though he had acknowledged in May that they had done so.

“They didn’t present me with anything like that at all,” he said in November. “A sexual assault, absolutely not.”

In an interview in early December, Ron Wellman, who was Wake Forest’s athletic director at the time and is now retired, said he had presented Gerrard with the allegations. He also said that he did not recall ever advising an athlete to remain silent.

“We talked in detail about everything,” Wellman said of his meeting with Gerrard. “At the end of that meeting, he agreed to resign.”

Wake Forest declined to provide any information about the incident, or the process that led to Gerrard’s resignation for “personal reasons” (according to a press release) days after Ullring reported it, citing privacy regulations. It offered the following statement:

“Lew Gerrard was hired in 1988 and resigned on March 26, 1999. Additionally, Caroline Ullring was enrolled at Wake Forest from 1995-99 and was a member of the Demon Deacons women’s tennis team.”

In 2019, Ullring began seeing a therapist who specializes in treating people struggling with the effects of trauma. She discussed the alleged assault with her in detail for the first time.

Through her long silence, Ullring sometimes thought she had done something wrong that night in Texas years ago. She didn’t know anyone else who had this experience with her coach. So many of her teammates seemed to love Gerrard.

“I felt I had to do it for the team and the university and I did not see any other way,” Ullring said recently.

Then last spring, she looked at her phone and saw the message from an old teammate that would become a hinge moment in her life. A 67-year-old woman from Colorado named Karen Clark wanted to speak with Ullring.

She wanted to talk about a tennis coach who she said had sexually assaulted her in the early 1970s: Lew Gerrard.

The stories that Ullring and Clark say they have lived with for decades are all too common in sports, especially individual ones like tennis. Young players spend long hours training and traveling with older, mostly male coaches. Too many of those coaches use their power to try to take advantage of those players sexually, sometimes resulting in incidents and relationships that range from inappropriate to criminal.

The United States Tennis Association currently has 137 coaches on its Safe Play Disciplinary list, meaning they have been banned or suspended for mistreating players. Seventy-three of those individuals have been accused or convicted of sexual misconduct with minors.

It happened to Pam Shriver, a Grand Slam doubles champion and member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It happened to Kylie McKenzie, who successfully sued the USTA in 2022 after the U.S. Center for SafeSport found it “more likely than not” that she had been assaulted by her coach, Anibal Aranda, when she was 19 and he was 34. (Aranda, who was suspended and then fired by the USTA, denies the allegations.) It happens to largely unknown juniors whose stories ended up in the hands of prosecutors, and to others who carry their secrets forever.

After years of silence, Shriver finally went public with the story of how her longtime coach, Don Candy, a close friend of Gerrard’s, pursued a sexual relationship with her, beginning when she was 17.

“It was stuffed down there,” she said during a recent interview, describing how she lived for decades in silence about what happened during her time with Candy, who is now deceased.

It’s a common behavioral pattern for sexual assault survivors: Put the nightmare in a box; stow it away.

That’s what Ullring did. Until she didn’t.

Growing up in Oslo in the 1980s and 1990s, Ullring had enjoyed the kind of active youth that many Norwegian children experience in a country that is mad for sports and the outdoors. She played golf, participated in gymnastics and skied plenty. She loved tennis the most. By her teenage years she was among the best girls in Norway, representing the country in national team competitions.

When she was 16 her older brother, Petter, died by suicide. His death sent her into a long battle with depression.

At her parents’ suggestion, after finishing high school in 1994, she took a break from education and attended Dennis Van der Meer’s tennis academy in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Van der Meer had been a longtime mentor for both coaches and players, including, for a time in the 1970s, Billie Jean King. College coaches from the mid-Atlantic region, including Van der Meer’s old friend, Lew Gerrard, often scouted talent at his academy.

Gerrard appeared during Ullring’s first months there. He complimented her game and asked if she might be interested in playing for Wake Forest. She enrolled there in the fall of 1995, intending to study chemistry.

Ullring soon realized life in Winston-Salem, N.C. was going to be different than she had expected. She wanted to play singles but wasn’t, even though she said Gerrard had told her she would. Chemistry labs conflicted with practices, so she had to switch to studying health and exercise science.

Taking college-level classes in English was difficult. Her dictionary had dog ears on nearly every page. She had to miss team dinners and other gatherings because her homework became so time-consuming.

She was terrified that she would fail. Her stress levels spiked. Doctors at the university health clinic prescribed anti-anxiety medication, such as Zoloft, which she would take, as needed, throughout her time at Wake Forest.

