Cal State L.A. Coach Target of Complaints : Cross-country: Three former athletes charge mental abuse and NCAA rule violations. School says there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.

Three former members of the women’s cross-country team at Cal State Los Angeles have filed complaints with the school, accusing Coach Greg Ryan of using threats and intimidation to create a climate of fear so pervasive that athletes said nothing while he mentally abused them, violated numerous NCAA rules and misappropriated funds.

In copies of the complaints obtained by The Times, Maria Lopez, Jeri Young and Gracie Padilla, who attended Cal State L.A. between 1992 and 1994, accuse Ryan of:

--Offering full athletic scholarships and then reneging when the athletes arrived on campus.

--Paying the rent for a star athlete before she had enrolled at Cal State L.A.

--Signing a parent’s name to financial aid documents and telling some athletes to sign for per-diem payments to events in which they did not participate.

--Lending athletes money.

--Having an obsession with athletes’ weight that resulted in eating habits that encouraged them to skip meals.

In addition, Ryan is under investigation by the Alhambra Police Department for allegedly stealing a bicycle from one of his runners.

Ryan has refused numerous interview requests by The Times, as has Athletic Director Carol Dunn.

School President James Rosser said recently that he had heard these allegations against the cross-country program, had investigated and had found no wrongdoing.

Lopez, Young and Padilla did not file formal complaints until last week--after Rosser’s investigation--and each said she had never been interviewed by the school about such allegations.

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Since becoming coach at Division II Cal State L.A. eight years ago, Ryan, 47, has turned the cross-country program into one of the best in the country. All of his teams have finished in the top 10 at the NCAA championships and last year he was voted Division II coach of the year in the Western Region.

It was this record and his promises of full financial support that Lopez and Padilla say led them to accept scholarships from Cal State L.A. They say it was one of the proudest moments of their lives.

Lopez and Padilla allege in their complaints that Ryan told them the athletic scholarships the school was offering would cover the cost of their room, board and tuition until they graduated. He said they would not need jobs during school semesters. However, they claim that after arriving on campus, Ryan told Padilla she would get only a partial scholarship and told Lopez she would get no scholarship.

They also say in their complaint that Ryan told them that, because they were Latina, state and federal financial aid would pay their way. In addition, they say Ryan told them they would qualify for jobs on campus. He said if they received financial aid, he wouldn’t have to use any of the money in his cross-country budget for them.

Lopez, who also was recruited by Long Beach State and Cal State Fullerton after graduating from Compton High School, left Cal State L.A. after the spring of 1994 and is now competing at El Camino Junior College.

“The only reason I went to CSLA was because of the scholarship he offered me,” Lopez said. “Ryan told me I wouldn’t have to work. All I would have to do is bring my clothes and my blankets and run.”

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Athletes who compete in meets are given a meal per diem of about $15. At Cal State L.A., the athletes must sign a per-diem form when they collect their money and the coach is reimbursed by the athletic department, based on how many athletes he had to feed and house during the competition. The proof of the coach’s expenses are the signatures on the per-diem forms.

According to Young’s complaint, Ryan asked Young and other runners to sign for competitions they never attended.

She claims that in the fall of 1992, Ryan handed her and teammates per-diem forms for the entire season and told them to sign for every meet. Young said she signed for six meets, but competed in only two.

“I knew it was illegal, but what was I going to do if nobody wanted to go with me and complain to [Athletic Director] Carol Dunn?” Young said. “We’d all talk about it after he’d make us sign the [per-diem] forms and somebody would say . . . that we should all go and tell on him. But I knew we wouldn’t because everyone was too afraid of him to do anything.”

Young, who transferred to Cal State Fullerton in 1993 and was recently voted a Big West scholar-athlete of the year, said Ryan frequently displayed an explosive temper.

“If you questioned him on anything like that, he would scream and humiliate you,” she said. “After that happened to you several times, you got to the point where you thought it just wasn’t worth it.”

Per-diem forms obtained by The Times under the California Public Records Act showed that at least one athlete had a signature by her name that she claims was not hers.

Oshonda Posey, a sprinter on the track team, said she never signed the per-diem form from the 1993 Stanford Invitational cross-country meet that purports to bear her signature.

