Nearly one year after Melissa Batie-Smoose slipped into unemployment after San Jose State University did not renew her contract as an assistant volleyball coach, she can watch the institution face consequences from the federal government.
Batie-Smoose rose to fame in the “Save Women’s Sports” movement when she filed a Title IX complaint against the university for its handling of transgender athlete Blaire Fleming, in fall 2024. Her complaint included the first public allegations that Fleming conspired with an opposing player to have SJSU volleyball co-captain Brooke Slusser spiked in the face during a match.
She was suspended from the program, and later not brought back, and she hasn’t been able to find work in her field since.
But Batie-Smoose enjoyed a moment of victory on Wednesday when she learned that the U.S. Department of Education determined that SJSU violated Title IX in its handling of Fleming.
“Personally, it was a big win,” Batie-Smoose told Fox News Digital. “It was nice to hear something that we knew all along, right, that we were being violated in the things that the female athletes and myself went through. But this is a big win today.”
But now, she wants to see the real consequences.
“To move forward, I think for me, it’s winning in the courts. It’s winning, making the university pay high stakes for this,” 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, meaning in the courts.”
Batie-Smoose has filed a lawsuit against the Board of Trustees of the California State University (CSU) system, as SJSU is one of 23 California-based schools that are part of the system. Batie-Smoose and her attorney, Vernadette Broyles, believe the suspension was “retaliatory” to her Title IX complaint over Fleming.
Now, they expect the Department of Education’s verdict on SJSU will give them ammunition in court.
“We would anticipate that it would have a positive effect on her lawsuit,” Broyles said. “When the agency that has been given responsibility to enforce a federal law has come to the conclusion that federal law has been violated, well they’re subject matter experts on that federal law. So courts tend to pay a great deal of attention to the findings of that agency. So it’s going to be very supportive of Melissa’s claims in federal court, and we’re delighted 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 lawsuit, whether it’s intervene or issue a statement of interest,” Broyles said. “That would be tremendously helpful.”
The Education Department has given the university 10 days to comply with a series of agreements or risk “imminent enforcement action.”
The necessary terms include:
- Issue a public statement to the SJSU community that SJSU will adopt biology-based definitions of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ and acknowledge that the sex of a human – male or female – is unchangeable;
- Specify that SJSU will follow Title IX by separating 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 any entity that discriminates on the basis of sex;
- Restore to individual female athletes all individual athletic records and titles misappropriated by male athletes competing in women’s categories, and issue a personalized letter of apology on behalf of SJSU to each female athlete for allowing her participation in athletics to be marred by sex discrimination; and
- Send a personalized apology to every woman who played in SJSU’s women’s indoor volleyball (2022–2024), 2023 beach volleyball, and to any woman on a team that forfeited 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, to her, those terms are “the bare minimum.”
“It’s a starting point,” Batie-Smoose said. “They still have to pay a big price for what they’ve done.”
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Broyles believes that SJSU should be “highly motivated” to cooperate with the Trump administration, but that cooperation is also “not certain.”
“In due course, when they go through their paces, [the Trump admin] could potentially remove their federal funding from San Jose State, and that’s enormously impactful. So one would they think would want to co-operate 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 vs federal and various things.”
Batie-Smoose originally moved her whole family all the way from Connecticut to California so she could take the job at SJSU in 2023, all while believing she would only be coaching female players.
She claims she wasn’t officially told the truth about Fleming until she started asking around about it, and head coach Todd Kress finally told her, a few weeks into her tenure. She alleges she was then told she couldn’t tell other players or players’ parents about it.
When she was suspended from her post in fall 2024 after filing the Title IX complaint, she said she found out just minutes before warm-ups for a home game against New Mexico State. She claims she had personal items on campus that she was not allowed to come back to retrieve, and alleged she was never explicitly told which of her actions she was being punished for, but simply that she violated FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) laws.
Now, more than a year later, she has moved her family from California to Texas as she tries to move forward with her life in a “safer” location. Still, it’s been a hard journey to this point.
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“It’s tough, it’s a tough transition. I’ve been looking for coaching jobs, and it’s still affected my career, so it’s been difficult,” Batie-Smoose said. “It’s taken a toll on all of us.”
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