She spent most of the winter carrying around an anxiety that fit over her life like an overcoat. It’s the weight you feel when you’re moving toward another separation, only this was different because there’s always a chance she may never again see her Marine husband.

This was still new to Brooke Rickards. Chris had left for his first seven-month tour just days after they were married last May. Even after he returned home safe to Delaware, Rickards remembers dreading April 14 and hoping it would never come.

In a way, she was lucky. Rickards had Seton Hall University, which was a sanctuary. And she had the school’s softball team, which was her second family. She rarely played, true. But as a senior, she felt a duty to promote morale, which is a challenge on a losing team.

So two weeks before Chris would leave for Afghanistan again, Rickards stopped by coach Paige Smith’s office to remind her for a third time that she’d be leaving campus after class on Friday, April 12, to see her husband off.

"You’re letting your team down if you go," Rickards said she heard the coach reply.

Brooke says she looked at her and blinked in disbelief.

"Pardon?"

"You’re needed here Friday and Saturday," Rickards recalled the coach saying. "As long as the other pitchers aren’t hurt, maybe you can go home early Sunday. But I’m not going to look favorably upon this."

As odious as that reaction may be, Rickards came to regard it as wholly consistent with her coach’s ethos and her personality.

She has company. In the past month, Smith has been accused by players and parents of bullying, placing sports ahead of academics, flouting NCAA rules, threats of revoking scholarship agreements made by her predecessor, and inventing violations to cut two seniors.

Two of the accusers are on the record for this story, four others declined to be identified, saying they feared reprisals.

But it’s hard to know whether this coach is a milder version of ousted Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice or the victim of a terrible series of misunderstandings. Is this a coach out of control or overly sensitive players and parents?

Smith is not permitted to defend herself because Seton Hall declined to allow her to be interviewed.

Athletic director Pat Lyons would not address specific allegations, so he had his department issue a statement. His refusal to communicate directly may be part of the problem.

"As upsetting as this has been, you can’t reach anyone in the administration about it," said Anne Gaffey, the mother of one of the dismissed players, senior reserve Cashel Gaffey. "For two weeks, nobody returned our calls. And fighting it is a David-and-Goliath thing, it really is."

Indeed, a common desire among the parents of Seton Hall softball players is less bureaucracy and more sense and decency — common or otherwise. At the time of her request to see her husband, Rickards, 22, had pitched three innings all season for a 9-23 team, so the urgency of her presence was purely subjective. It never occurred to her that she’d encounter resistance for something so simple yet so profoundly important.

"It was as if Brooke was asking to skip school to meet friends at a beach party," said her mother, Kathy Tull. "And the coach tried to lay a guilt trip on her. She came home anyway, of course, but you don’t forgive something like that."

Tull had sent a letter protesting Smith’s methods, dated March 13, to four administrators, including President Gabriel Esteban. To this day, it has not been acknowledged by the university, Tull said.

Meanwhile, Ray Vander May says he has received "a lot of disturbing phone calls from a lot of scared parents" of underclassmen throughout the season. Vander May is the retired former coach who left the program last May after posting a 423-382 mark in 16 seasons, including back-to-back Big East championships in 2004 and 2005 and three NCAA appearances.

"When I left, I asked whether they were going to honor the deals we had with my recruits — a partial scholarship the first year, a full ride the second — and athletics (officials) said, ‘Of course,’ " Vander May said. "Now I have four kids being told, ‘We’re not honoring the deal Coach Vander May made with you.’

"This is about class and ethics — if you promise a reward, you fulfill that reward. These are the cornerstones of your program."

Vander May paused for a breath, then made a noise on the phone that sounded like contempt.

"I’m not surprised this coach threw two seniors off the team, because she could no longer threaten them with anything else," he said. "The irony is those young ladies happen to be two of the nicest, most respectful kids I’ve ever recruited."

These are the kind of allegations that could lead to an aggressive response from a university administration, but Lyons’ statement seemed deliberately vague and detached:

"There are procedures in place to monitor the welfare of all of our student-athletes and insure adherence to NCAA Compliance regulations. Every issue brought to the attention of the Athletic Department and University is taken very seriously. We thoroughly investigate all allegations in accordance with University and Athletic Department policies.

"It is our policy to not comment publicly on issues related to our teams and student-athletes. This is in order to protect the privacy of our student-athletes as required by law and to maintain the integrity of the process."

Lyons would not respond to a direct question about the coach’s reason for cutting players.

There is nothing on Paige Smith’s résumé that is unusual, and it’s hard to deny she has the incipient air of achievement at age 32. She is educated — she has a bachelor’s degree from Campbell University, and a master’s in adult education at the University of Idaho, which is 50 miles from her hometown of Coeur d’Alene.

She wins. After a Big East apprenticeship at St. John’s, Smith coached five years at Division 2 Adelphi and posted a 169-104 record with two NCAA Tournament appearances before being hired by Lyons to replace Vander May last June 29.

The concluding sentence of Lyons’ statement observed that Smith had led the Pirates to "one of the more successful seasons in recent history." But success is relative: The team’s 21-30 record is a virtual match of the 21-32 mark in 2012, which was good enough to get Vander May forced out.

