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Nearly a year after Melissa Batie-Smoose fell into unemployment after San Jose State University did not renew her contract as an assistant volleyball coach, she can see the institution facing fallout 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 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 shoot her in the face during a match.
She was suspended from the program and then not returned, and has been unable to find work in her field since.
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Associate head coach Melissa Batie-Smoose with the San Jose St. Spartans as they play against Air Force in an NCAA women’s volleyball match at the Spartan Gym in San Jose, California, on Thursday, October 31, 2024. (Santiago Mejía/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
But Batie-Smoose enjoyed a moment of victory 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 Pak Gazette Digital. “It was nice to hear something that we knew from the beginning, right, that we were being violated in the things that the athletes and I went through. But this is a big victory today.”
But now he wants to see the real consequences.
“I think for me, moving forward is winning in court. It’s winning, making the university pay a lot for this,” he said.
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“This is not over. I don’t want people to think it’s over. We have a big fight ahead of us, we have to win at the highest level, meaning in court.”
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 “retaliation” for her Title IX complaint about Fleming.
Now they hope the Department of Education’s verdict on SJSU will give them ammunition in court.
“We anticipated it would have a positive effect on their lawsuit,” Broyles said. “When the agency that has been given the responsibility of enforcing a federal law comes to the conclusion that federal law has been violated, well, they are subject matter experts on that federal law. So courts tend to pay a lot of attention to that agency’s conclusions. So it will be very supportive of Melissa’s claims in federal court, and we’re pleased to see that.”
Broyles also wants the Department of Education to intervene directly in the lawsuit.
“We would love for the Department of Education to intervene in our lawsuit, either by intervening or issuing a statement of interest,” Broyles said. “That would be tremendously helpful.”
The Department of Education has given the university 10 days to comply with a series of agreements or risk “imminent enforcement action”.
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 recognize that the sex of a human being (male or female) is immutable;
- Specify that SJSU will follow Title IX by separating athletic and intimate facilities based on biological sex;
- State that SJSU will not delegate its obligation to comply with Title IX to any outside association or entity and will not contract with any entity that discriminates on the basis of sex;
- Restore to individual athletes all individual athletic records and titles that were misappropriated by male athletes competing in women’s categories, and issue a personalized letter of apology on behalf of SJSU to each athlete for allowing their participation in athletics to be marred by sexual discrimination; and
- Send a personalized apology to every woman who played in SJSU women’s indoor volleyball (2022-2024), 2023 beach volleyball, and any woman on a team that lost instead of competing against SJSU while a student was on the roster, expressing your sincere regret for putting female athletes in that position.
Batie-Smoose says that, for her, those terms are “the bare minimum.”
“It’s a starting point,” Batie-Smoose said. “They still have to pay a high price for what they have done.”
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Melissa Batie-Smoose filed a Title IX complaint. (Pak Gazette Channel)
Broyles believes SJSU should be “highly motivated” to cooperate with the Trump administration, but that cooperation is also not “certain.”
“In due time, when they quicken their steps, [the Trump admin] It could potentially eliminate its federal funding from San Jose State, and that has a huge impact. “So you would think they would want to cooperate with a federal government that is 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 originally moved her entire family from Connecticut to California so she could take the job at SJSU in 2023, while believing she would only coach female players.
She claims she wasn’t officially told the truth about Fleming until she started asking 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 her parents about this.
When she was suspended from her position in the fall of 2024 after filing the Title IX complaint, she said she found out minutes before warmups for a home game against New Mexico State. She claims she had personal items on campus that she was not allowed to retrieve, and alleged that 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, he has moved with his family from California to Texas as he tries to move forward with his life in a “safer” place. Still, it’s been a tough 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 tough,” Batie-Smoose said. “It’s taken a toll on all of us.”
