Mountain West Conference commissioner Gloria Nevarez said Thursday that the forfeitures that women’s volleyball teams are willing to take to avoid playing San Jose State is “not what we celebrate in college athletics” and that she is heartbroken over what has transpired this season surrounding the Spartans and their opponents.
Four teams have canceled games against San Jose State: Boise State, Southern Utah, Utah State and Wyoming, with none of the schools explicitly saying why they were forfeiting.
Funnily enough, The Associated Press also doesn’t explicitly say why they’re forfeiting. The AP nowhere admits that the issue is a male player on the San Jose State women’s team.
A group of Nevada players issued a statement saying they would not take the court when the Wolf Pack were scheduled to host the Spartans on Oct. 26. The players cited their “right to safety and fair competition,” though their school reaffirmed Thursday that the match was still planned and that state law bars forfeiture “for reasons related to gender identity or expression.”
State law tells women they can’t refuse to play against men? What a horrific law if so.
“It breaks my heart because they’re human beings, young people, student-athletes on both sides of this issue that are getting a lot of national negative attention,” Nevarez told The Associated Press at Mountain West basketball media days. “It just doesn’t feel right to me.”
Yes, they’re human beings, some of whom are women and some are men. The teams are divided by sex. There’s a women’s team and a men’s team. Men shouldn’t be in the women’s team. San Jose State has a man in the women’s team.
San Jose State coach Todd Kress said playing was his team’s “safe haven” and noted that security and police escorts are now involved when his team takes the court. He has not discussed specific players publicly since the forfeits began.
“I know that it’s definitely taken a toll on many of them. They’re receiving messages of hate, which is completely ridiculous to me,” Kress said in Albuquerque. “Some of those people are the underbelly of society that you attack an 18-, 19-, 20-year-old female. And even more so if you’re a parent and you’re attacking 18-, 19- or 20-year-olds. Would you want your student-athlete, your daughter, to face the same kind of hate that you’re dishing out?”
But he’s not a female. He’s not anyone’s daughter. That’s the point.
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8 responses to “Be sure to omit all the important facts”
“not what we celebrate in college athletics”
What they celebrate is not women staying out of the competition for their own safety, it’s men beating up women who don’t have a right to say no?
Creeps.
Given the kind of parents likely to be dishing out the abuse, I can empathize with because they’re mostly garbage human beings.*
In the other hand this is a jock playing in sports that aren’t his to play in, so who’s garbage now?
*Based on regional demographics; I know their type all to well given I work with them everyday.
“messages of hate” – which almost certainly refers to disapproval or criticism which sadly the culture is increasingly unable to differentiate from genuine expressions of hate. At this point I’m not even blaming the woke worldview. The crude pop-psychological idea that animus* is the only real or possible motivation is now shared by left and right. intellectuals and populists alike, and makes it near to impossible to conceptualise actual reason-based behaviour. And the media cheers it on because, of course, a shouting match makes for great vision and if you engage in any sort of analysis you’ll just be accused of lying so you might as well just go with the flow.
*I just checked and apparently ‘animus’ can mean both hostility and motivation so the confusion is clearly ancient but what was a confusion has become a theory and an almost universally accepted one at that.
Oh, I have no doubt there’s legitimately hateful speech being directed at the trans student. The fact that there’s a host of very good reasons to ban the kid from playing on the women’s team does not mean that suddenly there won’t be a bunch of assholes who issue violent threats, death-wishes and so on.
The issue is that the adults in the room have abdicated their duty to separate the two categories of critique.
I don’t doubt that either, Freemage. That abdication of responsibility results in an inevitable escalation and it doesn’t take more than a few iterations of serve and return to arrive at death threats. It’s not for nothing that the motto of the internet these days is pretty much “well, that escalated quickly”.
RILEY GAINES et al v. NCAA et al is an excellent reference. This class action lawsuit is funded by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS). The ICONS web page about the lawsuit has the latest amended version of the lawsuit as a PDF file (208 pages, filed Sept. 23, 2024).
In this latest version, the list of Plaintiffs (p. 168) adds Brooke Slusser, a volleyball player at San Jose State University (SJSU). In the expanded section on Volleyball (pp. 151-163), she adds details of her experience with Blair Fleming on the SJSU team. Of course there are safety concerns about Fleming hitting harder than women, but I also found these topics that I can group into blockquotes:
That is enraging.
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