Former Oregon State volleyball player Kyla Waiters poses for a photo near Corvallis, Ore., in July 2018, shortly before entering college. (Dorina Waiters via AP)

“I just thought I didn’t want to live anymore,” Waiters said.

Her decision a few months earlier to accept a scholarship to play volleyball for coach Mark Barnard’s team had been seeded with promises and hope. Named to an All-American team and attracting interest from more than a dozen Division I schools, Waiters said Barnard and his staff had promised to teach her a new position and give her a redshirt year to learn it.

Before a single semester had passed, all that was gone.

By the end of the season, Waiters — her arms and wrists scarred from a cutting habit she said she’d developed due to the stress of volleyball at Oregon State — was in Barnard’s office, being told he was shopping her scholarship. Her best plan, he said, would be to find another school.

“The sooner you move on, the better,” Barnard told her in a conversation she recorded and provided to The Associated Press.

That message came only weeks after police responded to the 911 call. Waiters is the third Oregon State player to seriously contemplate suicide since 2016.

Waiters was among a half-dozen players who reached out to the AP after a July story in which players, parents and people familiar with the program said Oregon State volleyball coaches physically and emotionally abused some players while the administration took no outward steps to address complaints.

A year after Waiters’ call to the police, another promising freshman, Amya Small, was taken to the hospital after taking dozens of over-the-counter medications.

Waiters said she had been stunned to read about it.

“I genuinely thought the article was written about me, that’s how similar it was to Amya’s story,” Waiters said.

She is among 11 players to quit or transfer from the program since 2016, some forced out using similar methods.

Two additional players — setter Delaney Taylor and another who did not want her name used for fear of backlash from former teammates — joined Waiters in telling AP they had also experienced many of the abuses outlined in the July story.