BERKELEY — A former Olympic water polo coach is asking for $1.38 million in lost wages and other benefits in a wrongful termination lawsuit against UC Berkeley.

Richard Corso, who coached Cal’s women’s team from 2006-16, alleges in an Alameda County Superior Court suit that school officials created a hostile work environment in order to force him out last year.

According to the suit, administrators wanted to hire a younger woman to run the water polo program that Corso had built into one of the nation’s best.

Cal officials disputed the claims Wednesday in a statement issued to this news organization, adding that the school has been penalized by the NCAA for a rules violation committed during Corso’s tenure.

“Many of the allegations in coach Corso’s lawsuit are demonstrably false, and statements that the lawsuit attributes to Cal athletics administrators are entirely fictitious,” the school’s statement read.

Corso, 62, charges age and gender discrimination against Cal athletic director Mike Williams, senior women’s administrator Jenny Simon-O’Neill and Jay Larson, associate athletic director of compliance.

The coach resigned in August, three months after signing a one-year contract that Corso says was designed by the school to create the illusion that he planned to retire after the season.

“I had no intention of retiring,” Corso said in an interview. “I felt I had at least two good Olympic cycles in me, maybe stretch it to 10 years.”

The suit alleges Cal administrators manufactured incidents starting in 2015 to oust Corso, including launching a year-long internal investigation into allegations of violations of the NCAA’s 20-hours-a-week training limit.

Cal officials said in the statement they substantiated the allegations and then reported them to the NCAA enforcement staff. According to Cal, the incident resulted “in a significant penalty of a reduction of 48 hours of practice time.”

Corso’s suit disputes that claim, saying the only action to come from the investigation was a letter of reprimand Corso received from his bosses.

All of this was followed by the sides agreeing to a new contract.

“He was inducted into the Hall of Fame,” said Corso’s lawyer, Andrea Tytell. “He knows better than to engage in NCAA violations. He didn’t over-train. It did not result in the same thing the university is claiming.”

According to the complaint, Corso took charge of a program in 2005 that was not performing well in the classroom or the pool. It says the coach had a 100 percent graduation record while leading the Bears to their first-ever NCAA tournament appearance in 2010.

Corso had a 227-98 record at Berkeley and led the Bears to the 2011 NCAA championship match, which they lost to top-ranked Stanford. Cal had advanced to the NCAA tournament four times in seven years ending in 2016 when three top players took a sabbatical to compete in the Olympics.

“We were doing it the right way at Berkeley,” said Corso, the U.S. men’s Olympic coach in 1996. “I’m just disappointed I’m not there. That was a lifetime goal to be at a place like Cal.”

Cal hired Coralie Simmons, 39, to take charge of the program two months after Corso resigned. Simmons, a two-time Division II coach of the year at Sonoma State and a member of the 2000 Olympic team that won a silver medal, has started strongly at Berkeley. The Golden Bears are 8-1 and ranked No. 4 nationally.

Simmons is the only female head coach among the seven schools in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. The Cal statement said officials considered both men and women candidates before choosing Simmons.

Cal has five men leading its 15 women’s programs, including those in soccer and volleyball. By comparison, Stanford has nine men coaches among the 20 women’s teams.

The school statement also said the university’s Human Resources department found no merit in Corso’s internal claim of gender and age discrimination.

He now is the youth technical director at the Westlake Village Pride Water Polo Academy. Corso formerly coached at UCLA from 1978-85.

The suit comes at a time Cal athletics is dealing with $21.7 million in losses for the fiscal year of 2016. The school is expected to lose $18.8 million in 2017. The financial bind has left some questioning whether university officials will cut sports programs.