Cape Town: The rift within the Lions continues after players accused the rugby club's operations and contract manager, Tracy van Ginkel, of barging into their dressing room while some members were still naked.
This follows a Weekend Argus exclusive detailing players’ frustration and distrust with the current coaching structure.
"We as players are extremely frustrated with the fact that Tracy walks in and out of the change room as she pleases," said a player.
"We are naked, our willies out, and she will walk in and say very arrogantly, 'nothing that I have never seen before’,“ alleged the player.
Another player said: "This makes the players totally uncomfortable as many of us are married men!!! (sic)... she embarrasses them when she acts like that!!! (sic)."
Asked what repercussions this had on their private lives, a few of the men said their wives were unhappy.
"Some of us are married with children and this creates problems ... we have in passing mentioned it to our wives/partners and got flack for it, resulting in major arguments and unhappiness on the home front," said another player, adding that if Van Ginkel was a man and they were women "it would have been a different story".
Van Ginkel couldn’t be reached for comment.
A player, who just started at the Johannesburg-based Lions, told Weekend Argus that the atmosphere at the Lions was tense.
"There is an extremely tense atmosphere at the Lions Rugby company ... there's absolutely no cohesion between the junior and senior coaches," he said.
In a previous article we reported on the outcome of players’ score card of their coaches and management staff out of 10. The players were split into several groups.
The scorecard made it clear that the team's relationship with their head coach, Ivan “Cash” van Rooyen, reached the lowest when he got an average rating of between three and four out of 10, a figure correlating with his disastrous winning ratio of only 39%.
One group allegedly gave the Lions' contracts and operations manager, Tracy van Ginkel a negative 3, while the "majority of the other groups" thought she was worthy of a one. CEO of the Lions Rugby Club, Rudolf Straeuli denied knowledge of the complaints regarding Van Ginkel’s alleged behaviour.
"I am not aware of the claims. Nothing has been communicated to me, either in writing or verbally," he said.
In January Van Ginkel was also embroiled in the Lions’ “hot dog” saga in Paris, France when they played against Stade Francais.
Team mates complained about the poor food on the tour.
"We were chowing hot dogs on tour. Usually we have proper nutritious meals. We were given hot dogs and wondered if this was last minute emergency plan to feed us," said the player.
Van Ginkel was also accused of misplacing their kit on the tour.
"Tracy is the same woman who knew that our jerseys for our game against Stade français were missing, but did nothing about it. She knew about the mishap for almost two weeks.
“Stade français had to ask their fan store to pay for the printing of numbers on our warm-up jerseys. We were really embarrassed," said another insider.
"Another problem that happened is that we had to walk 2km to do our own washing, because Tracy didn't want to pay for the washing at the hotel ... so we had to walk to a laundry place, they gave us €20 to wash our own laundry," they said.
Weekend Argus