San Jose State University suspended associate head volleyball Melissa Batie-Smoose.
Batie-Smoose filed a lawsuit against the school, alleging favoritism towards the male player on the female volleyball team.
Blaire Fleming is a male. Many schools have forfeited matches against SJSU because of Fleming for their safety.
The school told OutKick: “The associate head coach of the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team is not with the team at this time, and we will not provide further information on this matter.”
Batie-Smoose filed the lawsuit on October 29. From Quillette:
On 29 October, Batie-Smoose filed a 33-page sworn declaration with officials at SJSU, the Mountain West Conference, and the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), exhorting these bodies to investigate (1) the overt favouritism that she believes her school has shown to Fleming, at the expense of Fleming’s 18 female teammates; and (2) the unsettling measures that SJSU officials have allegedly taken in order to suppress expressions of concern from these affected women.In both respects, Batie-Smoose alleges that the behaviour of SJSU officials—including her own direct boss, Spartans head coach Todd Kress, whose position on these issues has reportedly alienated him from many of his players—may violate Title IX, the US civil-rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs.
Batie-Smoose listed many alleged events in her lawsuit, but this one caught my eye.
It allegedly happened in October 2024 when SJSU traveled to Fort Collins, CO, to play against Colorado State University.
Co-captain Brooke Slusser’s roommate received a message to “distance” herself from Slusser.
Batie-Smoose went around the hotel to ensure the safety of the team members.
That’s when the team found out “Fleming had left the hotel:”
It was subsequently learned that Fleming had been accompanied by another player, whom I will refer to as “Kim,” as she prefers to remain publicly anonymous. Their destination was the residence of CSU’s right-side hitter, Malaya Jones, against whom Fleming would directly line up in the next day’s match.During that match, Batie-Smoose claims in her Title IX Complaint, Fleming’s play style was bizarre. Fleming defied her coaches’ instructions by allowing Jones an unhindered diagonal hitting lane that exposed Slusser to kills. Batie-Smoose also reports that she repeatedly saw Fleming laughing together with Jones after the latter targeted Slusser in this manner. Fleming’s behaviour was reportedly so strange that even Kress expressed concern, and took Fleming aside for a one-on-one talk.But Fleming’s behaviour didn’t change. And SJSU lost the match in straight sets—the Spartans’ first defeat of the season.
Batie-Smoose described one part of the game in the lawsuit: “Blaire sent an over pass, perfectly setting up Malaya to kill the ball again in the direction of Brooke Slusser, after [which] Jones blew a kiss toward Fleming and mouthed ‘thank you.’”
Fleming’s companion went to see head coach Todd Kress and Batie-Smoose:
It was only the next day, when a guilt-stricken Kim reportedly stepped into Kress’s office to tearfully tell Kress and Batie-Smoose what she’d seen and heard on the evening of 2 October, that Batie-Smoose received apparent confirmation of her hunch that Fleming had allegedly thrown the match.By Kim’s reported telling—as Batie-Smoose summarised it in her sworn declaration to university officials—Fleming gave Jones the SJSU scouting report, and the two engineered a plan to leave the centre of the court open so that Jones would be able to target Slusser with powerful spikes in an unhindered fashion. (“Kim,” Jones, and Fleming were all asked for comment. All declined.)This is all hearsay, of course. But Kim’s alleged claims certainly align with the strange events that Batie-Smoose and Slusser would witness during the next day’s match. Moreover, Kim’s decision to come forward ran entirely against her own interests—lending her claims more credence—as it required her to not only betray Fleming’s confidence, but also to admit to the Spartans’ coaching staff that she’d breached team policy by leaving the hotel on the night of 2 October (a fact her coaches hadn’t previously known).
Batie-Smoose came to SJSU in 2023. Fleming didn’t out himself until April 2024.
But the coach had suspicions before then:
“We had nine student-athletes who had not previously played on the SJSU team,” attests Batie-Smoose in her Title IX Complaint. “It is my understanding that none of these players [were] told before coming to SJSU that Fleming’s natal sex is male, or that there was any player with a male birth sex on the team.”Fleming reportedly didn’t begin explicitly self-describing as transgender among fellow team members until April 2024. But in her Title IX Complaint, Batie-Smoose reports that she’d strongly suspected as much as soon as she observed Fleming practise in Fall 2023.Over a three-decade career as a coach and recruiter in women’s volleyball, Batie-Smoose had seen few women who possessed anything close to Fleming’s level of raw physical power. Fleming was relatively undisciplined and sometimes listless, Batie-Smoose reports, but what “stood out was spiking the [ball] and blocking on the front row, due to Fleming’s leaping ability and hitting power, which far exceeded that of any player in the [Mountain West] Conference.”
“But even when it comes to the future, it’s hard to be optimistic,” Slusser told Quillette. “If the university is willing to put their female athletes though this ordeal once, what stops them from doing it again?”
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