From the beginning, she and other teammates noticed some questionable behavior from Gerrard, like drinking alcohol around the team on road trips or during team dinners at his home with his wife. One former player, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the story remains sensitive for her friends and teammates, described Gerrard as a coach who occasionally made inappropriate, suggestive comments but had been something of a father figure to some players, opening his home to them when they were far away from theirs for the first time.

“We would have a few drinks and he would make flirty comments,” said Nicola Kawai, a recruit from New Zealand and close friend of Ullring during their years at Wake Forest. “There were the feelings of awkwardness and the giggles, and we would have to all laugh it off.”

Gerrard told he would have a glass of wine at dinners with the team, and might have a drink when the players came to his house for cookouts. He said they did not drink with him.

Then there were the massages, according to multiple former players. Some saw it as a helpful gesture, since the team did not have a dedicated trainer and players were clothed when the massages took place. Others said it made them uncomfortable.

Asked about giving the massages, Gerrard said, “I may have, if there was cramp in the leg or something like that.”

In mid-March 1999, after a loss at the University of Texas, Ullring was sitting at a table drinking with Gerrard during a team night out at a Texas restaurant. He began confiding in her about his marriage and other relationships with women, she said. A co-captain, she was also desperate to make the singles lineup.

At the end of the night, she and Gerrard left the restaurant together in one car, while the rest of the team rode in another with the assistant coach. She remembered thinking that was odd.

Gerrard walked Ullring to her room and then, standing at her door, offered to give her a massage. She declined, but then he coaxed her a few doors down the hallway, to his room. The next thing she knew she was lying on his bed on her back and he was massaging her shoulders, and then her breasts, and telling her that he just wanted her to feel good.

“You just freeze, you dissociate,” Ullring said.

The last thing she remembers is an image of Gerrard at the end of the bed in his boxer shorts. She does not know whether he penetrated her.

Ullring described what experts say is a common reaction for sexual assault victims: A kind of conscious blackout, a survival instinct. The mind shuts down.

A little while later, when she became aware of her surroundings again, she was on her stomach, and Gerrard was telling her that this was going to be their secret. He also told her she would definitely play singles that season, she said. Then he said it was time for her to go back to her room. She did as she was told.

Back on campus, she went to an appointment at the health services center and met with the doctor who was responsible for her medication. She told him what had happened. He told her she needed to report the incident to the athletic department so that other women on the team would not be at risk. Kawai, Ullring’s teammate and friend, who had transferred to Pepperdine, said Ullring called her in the days after the alleged assault to tell her what had happened. She also encouraged Ullring to report it.

Three other women who were on the Wake Forest tennis team during Ullring’s senior year, who asked not to be quoted or identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said they had heard some version of the story, but did not have direct knowledge of it. One said she called Ullring seeking details about what had led up to Gerrard’s resignation, but Ullring told her she was not allowed to talk about it.

Ullring sought out Dianne Dailey, the senior women’s administrator in the athletic department. Dailey said in an interview that Ullring told her that she was “uncomfortable and upset” about an incident that had occurred with Gerrard. Dailey suggested she speak with one of the athletic department’s counselors and referred her to Johnne Armentrout, whom Ullring knew from previous counselling sessions. She also briefed Wellman on what Ullring had told her.

After Ullring met with Armentrout, Dailey asked Armentrout if she had any doubt about whether Ullring was telling the truth about the alleged assault. Armetrout told her she had none, according to Dailey, who retired from Wake Forest in 2018.

Wellman scheduled a meeting with Gerrard for that afternoon and presented him with the allegations. Armentrout, who now provides counseling at the Trinity Center in Winston-Salem, did not return messages seeking comment. She is prohibited from speaking publicly about her sessions with clients.

Both Wellman and Dailey said they could not recall their next meetings with Ullring.

Ullring said Wellman told her about his meeting with Gerrard, and the coach’s resignation. According to Ullring, Wellman told her it would be best for everyone to keep quiet about all this. It would be handled quickly.

“I am a very loyal person,” Ullring said, explaining her decision not to go public for so many years. “It’s very hard for me to tell you.”

Wellman said he could not remember advising an athlete to remain silent about allegations involving a sexual assault, and would instead allow a student make that decision with the help of a professional counselor.

“We never tried to have an athlete keep quiet about something like that,” Wellman said.

Details about Gerrard’s dismissal from Wake Forest never became public.

