College Volleyball’s Spartan Meltdown

On 26 October, the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) Division I women’s volleyball team was scheduled to host a Mountain West Conference match against the San José State University (SJSU) Spartans. It was a game that everyone knew would never take place, because UNR’s players had publicly declared they wouldn’t be showing up—notwithstanding the stubborn insistence of UNR officials that the university “intend[ed] to move forward with the match as scheduled.”

When it became clear that UNR would be required to pay the Spartans’ travel costs if UNR forfeited the match on game day—as everyone knew they would—the location of the (by now, completely imaginary) match was changed to the Spartan Gym in San Jose, California. But of course, when game time arrived, that gym was empty—as everyone knew it would be—because members of the UNR team were busy conducting a press conference explaining why they’d stayed home. And the whole farce concluded with SJSU winning by forfeit.

This is the fifth women’s volleyball team whose players have chosen to forfeit against SJSU this season—all for the same reason—which is described in a media statement put out by members of the UNR squad:

We, the University of Nevada Reno women’s volleyball team, forfeit against San José State University and stand united in solidarity with the volleyball teams of Southern Utah University, Boise State University, the University of Wyoming, and Utah State University. We demand that our right to safety and fair competition on the court be upheld. We refuse to participate in any match that advances injustice against female athletes.

The “injustice” at issue can be sourced to a single SJSU player—Blaire Fleming—who is at or near the top of the SJSU Spartans’ leader board in sets played, “kills” (winning offensive shots that are unreturnable by the opposing team), and blocks. The team’s web site also informs us that Fleming is a public-relations major who “would like to work in the fashion or art industry,” and “likes cooking and trying new restaurants.”

What the site does not mention is that this San José State Women’s volleyball star is not biologically female. Rather, Fleming is a biologically male athlete who chooses to self-identify as a woman for legal and social purposes. However, in keeping with all the other farcical aspects of this saga, SJSU athletics officials have been required to pretend that this fact is somehow less important to the volleyball community than Fleming’s artistic inclinations and culinary interests.

This pretence is rooted in the official policies of SJSU’s Athletics Department, which demand that the asserted female gender identity of trans women such as Fleming be taken as trumping human biology. This explains why, when the above-described farce finally ended on 26 October, it was UNR, which fields an all-female volleyball team, that was required to forfeit—and not SJSU, which doesn’t.

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In many ways, this story is similar to others I’ve reported for Quillette, in which a trans-identified male athlete is permitted to exploit his physical advantages in order to dominate (nominally) all-female sports competitions. But as we will see, the Spartans’ saga is unusual for several reasons—including that the loudest criticism of Fleming’s presence on the Spartan roster is coming from Fleming’s own side of the net.

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The accounts contained in this article are based principally on interviews with two members of the SJSU women’s volleyball program, and the supporting documents they shared with Quillette in regard to their claims. The first is someone whose name will already be familiar to many readers: Spartan co-captain Brooke Slusser, whose publicly expressed concerns about SJSU’s policies have already put her at the centre of America’s culture war over the scope of transgender rights.

The second source is someone who is herein breaking her silence for the first time—Melissa Batie-Smoose, Associate Head Coach of the SJSU women’s volleyball team. Given her close daily interaction with Spartan players and university administrators, there is arguably no one better placed within the program to explain the effects of Fleming’s presence on the team’s internal social dynamics and on-court performance.

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.

As far as possible, Quillette has fact-checked Batie-Smoose’s Title IX Complaint, and sought comment from the individuals whom she names. However, readers should remember that her descriptions and allegations have not been tested in court.

Batie-Smoose came to SJSU in January 2023 along with Kress, whom she’d known since 2006, when they worked together on the volleyball coaching staff at Florida State University. Both arrived as highly respected industry veterans with numerous NCAA accolades. Neither had any part in the original decision to recruit Fleming into SJSU’s women’s volleyball program—which was made under the auspices of former head coach Trent Kersten (who now serves in the same role at another Division I school, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles).

It was only after arriving in San Jose in early 2023 that Batie-Smoose learned that her new team had a male-to-female transgender player on its roster. The coach later found out that this had been no oversight on the part of the administrators who’d interviewed and hired her: SJSU has a policy of withholding such information from all newly recruited staff and athletes.

“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.”

Kress’s original impressions of Fleming aren’t known to us, as he declined repeated Quillette interview requests. But by Batie-Smoose’s account, Kress originally seemed to share her concerns as to whether it was appropriate for biologically male volleyball players to compete on women’s teams. His attitude reportedly changed in abrupt fashion, however, when Kress was given strict orders on the subject from the school’s Athletics Department.