To whatever degree either coach deserves credit, the players clearly enjoy each other’s company. Perhaps they had no choice this year: No outsider is allowed within 30 feet of the home dugout at Sheppard Field, and Smith’s policy is that players aren’t allowed to talk to their parents between games of a doubleheader.

According to Rickards and another player who asked for anonymity because of a fear of coaching reprisals, such discipline isn’t required for academic pursuits. The best example occurred the week of March 10, when two players had the opportunity to make a presentation before Johnson & Johnson as part of a sophomore assessment required by their Business School curriculum.

The presentation coincided with the team’s flight to San Diego, however, so the two student-athletes would have to skip the trip. Still, it was a no-brainer: These women weren’t even starters, and this was a chance to show the board of a Fortune 500 company the best of what Seton Hall offers.

"But when they told the coach they would have to miss the tournament, the coach brought it up in front of the team," Rickards said. "She said, ‘These two are choosing that team over this team.’ She gave them a choice to skip the presentation or be suspended for every other trip. Some of the girls offered to take whatever punishment she wanted to give them — extra sprints, whatever — if she allowed them to stay home.

"As it turned out, they gave their presentation, and won a competition. It was a very big deal. One of them just interviewed for an internship there. And the coach didn’t carry through on her threat. But she tried to humiliate them."

On April 28, according to Rickards, Smith told her players they could miss the mid-week games of April 30 and May 1 if they felt it was necessary to go to class — particularly with a trip to Tampa for the Big East Tournament possible for the following week.

Rickards said she told her coach she would skip the games to attend Spanish classes. The coach confirmed Rickards would be excused from the games in a mass e-mail dated April 29, and academic support director Amanda DiDonato was copied on the note, obtained by The Star-Ledger.

Rickards said she was called into the coach’s office at 3:10 p.m. on May 2, where Smith used the last thing in her playbook: She told Rickards she was cut because she did not satisfy the condition to skip the games. It was only for students who were "at risk of failing" their classes, and DiDonato informed the coach Rickards was in no such danger, the coach asserted.

"She never gave any conditions," said Rickards, a sociology student with a 3.1 grade-point average. "I missed 20 Spanish classes this semester because of our travel schedule, but it didn’t matter to her. This school is supposed to prioritize academics, and this lady puts softball ahead of everything."

The coach may sidestep a violation of NCAA bylaw 17.1.6.6.2 ("no class time shall be missed at any time … except when a team is traveling to an away-from-home contest") because the games in question were at Saint Peter’s and at Stony Brook, N.Y.

But as Vander May put it, "This is Seton Hall. We’re supposed to stand for something. Now we stand for cutting a kid for going to class? Did you ever hear of something like this?"

Brooke Rickards was done fighting. She was deprived of a final Big East Tournament and the seniors banquet, but it hardly mattered anymore.

"I was glad to be away from it," she said. "The last thing I said to Paige was that I hope she took pride in kicking two seniors off in a week."

Anne Gaffey will only confirm that the family has filed a grievance with the athletic department on her daughter’s behalf, "based on Cashel being dismissed for a violation of rules that … we find ridiculous." She would not elaborate, citing her daughter’s privacy.

Teammates say it was widely known Cashel Gaffey kept a notebook about the team in her equipment bag, but the information contained in it was never disclosed.

Rickards says its contents fit the common knowledge category. Some of it you could take to the administration, such as Smith routinely exceeding the NCAA’s practice limit (20 hours per week) throughout the fall season by mandating player arrival 15 minutes before the scheduled time. Some of it was reckless, such as the time Smith punished a player by ordering her to do the team’s laundry — at 1 a.m., unchaperoned, 1,000 miles from home in the basement of the Jacksonville, Fla., Holiday Inn.

Some of it was insensitive, Rickards says, such as the times Smith divided the team into workout groups and gave them names such as "aborted fetuses" and "booze bags."

Rickards recalled the jaws of underclassmen dropping when Gaffey admonished the coach with, "I don’t think the Archdiocese of Newark would find those names appropriate."

"Paige said to Cash, ‘What I think is appropriate is for you to run for the entire practice,’ " Rickards recalled. "So Cash ran the whole time, even though she was getting over an upper respiratory infection."

Gaffey was cut on April 21, after the team returned home from their trip to Syracuse. She had left her equipment bag unsupervised while taking a mandatory urine test, and after collecting her bag, she realized her notes were missing.

Just minutes later, she was informed that she was no longer on the team.

Vander May knows rejection himself, but he says he speaks candidly "out of obligation to those kids." He added that he was offered "an extra month or two of pay" to sign a confidentiality agreement last May, but refused the offer because he’s "fed up."

"But I’m not bitter about leaving Seton Hall. Not in the least — I was relieved," the former coach said. "The thing that drives me crazy is the bullying of the kids that I brought in there, the rule-bending, the refusal to honor previous agreements, and the fact that they’ve made a mockery of the student-athlete ideal."

Rickards, meanwhile, will get her diploma and go home to Delaware this week. She hasn’t learned whether she’ll get the uniform she wore with pride for four seasons.

"I only stayed this long because I care about my teammates," she said, "and I can’t imagine what it will be like for these girls to go through three more years of this."

Dave D’Alessandro: ddalessandro@starledger.com