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When ESPN recently had a few stray weeknights where they were scrambling to find live content to fill prime time hours they turned to women’s college volleyball for a short-lived schedule of matches involving some top-ranked schools. I actually briefly watched a couple of them because, well, I’m a huge sports fan and at times I’m open to just about anything. A match between Houston and Louisville was actually exciting. The Cardinals just happen to be fourth in the most recent AVCA rankings, the sport’s answer to AP and USA TODAY. Have a look yourself. You won’t find a single school from the Mountain West Conference among the Top 25.
But apparently, there are some even harder-core fans of the sport out there who have been watching games from that conference, whose tiles are waaaay down the prioritized list for my ESPN+ algorithm that I never was even tempted to click on them, And one player from one team has apparently caught the attention of a lot of these “fans”:
As the Los Angeles TIMES’ Steve Henson reported yesterday:
Donald Trump got wind of the ongoing issue surrounding gender identity and women’s volleyball in the Mountain West Conference and declared Wednesday during a town hall on Fox News Channel’s “The Faulkner Focus” that if elected he would ban all transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
Answering a question about transgender athletes, Trump referenced a play last week showing a San Jose State women’s volleyball player spiking a ball that hit a San Diego State player in the arms, briefly knocking her down. The player successfully kept the ball in play with the dig and immediately stood up and smiled.
A video of the play circulated on social media accompanied by claims that the San Diego State player was hit on the head while noting that the San Jose State player is transgender.
“I saw the slam, it was a slam. I never saw a ball hit so hard, hit the girl in the head,” Trump said. “But other people, even in volleyball, they’ve been permanently, I mean, they’ve been really hurt badly. Women playing men. But you don’t have to do the volleyball. We stop it. We stop it. We absolutely stop it. You can’t have it.
And as the paragon of objectivity Kristin Parks of FOX NEWS.com parochially added:
After Faulkner asked Trump how he would do that, the GOP candidate suggested he would take executive action.
“You just ban it. The president bans it. You just don’t let it happen,” Trump said, as the audience cheered. “Not a big deal.”
Well, apparently it is a big deal to some, at least big enough for the ASSOCIATED PRESS’ Mark Anderson to devote a lengthy article to it earlier this week:
Another athletics opponent of San Jose State has grappled with whether to play the school in volleyball.
The University of Nevada made it clear Monday that its Oct. 26 match against San Jose State would go on as scheduled after the team’s players released an independent statement a day prior saying they would forfeit.
“We demand that our right to safety and fair competition on the court be upheld,” the players’ statement read. “We refuse to participate in any match that advances injustice against female athletes.”
Boise State, Southern Utah, Utah State and Wyoming previously canceled matches this season against San Jose State, with none of the schools explicitly saying why they were forfeiting.
The Republican governors of Idaho, Utah and Wyoming have made public statements in support of the cancellations, citing a need for fairness in women’s sports.
Nevada’s athletic department cited state equality laws as the reason it couldn’t back out of its match, while acknowledging most of the players said they wouldn’t take the court.
The athletic department also stated the university is “governed by federal law as well as the rules and regulations of the NCAA and the Mountain West Conference, which include providing competition in an inclusive and supportive environment.”
Apparently those that have been putting this issue front and center enough to the point where it has become the latest example of an October surprise in a highly competitive presidential race are taking their lead from players who have seen this Spartan up close. The SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE’s Mark Zeigler provided some details yesterday:
Last month, San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser joined a lawsuit in federal court in Georgia contesting the NCAA’s transgender policy, saying she was not told teammate Blaire Fleming was transgender upon her arrival as a transfer from Alabama.
Fleming transferred to San Jose State three seasons ago from Coastal Carolina. Her gender history did not become public knowledge until last April, although sources said several Mountain West coaches and athletes privately knew when they faced her in previous seasons.
(Slusser) recalls it was ‘scary’ having balls hit that hard at her and unlike anything she had previously experienced in her volleyball career,” the federal complaint says. “Many of the girls on the team spoke with Brooke about their fears of being hit by balls spiked by Fleming, and concerns about potential concussions from being hit by a Fleming spike were regularly discussed.”
The complaint mentions an incident earlier this season in a win against Delaware:
“A SJSU freshman set Fleming for a spike, and Fleming smashed the ball into the face of a woman on the University of Delaware team’s back line, knocking the opposing player to the ground. Several days after the event, the teammate who had set the ball for Fleming came to Brooke in tears due to feelings of guilt that her set to Fleming had led to the Delaware player being hit in the head. The SJSU player wondered aloud whether she had done the right thing to set the ball for Fleming and whether she was responsible for any injury the University of Delaware player suffered.”
San Jose State has not made Fleming available to the media. Slusser has spoken to multiple media outlets, including “The Megyn Kelly Show,” during the season.
Well, that probably explains how this got on the radar of folks like Trump. After all, we know all too well his appetite for potential blood and women like Kelly.
There is no doubt a groundswell of female athletes who have the kind of mindset akin to that of Riley Gaines, the swimmer who was denied NCAA honors because she was outperformed by transgender Lia Thomas and has gone on to achieve considerable notoriety within the world of conservative media–way more than typical NIL opportunities might have offered someone with the talent ceilings of SEC swimmers and MWC volleyabllers. Sure looks like Slusser is eying a piece of that pie herself.
But I honestly wonder if the concerns expressed by her and those at the schools that have been vocal enough to take this stand are motivated by this grandiose concept of gender fairness or simply competitive envy.
The latest MWC standings show three of the four schools that canceled matches with San Jose State all looking up at them in the table. The University of Delaware is tied for third in that volleyball hotbed conference, the Colonial Athletic Association, two games behind Charleston and Hofstra.
But San Jose State itself is merely tied for third in the MWC, behind Colorado State and Fresno State. Even with the “competitive advantage” of a killer like Fleming. Neither of those schools even got a single vote in this week’s AVCA Top 25, either.
Maybe that’s because, as Ziegler’s article asserted, none of what college volleyball’s latest convert thought he saw actually happened at all?
“It has been incorrectly reported that a San Diego State University student-athlete was hit in the face with a volleyball during match play with San Jose State University,” SDSU said in a statement. “The ball bounced off the shoulder of the student-athlete, and the athlete was uninjured and did not miss a play. We have called for corrections with multiple media outlets.”
The confusion likely stems from the Mountain West Network’s livestream of the match, where host schools provide announcers along with one or two basic camera angles.
The announcers indicated the ball hit SDSU’s Keira Herron in the face, noting she had “pink in her hair and her face is starting to look like she’s matching that as obviously took the contact, but also gotta feel a little embarrassed as she tries to laugh off that last ball.”
Oh, one more thing. That now overhyped showdown with Nevada that’s set for a week from tomorrow night? Nevada just happens to be the school that’s tied with SJSU for that third place slot in the MWC.
I guess when folks are faced with surprisingly tied results in a competitive race they’re willing to use any tactic at all to gain an advantage.
Isn’t that right, Wilson?
Courage…