The Miami University women's tennis team has been one of the less heralded teams during the past two years. The team has quietly become a contender in the college tennis world.

The 'Hawks won the MAC regular season and tournament championships in 2009, advanced to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history and were ranked in the national rankings for the first time ever in April and finished the year 72nd overall.

The 'Hawks went 16-7 last year, including a perfect 8-0 in the league. Monica Gorny was named the conference freshman of the year and a first-team all-league selection. Anastasia Dracheva, 2008 co-freshman of the year, also gained First-Team All-MAC honors for the second straight season, while two other RedHawks - sophomores Stephanie Danesis and Megan Martzolf - were named members of the all-tournament team.

Another big contributor to this recent success has been senior captain Brintney Larson. Larson has put together a 30-16 singles record, going 14-7 in 2007-08, along with a 28-13 doubles record, going 14-6 record last season and was named first-team All-MAC her sophomore year.

With all this talent, life was pretty easy for former coach Howard Joffe, 2009 MAC Coach of the Year.

As often happens at schools such as Miami, coaches go on to bigger and better places. At the end of the 2009 season, Joffe accepted the head coaching job at the University of Maryland, an excellent school and opportunity for him.

While many of the girls on the team were sad to see their coach go, Larson said they were open to being taken in a new direction by new head coach David Emery, previously an assistant at the University of Illinois.

Miami University Athletic Director Brad Bates said at the time of Emery's hiring he was "regarded as a rising star by leaders in the national tennis community and he was exceptionally impressive throughout our search process. He brings a wealth of experience as a student, teacher, player, scholar and coach to our program, and we are very excited to have him join the Miami family."

While there seemed to be much optimism for the team coming off of its best season in recent memory, this optimism would turn into a major disappointment.

Though there is currently no update on the Miami University tennis Web page, Larson said Bates fired Emery two weeks ago. The university has not given a reason, but Larson sat down and told me what transpired during the last few months.

"Our team tried to keep a very optimistic viewpoint with getting a new coach; we all came in hoping it would be a good year and we'll just see where it goes," Larson said. "Right when Dave came in he made us do just a ton of extra fitness, at first it was really hard, and we thought 'OK, this is what teams in the Big Ten are doing,' so we never complained. And as the year went on we just started noticing things that weren't right. He never gave us any feedback or motivation or support, we felt like we were playing for nothing. I even went in and had a meeting with him, telling him I was exhausted and struggling in school, and I told him that we really needed his support and motivation, and he got really defensive. He seemed to listen to what we had to say, but would never do anything."

What transpired next, whether or not the university will comment, is according to both Larson and her teammates' accounts.

Larson said on Halloween Saturday, the former men's tennis team was in town visiting and Coach Emery told them at practice, "If we hang out with them, you girls need to flirt with them because that's our only source of budget and income."

"We kind of just disregarded it because he would say comments like that all the time," Larson said. "So that night we went out together as a team to Brick Street, which is where we always go, and Dave knew that. Dave and the entire tennis alumni were there and they were just belligerent. So we tried to keep our distance, but kind of felt pressured to talk to the alumni because of what he said earlier. I find out later that he had a $500 bar tab and was just buying shots for everybody and just handing them out to anyone who would walk by. Honestly we were just so confused, we didn't know what to do; he's our authority figure. So we all got out of Brick pretty quickly just because of the situation and the next day everyone on the team was just really confused, didn't know what to do and had just lost respect for him. The next day Dave was texting a bunch of girls on the team saying 'don't tell anybody,' and he specifically told one of our girls to 'not tell her friend at Illinois.' We all assumed he would call a team meeting and just apologize, but he never said anything to us, didn't address the situation or anything. I couldn't look him in the eye, I was completely disgusted by him and a lot of the girls just didn't feel safe around him any more."

Larson finally got fed up and headed to Bates' office to explain the situation to him.

"I e-mailed Brad and set up a meeting with him and told him everything," Larson said. "And I've never seen a person madder than Brad was. He was like, 'I don't want to hear any more.' He walked over to Withrow and fired Dave right on the spot. So then we decided we wanted Ricky (Rosas, assistant head coach) to be our interim head coach. We all love and respect Ricky so much and honestly if it wasn't for Ricky, we wouldn't have made it this year. Then the next day, one of the girls from Illinois called us and was like 'wow I heard what happened there, have you heard what's happening here?' She told us that one of the girls on the Illinois team, who's 19, came out to her team and told them that now that Dave wasn't a NCAA coach anymore, she had been dating him for the past year. So he was dating one of his players while he was a coach at Illinois. Then on top of that we found out that when he told us he was going on recruiting trips, he was actually going to Illinois and visiting his girlfriend. So Dave Emery is not allowed to contact us and we haven't heard from him since."

Now in no way am I trying to paint a bad picture of our athletic department, but a serious lack of information seems to have taken place in the hiring of this coach and this is a scary and real situation. Larson agreed.

"The Illinois coach actually called Brad and apologized," Larson said. "She said they had no idea this was going on. But Brad is definitely trying to help fix this problem, because he told us the system they use to hire coaches is what they have been doing for years and he wants us to be a part of the search and see if we can improve the system."

I hope this article makes people aware of how much transparency is still needed in athletic departments everywhere. Although there has been no press release issued by the university on the tennis Web site, when the captain of the tennis team came forward to tell me this it obviously had happened. If this were a bigger program, this would not be so easy to conceal. And people have the right to know about this.

"We're one of the best athletic teams at Miami and I know we don't bring in a lot of revenue, but we should be getting the respect we deserve," Larson said.