“I’ve never competed with the cross-country team,” Posey said. “I’ve never run anything longer than the 400 [meters] at Cal State L.A., and I have no idea why my name is on there.”

According to Padilla’s complaint, there was another kind of signature problem in the summer of 1993, when she was recruited. Padilla, who was 22 then, needed a parent’s signature to receive financial aid. State and federal agencies hold parents responsible for some of the costs until an athlete is 26.

In her complaint, Padilla alleges that Ryan signed the form.

“He [Ryan] told me he forged [my father’s] signature ‘to prevent delays,’ ” Padilla said in an interview. “My father has still never seen those papers.”

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All three complaints cited the relationship between Ryan and Genet Gebregiorgis, a former member of the Ethiopian national cross-country team. The complaints allege that Ryan gave the athlete money, paid her rent and bought her a plane ticket to Ethiopia.

Gebregiorgis, in a phone interview with The Times from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said she was looking for someone to help her when she met Ryan in the fall of 1992.

She had come here to be near her boyfriend, Desta Asgedom, who was a promising middle-distance runner competing for Riverside Community College. But shortly after she arrived in Los Angeles, Asgedom was run over by a pickup truck and killed. His death was later ruled a suicide.

Since they both had lived on Asgedom’s scholarship money, Gebregiorgis was left with no means of support and had no way to return to Ethiopia.

According to Gebregiorgis, Ryan offered to “take care of her” if she competed for him. Several months later, she moved into an apartment on 2221 Orange Grove Ave. in Alhambra. That apartment was leased to Ryan.

Monica Lau, the owner of the apartment, said that Ryan began leasing from her in 1988 and used the apartment to house members of his team. Lau said that if the athletes couldn’t pay the entire $900 rent, he was responsible for the difference. Lau said Ryan was forced to make up for tardy payments several times.

NCAA rules prohibit athletes from receiving benefits from anyone involved with the university.

“An extra benefit is any benefit that is not available to students in general and not authorized under NCAA rules,” said Steve Mallonee, director of legislative services for the NCAA.

Young, who lived with Gebregiorgis and current team member Marisol Pedraza during the spring of 1993, said that she was in charge of collecting the rent for Lau while she was there.

“I would ask Ganet for her share of the rent and she always told me to go see Coach,” Young said. “I’d call [Ryan] or tell him rent was due at practice, and he would write out a personal check right there or give it to one of the girls to give to me.”

Young’s complaint said that Ryan was “covering the costs of rent, utilities, food, clothing and transportation for Genet Gebregiorgis, because she was not a legal citizen of the country and had no means of support.”

From the spring of 1993 to the fall of that year, Gebregiorgis was enrolled at Los Angeles Trade Tech, a junior college where she was named junior college cross-country athlete of 1993.

According to Gebregiorgis and Young’s complaint, Ryan was paying Gebregiorgis’ bills for almost a full school year before she was eligible to enroll at Cal State L.A.

According to Lopez’s complaint, after she told Ryan she needed money to pay her rent and buy groceries, Ryan handed her $300 in cash. She said Ryan told her the money was part of her scholarship. But Lopez said she questioned whether pulling cash out of a wallet was the proper way to hand out scholarship money.

“He told me not to worry about it,” Lopez said. “And then he would say not to tell anybody he gave me the money.”

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The complaints by Young, Padilla and Lopez all say one of the worst things they had to endure was Ryan’s obsession with their weight and what they call a “cavalier attitude” toward their health.

According to them, Ryan believes that, for distance runners to be successful, they must be as light as possible, and he weighed each runner about once a week. Young said Ryan told her to drop 14 of 122 pounds from her 5-foot-6 frame her first day at CSLA.

Diane Brill, the athletic trainer at Cal State L.A. from 1984-1993, said she told Ryan on several occasions that putting the women on a scale so often and being so obsessive about their weight was harmful to their mental health. She said she told him that she believed two of his runners displayed anorexic behavior.

Brill said Ryan denied having anybody on his team who wasn’t healthy.

But Lopez and Padilla’s complaints say they had conditions diagnosed as anemia and told Ryan they believed it was caused by trying to reach his weight standards. They said he told them that everyone on the team was anemic and that all good distance runners had to be.