In this regard, a name that comes up often in the Title IX Complaint is Laura Alexander, an Assistant Director of Student Wellness at SJSU with jurisdiction over the school’s volleyball program. According to Batie-Smoose, Kress told her that Alexander had said anyone opposed to Fleming’s inclusion on the women’s team should leave SJSU and seek “therapy.”

Batie-Smoose reports that Kress began bending over backwards to accommodate Fleming, who reportedly often took liberties with the team’s dress code and practice schedule, as well as the baseline behavioural standards that Kress applied to the rest of the team. This claimed double standard is one of the major themes of Batie-Smoose’s Complaint.

In one detailed case study she puts forward, Batie-Smoose contrasts the allegedly lax treatment afforded to Fleming with the far stricter standards imposed on a promising female recruit who was competing for Fleming’s position. Kress allegedly refused to renew the recruit’s scholarship. Being unable to pay her tuition out of pocket, the recruit was effectively pushed out of the program, and now plays in another state.

The climate that Batie-Smoose describes is one of fear and self-censorship. Until Slusser finally went public with her concerns in recent weeks, everyone involved with the SJSU women’s volleyball team seems to have been scared to even mention the fact that Fleming is transgender—despite also being required to pretend that Fleming’s biologically male status is athletically inconsequential.

By Batie-Smoose’s account, an official from the school’s central communications office was enlisted to repeatedly instruct volleyball team members that “this was Blaire’s story to tell” and “Blaire’s story alone.”

At first, Batie-Smoose followed along with these instructions. But she began to have second thoughts as evidence grew that Fleming’s presence on the court might not only be unfair to other athletes, but possibly dangerous as well.

In one notorious incident in mid-October, Fleming blasted a kill shot off the head of an opponent, knocking her to the ground. At a recent tournament in Iowa, Fleming downed a member of the University of Delaware squad in similar fashion. “It was clear to me that the [University of Delaware player] was very athletic and skilled, but simply had no chance to protect herself from the spike,” writes Batie-Smoose.

In her Title IX Complaint, the coach reports that even defenders on Fleming’s own team, concerned for their safety, now sometimes turn away during practice matches when Fleming is winding up for a kill—a fear response that she describes as “virtually unheard of in women’s volleyball.”

Competitive volleyball is a small world, and news that SJSU had a biologically male player on its roster spread quickly throughout the Mountain West Conference in early 2024. And so when teams started forfeiting matches, SJSU players weren’t surprised.

In July 2024, Slusser and her co-captain, Brooke Bryant, travelled to a tournament in the Balkans, where they represented the Mountain West Conference. Upon their return to San Jose, the two informed Kress that Fleming had been a point of discussion among the Mountain West all-stars from other universities—and that some of these women had indicated their teams wouldn’t play matches against a SJSU roster that included Fleming.

Kress reportedly became agitated, and brusquely dismissed the prospect of teams following through with such threats. Batie-Smoose reports that Kress later told her he’d spoken with Alexander about the forfeiture issue, and that she’d confidently assured him the whole issue would soon “blow over.”

Which, of course, it very much did not.

Like many of her players, Batie-Smoose found herself inhabiting two separate realities when the 2024 season kicked off in August—an official professional milieu, in which coaches, administrators, and players were all supposed to pretend Fleming was just one of the girls; and a private milieu, out of Kress’s earshot, in which women could candidly share their concerns.

Like other elite US college athletes, members of the SJSU women’s volleyball team have spent much of their lives chasing scholarships from top-level university programs. And they understandably feared that running afoul of Kress and Alexander would put that prize at risk. As Batie-Smoose puts it, the “repeated instructions by SJSU administrators not to speak about Blaire Fleming caused student-athletes on the team to fear that they could lose their scholarships or be removed from the team if they spoke outside of a team meeting about Fleming’s sex.”

Batie-Smoose believes that Kress became progressively more fixated on fears that taking any wrong step with Fleming could end his SJSU tenure. This fear expressed itself, she claims, in the harsh tone he began taking with female players—Slusser, especially.

By Batie-Smoose’s account, Kress began regularly instructing women that excluding trans-identified players such as Fleming should be seen as morally tantamount to homophobia and anti-black racism. In some cases, he reportedly speaks to the issue in deeply personal terms, suggesting that Fleming’s naysayers are betraying not just the cause of trans rights, but also the entire LGBT community. In effect, this head coach of a Division I women’s volleyball team was telling many of his own athletes that they’re bigots.

