In a lawsuit filed last week, Brooke Slusser, captain of the women’s volleyball team at San José State University (SJSU), asked that one of her friends be kept from an upcoming tournament.
Several teams have backed out of games against the SJSU volleyball team this season. Though none of them have said why they made the choices they did, some people think it might have something to do with Slusser’s ongoing lawsuit against the NCAA.
In their complaint, Slusser and a few other current and past college volleyball players say that the Mountain West Conference is breaking several equality laws by letting the allegedly transgender player play on the team.
The paper asks the conference to admit that it broke the law and make biologically male athletes ineligible for women’s sports. It also asks that the athlete not be allowed to play in the Mountain West tournament starting on November 27.
The case also names Melissa Batie-Smoose as a defendant. She says she was fired from her job as an assistant coach for the SJSU team for “standing up for my players’ rights.”
The Mountain West Conference couldn’t say anything because the case is still being litigated, but they did say that they “take[s] seriously all concerns of student-athlete welfare and fairness.
News Desk (TNND) asked SJSU about the complaint, and the school said it would respond appropriately.
In October, Todd Kress, the leader of the SJSU women’s volleyball team, was upset about how many opponents had canceled games against his team because of “outside noise.”
This past few weeks, he said, “focusing on what we can do on the court has been very hard.” There have been outside groups that have tried to split our team, our school, our league, and our sport.
I know it’s been hard on the kids in our locker room who have worked hard for years.
“We have a great group of young women who are trying to forget about the trouble,” he said. “I just believe that we’ll be able to forget about the noise from outside and remember how much we love each other again.”
In October, TNND said that the school’s women’s volleyball team’s X page seemed to have limits on comments under its posts. As of Monday, that security still seems to be in place.