During his initial interview with , Gerrard confirmed that officials told him Ullring had accused him of assaulting her. He denied it but acknowledged drinking alcohol in the presence of players.

“We had a non-drinking rule for the coaches,” he said, explaining what led to his resignation.

He continued to teach privately, but he never coached at a college again, and went on to work in real estate before eventually retiring.

Sven Ullring, Caroline’s father, recalled his daughter calling him and her mother at the end of March 1999 to tell her that Gerrard had been forced to resign because of an incident between the two of them.

“She told me about sexual harassment by her coach, but she didn’t give any details. She said also that she had spoken with the administration at Wake Forest University, who told her that he had been forced to resign,” said Sven, an engineer and the former chief executive of Det Norske Veritas, a Norway-based multinational energy and maritime conglomerate. He said she sounded calm. “She thought it was terrible and she had fainted,” Sven recalled. “But at that time I got the impression that it was not very bad. It was not a question of rape.”

He asked her if she felt they needed to hire a lawyer.

“She said no, because she had been told by the university that she mustn’t talk to anyone about what had happened,” Sven Ullring said.

He did not press her for details. “At that time, it was something that wasn’t talked about,” he said.

In an email to her father days later, Caroline wrote that she was enjoying herself on the tennis court far more with Gerrard gone.

Sven Ullring said his daughter seemed in a good state of mind at graduation in May, but when she returned home for Christmas later in the year, she told them that she had been struggling with bulimia. He began to wonder whether something more substantial than sexual harassment had occurred between her and Gerrard. She had been in a fragile state since her brother had died by suicide.

“And this, on top of that, probably made it very bad,” he said.

Through watching his daughter undergo treatment the past 25 years, he understands all this now as a typical pattern of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I understand that these things don’t come suddenly,” he said. “They develop over time.”

Ullring said the last time she saw Gerrard was from a distance. He was driving in the vicinity of the Wake Forest campus, in the days following her meetings with Wellman and his resignation from the university. Their eyes locked. He appeared extremely angry with her, she said.

A quarter of a century later, the sight of an approaching car, when she doesn’t know the intentions of the driver, can still send her into a panic.

“It’s so deep in my body,” she said. “I was afraid he was going to kill me.”

Ullring planned on playing the rest of that last season for Wake Forest now that she felt better, as she had told her father. Instead, being on the tennis court very quickly became hard to manage.

On April 1, her birthday, her teammates held a celebration at practice. Later that day, when she was alone, she forced herself to throw up for the first time, the beginning of her yearslong battle with bulimia.

She told anyone who asked she could not talk about Gerrard. Within weeks, she stopped attending practices regularly.

“It all fell apart,” she said. “All the strength I built up from when my brother died.”

In 1973, Karen Clark was 15. Then known as Karen Denison, she was a junior player in the Washington, D.C. area, the sixth of seven brothers and sisters, an outgoing athletic girl at a time when opportunities in sports were starting to grow for teens like her. Gerrard, a well-regarded coach in the region, saw Clark play at a tennis camp, she said. He sought out her parents and offered to work with their daughter.

Clark had already done well in regional age-group tournaments. The chance to work with a coach with a growing reputation seemed too good to pass up. Her parents signed on, and she began training with him twice a week at the Tennis Barn in Columbia, Md.

That fall, Gerrard told Clark he would be teaching an adult clinic in Charlottesville, Va. at the Boar’s Head Inn. Did she want to come along? At the time, Clark’s older sister was attending graduate school there at the University of Virginia.

Clark’s mother drove her to Charlottesville from their home near Washington, D.C. There was a little tennis on the first night, and then Gerrard told her they needed to head to his hotel’s bar to meet up with some of the other players at the Boar’s Head’s restaurant, she said.

Except those players weren’t there. She and Gerrard sat down at a table anyway. She remembers drinking a glass of “something brown,” she said. Then Gerrard told her that he had to retrieve something from his room. She had rarely even sipped hard alcohol before. She remembers the nearly empty tavern and remembers stumbling through a hallway and entering the room. Then, similar to what Ullring remembers, she says she experienced a conscious blackout.

The next thing she remembers is waking up on the bed, lying on her back with her tennis skirt around her knees. Gerrard was wiping her stomach with tissues, she said.

He gave her a ride to her sister’s apartment. Clark woke up the next day and thought:

In an interview with , Gerrard said he did not recall coaching someone named Karen Denison in 1973. He coached a lot of players, and that was a long time ago, “more than 50 years.” He denied having any sexual contact with any of his students.

