Three University of Wyoming volleyball team players, plus student-athletes from other Mountain West Conference universities and a team coach, sued the conference and its commissioner Wednesday.
Among other things, they claim the conference pushed them into competing with a transgender athlete and stealth-edited its rules to stifle their free speech and violated federal Title IX law.
The lawsuit follows weeks of controversy over San Jose University’s inclusion of a transgender outside hitter, Blaire Fleming, who is now ranked as the team’s top scorer.
Bill Bock, who represents the plaintiffs and the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS), filed the lawsuit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for Colorado.
The lawsuit is an ICONS project, Bock told Cowboy State Daily in a Wednesday email.
The following women are suing:
• Fleming’s teammate and team co-captain Brooke Slusser, of San Jose State University
• SJSU former student-athlete Alyssa Sugai
• SJSU former student-athlete Elle Patterson, who says she lost a scholarship opportunity to Fleming
• Nicanora Clarke, member of the volleyball team at the University of Nevada, Reno
• Kaylie Ray, member and co-captain of Utah State University women’s volleyball team
• Macey Boggs, UW volleyball team member
• Sierra Grizzle, UW volleyball team member
• Jordan Sandy, UW volleyball team member
• Katelyn Van Kirk, Boise State University volleyball team member
• Kiersten Van Kirk, Boise State University volleyball team member
• Melissa Batie-Smoose, associate head coach of the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team
•Sia Liilii, co-captain on the University of Nevada, Reno team.
The entities and people being sued are the Mountain West Conference, its commissioner Gloria Nevarez, SJSU, the board of trustees that oversees it, SJSU’s Senior Associate Athletic Director Laura Alexander, SJSU Senior Director of Media Relations Michelle McDonald Smith and SJSU head coach Todd Kress.
Actually, A Forfeit
Including the University of Wyoming, four schools to date have canceled volleyball matches against SJSU amid pressure from some players and several community members to consider safety and fairness risks over pitting women against Fleming.
On Sept. 27, just as the second of those four schools was canceling, the Mountain West Conference authored a rule saying those cancellations would count as losses, according to the lawsuit. The document floats the argument that teams could cancel over safety concerns, rather than weather a forfeit loss.
The complaint alleges that Mountain West leaders “hastily” drafted a new rule, making the canceling teams chalk up a forfeiture loss for each cancellation.
“The burgeoning controversy, which Commissioner Nevarez apparently believed could lead women’s volleyball players and teams to exercise their constitutional rights to protest and boycott, caused the commissioner and her staff to hastily draft and post on the MWC website a policy designed to penalize First Amendment protests supporting the rights of women’s volleyball players in the MWC,” the lawsuit complaint says.
“This new MWC policy was clearly intended to chill and suppress the free speech rights of women athletes in the MWC,” the document adds.
It calls the new rule’s adoption and posting an aberration of MWC’s usual, board-run methods of rulemaking, and an “under-the-radar” gesture.
Metadata from the MWC website “reveals,” says the complaint, that the new rule about schools having to take a forfeit for refusing to play transgender players was drafted and posted under MWC Deputy Commissioner Bret Gilliland’s user credentials Sept. 27, 2024.
Gilliland sent an email to Mountain West schools, including UW, on Sept. 27 at 4:18 p.m. saying the new rule was adopted by the MW Board of Directors in August 2022.
The complaint calls this “irregular” and says it leads to the conclusion that the rule was drafted to penalize schools for cancelling on SJSU.
“(It) violates the First Amendment,” the suit adds.
What It Says
The Mountain West Conference Transgender Participation Policy says in part that a transgender student-athlete can compete after passing the NCAA process and requirements for doing so.
It also says a Mountain West Conference team refusing to compete against a fellow conference member’s team “which includes an eligible transgender student-athlete” will take a forfeit loss.
And it contains what the complaint calls a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” policy, in which one institution doesn’t have to tell another whether it has a transgender player on the team.
The Claims
The women claim violations of the First and 14th Amendments; the right to bodily privacy (for San Jose teammates); discrimination, retaliation, viewpoint discrimination and other violations.
The women of San Jose also are claiming fraud: that they were brought to the school without knowing they’d be playing with, sometimes rooming with, and sometimes competing for scholarship funds against a transgender athlete.
“The NCAA, Mountain West Conference, university presidents and college athletic directors around the country are failing women,” said Bock in a Wednesday statement. “Because the administrators don’t have the courage to do their jobs, we must ask the federal courts to do their jobs for them.”
The MWC communications office did not respond to a late-day voicemail seeking comment Wednesday.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
