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Nearly a year after Melissa Batie-Smoose became unemployed after San Jose State University failed to renew her assistant volleyball coach contract, she may see the institution facing consequences from the federal government.
Batie-Smoose rose to prominence in the Save Women’s Sports movement when she filed a Title IX complaint against the university over its handling of transgender athlete Blaire Fleming in the fall of 2024. Her complaint included the first public allegations that Fleming conspired with an opposing player to get SJSU volleyball co-captain Brooke Slusser in the face during a game.
She was suspended from the program, then not brought back, and since then has been unable to find work in her field.
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Associate head coach Melissa Batie-Smoose with the San Jose St. Spartans as they take on Air Force in an NCAA women’s volleyball match at Spartan Gym in San Jose, Calif., Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
But Batie-Smoose had a moment of victory Wednesday when she learned that the U.S. Department of Education had determined that SJSU violated Title IX in its handling of Fleming.
“Personally, it was a big win,” Batie-Smoose told PK Press Club Digital. “It was nice to hear something that we knew all along, right, that we were violated in the things that the female athletes and I went through. But it’s a big victory today.”
But now she wants to see the real consequences.
“Moving forward, I think for me it’s winning in court. That’s winning, making the university pay high stakes,” she said.
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“It’s not over. I don’t want people to think it’s over. We have a huge fight ahead of us, we have to win at the highest level, which is in court.”
Batie-Smoose has filed a complaint against the California State University (CSU) System Board of Trustees, because SJSU is one of 23 California schools that are part of the system. Batie-Smoose and her attorney, Vernadette Broyles, believe the suspension was “retaliation” for her Title IX complaint against Fleming.
They now expect the Department of Education’s verdict on SJSU to give them ammunition in court.
“We anticipate that this would have a positive effect on his trial,” Broyles said. “When the agency charged with enforcing a federal law comes to the conclusion that the federal law was violated, well, they are subject matter experts on that federal law. So the courts tend to pay a lot of attention to that agency’s findings. So it’s going to strongly support Melissa’s allegations in federal court, and we’re pleased to see that.”
Broyles also wants to see the Department of Education intervene directly in the lawsuit.
“We would love to see the Department of Education intervene in our pursuit, whether it’s an intervention or an expression of interest,” Broyles said. “That would be extremely helpful.”
The Ministry of Education has given the university 10 days to comply with a series of agreements or face “imminent enforcement action”.
Necessary terms include:
- Issue a public statement to the SJSU community that SJSU will adopt biologically based definitions of the words “man” and “woman” and recognize that the sex of a human being – male or female – is immutable;
- Clarify that SJSU will follow Title IX by segregating sports and intimate facilities based on biological sex;
- State that SJSU will not delegate its obligation to comply with Title IX to any external association or entity and will not contract with an entity that discriminates on the basis of sex;
- Return to individual female athletes all individual sporting records and titles misappropriated by male athletes competing in female categories, and send a personalized letter of apology on behalf of SJSU to each female athlete for allowing her participation in athletics to be tainted by gender discrimination; And
- Send a personalized apology to every woman who played SJSU women’s indoor volleyball (2022-2024), 2023 beach volleyball, and any woman on a team who withdrew rather than compete against SJSU while a male student was on the roster – expressing sincere regret for placing female athletes in that position.
Batie-Smoose says that, for her, these terms are “the bare minimum.”
“It’s a starting point,” Batie-Smoose said. “They still have to pay a heavy price for what they did.”
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Melissa Batie-Smoose filed a Title IX complaint. (PK Press Club Channel)
Broyles believes that SJSU should be “very motivated” to cooperate with the Trump administration, but that this cooperation is also not “certain.”
“When the time comes, when they have taken their first steps, [the Trump admin] could potentially pull its federal funding from San Jose State, and that would have a huge impact. So they would think they would want to cooperate with a federal government that’s giving them these millions of dollars,” Broyles said. “We’ll see what they do, because there’s ideology here, there’s politics here, state versus federal and various things.”
Batie-Smoose initially moved her entire family from Connecticut to California so she could take the job at SJSU in 2023, while thinking she would only coach female players.
She claims she wasn’t officially told the truth about Fleming until she started asking questions about it, and head coach Todd Kress finally told her, a few weeks into his tenure. She alleges she was then told she couldn’t tell other players or the players’ parents.
When she was suspended from her position in the fall of 2024 after filing a Title IX complaint, she said she found out just minutes before warming up for a home game against New Mexico State. She claims she had personal items on campus that she was not allowed to return to retrieve, and alleged that she was never explicitly told which of her actions she was being punished for, only that she had violated FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) laws.
Now, over a year later, she has moved her family from California to Texas as she attempts to continue her life in a “safer” place. Still, the journey has been difficult so far.
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“It’s tough, it’s a tough transition. I was looking for a coaching job, and it’s always affected my career, so it’s been tough,” Batie-Smoose said. “It took a toll on all of us.”