Clark’s sister, Pat Denison, now a professor of drama and literature at Barnard College in New York, said she remembered Clark staying with her to participate in the clinic with her coach, Gerrard.

Shriver said she remembers her coach, Don Candy, taking her to watch Gerrard coach Clark at a tournament in Baltimore.

Gerrard acknowledged that both Candy and Shriver were friends of his. He also said he coached clinics at the Boar’s Head in the 1970s with Dennis Van Der Meer.

Clark has lived a lot since then. She had a career in business, working at McDonnell Douglas in Alabama as a buyer for Space Lab parts and as a liaison between purchasing and engineering. She coached collegiate tennis. She married, had children, and became a grandmother. She told no one about the alleged incident with Gerrard until 2006. She was nearly 50 years old, a mother of three, married to her husband, Raoul, for 24 years.

She was also the assistant tennis coach at the University of Denver, working with a young head coach named A.J. Jensen. Jensen, an Australian, was a recent graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where she had won three NCAA women’s doubles titles.

Before that, Jensen had spent part of a year at Wake Forest.

“I got recruited by this pervert from New Zealand,” Jensen told Clark one day. Jensen had heard that the coach had been fired a few years later because something had happened between him and a player.

Clark knew exactly who Jensen was talking about.

She drove home. It was the middle of the day. Her kids were at school. Her husband was at work. In her first floor sunroom, she doubled over, crying harder than she had ever cried before.

“It was this revelation that it wasn’t just me,” she said.

That night, she told her husband about what she remembered happening to her at the Boar’s Head Inn in 1973, though without much detail. She didn’t talk about it again until she entered therapy in 2015. Raoul Clark confirmed the 2006 conversation, and a later one in 2015, when Clark detailed the alleged assault.

Eventually, she told her kids and her friends. Then, in 2019 she tracked down Gerrard and wrote him a letter.

She told him not to respond and to never contact her.

When she heard Shriver tell her story on a podcast, she tracked her down and shared what Don Candy’s good friend had done to her. Clark says Shriver immediately remembered her and her mother, and Gerrard too. She says Shriver told her that abuse can come in many forms, and often from the people you might least expect.

In early May, Clark learned that when confronted with her story, Gerrard claimed not to remember her, even though he had coached her for nearly a year.

“This is exactly why I didn’t tell anyone, because he was going to deny it,” Clark said. “And it is devastating.”

Clark never stopped thinking about that student at Wake Forest. She wondered if she had struggled alone for years as Clark had. Then, in June 2023, she reached out to Jensen, now a tennis coach at U.C.-Santa Cruz.

Could Jensen help her find that student? Days later, Caroline Ullring’s phone lit up.

For 24 years, Ullring had thought her experience with Gerrard was unique. She had thought that somehow she had done something wrong, that it was her fault.

In 1999, she had returned to Europe with her secret. She eventually enrolled in medical school in Ireland, but in 2006, in the middle of her studies, her boyfriend died of complications from treatments for a brain tumor. She fell into a deep depression and was admitted for the first of multiple stays in the psychiatric wards of various hospitals. She finished her medical degree, but does not practice medicine.

She underwent electroshock treatments and survived multiple suicide attempts. Working with a psychologist who treated her for post traumatic stress disorder in 2019, she delved into all her traumas. A year ago, though, she was still prone to feelings of ambivalence about living or dying.

Hearing Clark tell her story in a series of messages over text and email, leading up to a video call last summer, changed that.

“I wasn’t alone,” she said. “It wasn’t something wrong with me.”

Clark has described Ullring as “a gift.” The idea of her had made Clark double over in tears back in 2006. Now they have a bond that helps sustain both of them. They text each other multiple times every week. They have yet to meet in person. They are sure they will one day.

In late March this year, Ullring decided to do something she had not done in years. Nearing 50, she signed up for Norway’s over-40 indoor singles championship.

Her fitness wasn’t where she wanted it to be. Still, she felt that old urge to compete. She won one match and then another. There were moments when she entered a flow state she remembers from her early years in Oslo, when tennis feels like what you are meant to do.

And then there weren’t any more matches left to win and she was the 40-and-over champion of Norway. Tennis and life had become something else.

There was gratitude, too, for having survived, though she still has good days and bad days.

“I’m lucky,” she said a few days after the tournament. “I’m happy that I’m still alive.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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