In effect, this head coach of a Division I women’s volleyball team was telling many of his own athletes that they’re bigots.

As it became clear to rank-and-file team members that expressing their concerns to Kress on this issue was pointless (at best), Batie-Smoose and Slusser took on the role of unofficially leading a de facto opposition faction within the team—a faction that grew, by Slusser’s estimation, to encompass all but two or three of the team’s eighteen biologically female players.

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The mood on many sports teams rises or falls with their wins and losses. But not in this case. While Fleming’s physical prowess has helped SJSU achieve a winning record, both Slusser and Batie-Smoose report that the social atmosphere on the team has degenerated rapidly during the 2024 season, and now may be described as toxic, joyless, and dysfunctional.

More than most team sports, volleyball requires constant communication among players and coaches. Yet Slusser reports that she is no longer on speaking terms with Fleming, except insofar as is absolutely necessary during match play. For his part, Kress reportedly no longer speaks to Slusser, and instead directs his comments to Batie-Smoose for her to relay—which has become difficult now that Kress and Batie-Smoose have all but stopped speaking to one another. Among team members as a whole, meanwhile, the schism that separates the majority faction from Kress, Fleming, and Fleming’s small clique of female supporters has become increasingly bitter.

Slusser has been the target of at least one violent threat—though it was communicated only indirectly, through a social-media message sent to her roommate. And Fleming, it should be said, has also been been the subject of inappropriate and abusive messaging, which has surely taken a psychological toll. While having a team dinner before one game, Batie-Smoose reports, a member of the coaching staff was berated by an apparently intoxicated diner who boorishly railed at him for having “a man on the team.”

Many Spartans players have reportedly been skipping practices as a means to avoid Kress’s hectoring, as well as the unpleasant atmosphere that pervades team meet-ups more generally. In normal circumstances, a player who repeatedly skips practices without a valid excuse typically finds herself benched or even thrown off the roster entirely. But Kress, Batie-Smoose reports, “has completely lost control of his team,” and is no longer capable of enforcing team rules in any effective or systematic way.

Kress reportedly admitted to Batie-Smoose that he feels especially powerless to discipline either Fleming or Slusser (both of whom have played in all of the 50 sets the Spartans have contested this season): The former scenario would leave Kress vulnerable to accusations that he’s giving in to transphobes, while the latter could be interpreted as retaliation against his most high-profile public critic.

The controversy now follows the women around campus. In one episode described to Quillette, for instance, a team member reportedly suffered a panic attack in class after she was identified as a member of the women’s volleyball team by her professor. He then proceeded to play a TikTok video related to the controversy, at which point the player’s classmates piled on with questions about her alleged failure to support Fleming’s inclusion—at which point she fled the classroom. (The professor reportedly apologised to the player upon their next meeting.)

When expressing opposition to policies that permit men to self-identify into women’s sports (not to mention prisons, rape-crisis centres, and other protected female spaces), conservative culture critics tend to place blame squarely on transgender activism and abstruse conceptions of human identity, such as “queer theory.” But in their interviews with Quillette, both Slusser and Batie-Smoose emphasised another, far less esoteric factor at play at SJSU: College sports is big business in the United States. Every coach—Kress included—is judged on his or her win-loss record. And putting male bodies on a female team is an easy winning formula. Fleming attends SJSU on a full athletic scholarship. If Fleming doesn’t play, that investment is squandered. 

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And it’s true that, in arithmetic terms at least, Fleming has helped lead the SJSU women’s volleyball team to an outstanding season. The Spartans’ 6 September victory over Iowa State (which was not a forfeit) was particularly notable, as it represented the first time in two decades that the Spartans have defeated a Big Ten school. However, most team members find it increasingly difficult to go through the expected celebratory rituals—especially following yet another kill scored by their male-bodied teammate.

These silences have become so deafening to Kress that he’s reportedly upbraided players for failing to cheer on Fleming’s dominant play with sufficient enthusiasm. Both women who spoke to Quillette were unapologetic, however. “I don’t cheer on that shit,” one told me bluntly.

“If we lose, it’s not fun. But if we win, it’s not fun either,” she added. “Even if we win it all at the end of the season, you think I want that ring? The whole thing will be tainted.”