Lopez said she knew being hungry all the time wasn’t good for her body. She began noticing she was getting fatigued more often and people kept telling her how drawn she looked. Toward the end of the 1993 cross-country season, she knew something was wrong.

“I was bleeding for a long time and I thought there was something wrong with my menstrual cycle,” Lopez said. “Many of the girls on the team had problems with their cycle and we all thought that it was due to running and not eating, but the doctor told me I was pregnant. He told me to stop running.”

Lopez said the national championships were approaching, and she was Ryan’s No. 3 runner. If the team had any chance to win, she had to run.

According to Lopez’s complaint, Ryan had threatened to kick her off the team many times and said he could kick her out of school by cutting off the state and federal aid she was receiving. She believed that if the team suffered because of her pregnancy, Ryan would carry out those threats. Afraid of losing everything, Lopez competed but ran poorly at the national championships, and Cal State L.A. finished fourth.

In the complaint, Lopez said she regretted risking her baby’s health, and when Ryan told her one day that he wanted her to be less than 100 pounds by track season, Lopez told him it would be impossible for an expectant mother to weigh that little.

“He freaked,” Lopez said. “For three hours we sat in his office and he tried to convince me into having an abortion. He told me he had taken some of the other girls and that he would take me, too, and that a baby would ruin my life, my boyfriend would leave me, and my parents would disown me.”

After she made it clear to Ryan that she was going to keep the baby, he wished her luck and promised to help her get back into school after the baby was born. But several months after Jesse Martinez was born on June 27, 1994, Maria Lopez said she visited Ryan and he told her he didn’t want her on the team or at Cal State L.A.

“He told me he didn’t want me because I was fat,” Lopez said. “He told me I wouldn’t make the team and it was my fault because I had a baby. He said there was nothing for me at CSLA. I won’t ever forget the way he made me feel. I got home that night, I hated my baby, I hated my boyfriend, and I hated myself.”

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Gracie Padilla decided to quit the team in March 1994, when, she said, Ryan began screaming and embarrassed her in front of coaches she knew at a meet.

She stopped going to practice and avoided Ryan on campus. Padilla said Ryan started asking other athletes where she was and left messages at her apartment. She refused to return his calls.

Padilla said Ryan became more agitated with every phone call until one day, while she was finishing her packing and about to leave, he threatened her.

“He called, and before I could hang up he screamed, ‘Remember, I have a key to your apartment.’ ”

Ryan was Padilla’s landlord.

Minutes after she hung up, Ryan allegedly went to the apartment and started pounding on the door. When Pedraza let him in, he went up to Padilla’s room, where she had locked herself in.

“I thought I was going to faint.” Padilla said. “I hid in the closet and he started calling me names and I heard him talking to Marisol [Pedraza] and asking her, ‘Is this her stuff? Is this her bike?’ Marisol said ‘Yes.’

“He yelled at me, ‘If you want to get your bike back, Gracie, you better come talk to me.’ ”

Padilla said she rushed to the door and saw him carrying the bike down the stairs and putting it in his van.

Padilla said she went to Dunn, the athletic director, and told her the story. She said Dunn kept breaking appointments after their initial meeting and finally told Padilla that she had investigated the matter and believed one of her teammates had stolen her bicycle. Dunn said not to bring the problem to her anymore.

Padilla filed a theft report last December. According to Lt. Rocky Caringello of the Alhambra Police Department, the case is under investigation.

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Some of the women lodging the complaints are competing elsewhere but are still struggling with their memories of Ryan and their experiences at Cal State L.A. They say, however, that the fear is beginning to lessen.

Lopez won the 3,000 meters at the Riverside Classic track meet and qualified for the state championships in the 5,000.

“I want him to see that I’m not worthless,” Lopez said. “I’m working hard to get back into shape and run good times. I want him to see how wrong he was about me.”

The question remains, if things were as bad as they said, why didn’t they say something earlier.

“Who would have believed me?” Young said. “It was his word against mine, and I always had that battle in my own mind, ‘Was he really that mean?’ Sometimes I think he couldn’t have been that bad. I can’t hardly believe it, now that I’m away from there.”