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Nearly a year after Melissa Batie-Smoose slipped into unemployment after San Jose State University did not renew her contract as an assistant volleyball coach, she could see the institution facing consequences from the federal government.
Batie-Smoose became famous 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 the fall of 2024. Her complaint included the first public allegations that Fleming conspired with an opponent to have SJSU play volleyball in SJSU co-captain S facelusser.
She was suspended from the program and later not brought back, and she has not been able to find work in her field since.
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Associate head coach Melissa Batie-Smoose with the San Jose St. The Spartans as they play 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 enjoyed a moment of victory Wednesday when she learned the U.S. Department of Education determined SJSU violated Title IX in its handling of Fleming.
“Personally, it was a big win,” Batie-Smoose told Pakinomist Digital. “It was nice to hear something that we knew all along that we were violated in the things that the female athletes and myself 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 the courts. It’s winning that makes 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 suit 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” of her Title IX complaint against Fleming.
Now they expect that the Ministry of Education’s verdict on SJSU will give them ammunition in court.
“We would expect that it would have a positive effect on her trial,” Broyles said. “When the agency charged with enforcing a federal law has come to the conclusion that federal law has been violated, well, they’re subject matter experts on the federal law. So the courts tend to pay close attention to the findings of that agency. So that’s going to be very supportive of Melissa’s claims in federal court, and we’re happy to see that.”
Broyles also wants the Department of Education to intervene directly in the lawsuit.
“We would love to see the Department of Education intervene in our lawsuit, whether it’s to intervene or issue a declaration of interest,” Broyles said. “That would be enormously helpful.”
The Education Department has given the university 10 days to comply with a series of agreements or risk “imminent enforcement action.”
The necessary conditions 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 a person’s gender – male or female – is immutable;
- Specify that SJSU will comply with Title IX by segregating 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 female athletes all individual athletic records and titles wrongfully appropriated by male athletes competing in female categories, and issue a personal letter of apology on behalf of SJSU to each female athlete for allowing her participation in athletics to be marred by gender discrimination; and
- Send a personal apology to all women who played in SJSU women’s indoor volleyball (2022-2024), beach volleyball in 2023, and to any woman on a team that lost instead of competing against SJSU while a male student was on the roster – expressing sincere regret for putting female athletes in that position.
Batie-Smoose tells 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 have done.”
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Melissa Batie-Smoose filed a Title IX complaint. (Pakinomist Channel)
Broyles believes that SJSU should be “highly motivated” to cooperate with the Trump administration, but that cooperation is also not “certain.”
“In due time, when they go through their steps, [the Trump admin] could potentially remove their federal funding from San Jose State, and that has huge implications. So you’d think would want to partner 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 different things.”
Batie-Smoose originally moved her entire family all the way from Connecticut to California so she could take the job at SJSU in 2023, all the while thinking she would only coach women’s players.
She claims she wasn’t officially told the truth about Fleming until she started asking around and head coach Todd Kress finally told her a few weeks into her tenure. She claims she was then told she couldn’t tell other players or players’ parents about it.
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 warming up for a home game against New Mexico State. She claims she had personal belongings 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 violated Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) laws.
Now, more than a year later, she has moved her family from California to Texas as she tries to move on with her life in a “safe” 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.”