Slusser is in an especially difficult position, being not only a Spartan co-captain, but also the team setter—the volleyball equivalent of a quarterback in American football. Which is to say that she is typically the player who delivers the high-arcing sets that Fleming (and other front-row players) convert into kills—effectively making Slusser an on-court accomplice to Fleming’s demonstrations of male-bodied power.

Given her team’s fractured social dynamic, it’s actually quite amazing that Slusser is capable of maintaining her composure on court. A particularly low point occurred on 17 October, in the moments before the Spartans’ match against New Mexico at the Johnson Center in Albuquerque. Slusser found herself in tears after reading a social-media post written by someone in Fleming’s camp, airing old dirty laundry about one of Slusser’s close family members. Yet the co-captain somehow found a way to not only play all four sets that day, but set Fleming up for 18 kills.

Slusser told Quillette that she endures each match in a state of dissonance. On one hand, she feels duty-bound to do her best to help the team win. On the other hand, doing so often means setting the ball to someone whom she believes shouldn’t be playing collegiate volleyball on a women’s team.

Slusser endures each match in a state of dissonance. On one hand, she feels duty-bound to help the team win. On the other hand, doing so often means setting the ball to someone whom she believes shouldn’t be playing collegiate volleyball on a women’s team.

It’s a tragicomic moral dilemma that seems plucked from a university course on ethics or philosophy. Yet it’s one she confronts every time her fingertips touch the ball during a match. And the only way to deal with it, she tells me, is to render herself emotionally “numb.”

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In recent weeks, Slusser and Batie-Smoose both joined a group of female athletes, organised by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, in suing the NCAA, on the claim that its policy of permitting biologically male athletes to compete as women violates Title IX.

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In an ironic development, however, SJSU officials are now seeking to weaponise the same legislation—except on Fleming’s behalf.

Batie-Smoose reports that Kress told her he’s brought forward at least one Title IX complaint against Slusser with school administrators, on the basis that Slusser referred to Fleming in the media with masculine pronouns—a practice that Kress describes as a threat to the rights of trans women.

On 24 October, Peter Lim, the SJSU Athletics Department’s Interim Title IX and Gender Equity Officer, was summoned to deliver a 90-minute presentation to a Spartans audience, in which he explained that trans-identified athletes such as Fleming are members of a “protected class” under Title IX’s provisions. Batie-Smoose says she felt the stare of the presenter’s eyes during these proceedings, suggesting that she constituted his intended audience. (Lim did not respond to Quillette’s requests for comment.)

Three days later, Batie-Smoose reports, Kress somewhat cryptically forwarded to her an oddly phrased email from one “Gary Brickwood,” a lawyer who purported to offer Kress assurance that he’d be within his legal rights to strip Slusser of her team captaincy, revoke her scholarship, and even throw her off the team (while also directing a gratuitous jab at Slusser’s mother). That email, a copy of which was obtained by Quillette, reads, in part, as follows:

A person [Slusser] has a constitutional right as an individual to join or file a lawsuit challenging another person’s right to play a sport. That player does not have a right as a team member to lie on public media about danger posed by the teammate [Fleming, presumably] in order to attempt to ban the teammate from playing or to cause the team as a whole to in effect forfeit its remaining games knowing other schools will act like blockheads… The school and you as coach along with the [Athletic Director] I presume have the discretion to decide that Slusser is knowingly harming her teammate and the volleyball team and should lose her playing position, co-captain position, and her scholarship… It is apparent that Slusser’s mother and her daughter feel hatred toward trans people. The school should stop facilitating the public display of that hatred.

A search of a personnel database operated by the State Bar of California matches the author’s email address to a lawyer from Redwood, California named Gary Charles Brickwood, who has been professionally inactive since December 2023. Quillette’s attempts to contact Brickwood by phone and email were unsuccessful. And Kress declined to answer questions about what he hoped to accomplish by passing Brickwood’s message on to his coaching subordinate, or whether he was engaged in independent efforts to find legal arguments that might serve to justify sanctions against Slusser.

Perhaps the most unsettling set of alleged events described in Batie-Smoose’s Title IX Complaint unfolded in Fort Collins, Colorado, in advance of the Spartans’ 3 October 2024 match against the Colorado State University (CSU) Rams.

In an obvious dig at Slusser—who, at the time, had only just gone public with her concerns about Fleming—the CSU facilities announcer declared the event to be an “Inclusive Excellence Volleyball Game.” The Spartans were put further on edge later that day, when Slusser’s roommate received the above-referenced social-media threat, advising her to “distance yourself from [B]rooke tomorrow at the game, it will not be good for her.”

Batie-Smoose learned of the message after checking in to the team’s local hotel, and began making inquiries to ensure that team members were safe.

It was at that moment, Batie-Smoose reports, that the team learned 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.

“At one point,” says Batie-Smoose, “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.’”

In an interview with Quillette, Slusser confirmed Batie-Smoose’s descriptions of the match in all respects.

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” and Malaya Jones were both asked to comment on these claims. Both 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).

And so, at the very least, it would seem that Kim’s allegations would have warranted a university investigation. Yet it’s not clear whether one has been initiated.

According to Batie-Smoose, Kress began downplaying Kim’s story as soon as she’d left his office. And when Batie-Smoose followed up the next week, by asking what steps Kress had taken, he replied wearily that “it’s out of my hands”; and that he’d reported the information to Alexander, who, in turn, he said, had reported the information to the university’s Title IX office. (Quillette sent a detailed list of questions concerning these events to Kress, Alexander, and SJSU’s central communications office. None of the recipients chose to respond.)

That was a month ago. During that period, no one from the university is known to have talked to anyone on the team, including Batie-Smoose and Slusser, about any of these events—much less initiated a formal investigation.

Whatever did happen on 2 and 3 October in Fort Collins, it had become clear to everyone that the SJSU women’s volleyball team was now a zero-trust environment. The mood is so dire, Slusser and Batie-Smoose report, that they see no way to fix the program under its current administrative and coaching regime. Both tell me they’re focused mainly on preventing the next cohort of female SJSU athletes from having to fight this same battle.

“I think the [non-Senior] players returning next year just want to grit their teeth and get through this—because by then, Blair will be gone and maybe they can have a normal season,” Slusser told me. “[For now], they’re just handling it as best they can. Which means just going numb to the situation while still trying to show up every day and give their best.”

“But even when it comes to the future, it’s hard to be optimistic,” she adds. “If the university is willing to put their female athletes though this ordeal once, what stops them from doing it again?”

Earlier this year, I wrote about the case of Lazuli Clark, a trans-identified male athlete who self-identified himself into female competitive categories in at least four different sports. In that article, I argue that when a man replaces a woman on a team roster or a tournament podium, it isn’t just that lone woman who suffers negative effects. It’s also the many other women who must share intimate spaces with that man, assume the physical risks associated with competing against him, experience the competitive distortions caused by his presence, and endure the gaslighting of league officials, reporters, and other third parties who consistently order women to ignore the reality of sexual dimorphism on pain of being denounced as transphobic.

The saga of SJSU’s women’s volleyball team shows there is something else that women must sacrifice for the cause of male-bodied inclusion: the joy they derive from building trusting friendships with teammates and coaches as they train and compete with a common purpose.

As this and other case studies show, some women inevitably will be manipulated or bullied into acceding to the claim that men can truly become women by announcing new pronouns. Even if such women comprise only a small minority on any given roster, the team will divide into irreconcilable camps. And the spirit of camaraderie they once shared is destroyed.

From the point of view of many ideologically doctrinaire administrators, it seems, this toxic dynamic is a feature, not a bug. Through such internecine struggles, heretics can be denounced and silenced by their more trans-“inclusive” teammates—thus sparing administrators the dirty work of performing this policing themselves.

It is only when women such as Slusser and Batie-Smoose step forward publicly that other women tend to find their voices on this issue, and refuse to be intimidated. This has been happening more often in recent years, but it is still relatively rare. And so perhaps one can understand why Todd Kress seemed to be so angry and flustered when the women around him began openly questioning his lectures about what does and doesn’t define their womanhood.

After all, this was all supposed to “blow over,” right?

I was once (not so long ago) a volleyball dad, and would travel to tournaments around southern Ontario and the United States with my middle daughter and her Toronto-based team. She’s a fine player (a setter, in fact), and it’s been a treat to watch her play. But I absolutely didn’t care whether her team won or lost, because the real reward, as I saw it, was the inspiring way they co-operated and bonded as a team.

I particularly enjoyed watching how their first impulse after every match was to rush together to celebrate collectively in victory or console one another in defeat—a ritual that played out in miniature dozens of time each match after every dramatically contested point.

It is these intense bonding experiences that are the real prize for all the hard work and sacrifice that draw women such as Slusser and Melissa Batie-Smoose into the sport. And it is a tragedy to know that members of their team—like the legions of other female athletes being similarly victimised at other schools, and in other athletic pursuits—are being stripped of this priceless reward so that a handful of male athletes can don a woman’s uniform.