At Lenoir-Rhyne University, what was said in the locker room didn’t stay there.
Last fall, the varsity women basketball players at the small private school in Hickory held a members-only symposium on race and social justice that was designed to unite the team.
Instead, it helped gut it.
Discussions intended to breach any divide among the players over the explosive subjects of systemic racism and the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor soon gave way to teammates accusing other teammates of making racist comments, eventually leading to campus protests, according to published reports and some of the players’ social media pages.
In March, eight players and the student manager left the team, leading the school to pay for an outside investigation by a prominent Charlotte law firm into whether first-year coach Grahm Smith had promoted a racially hostile atmosphere in his Division II program.
One player, Laney Fox, released an audio recording of a Zoom meeting in March during which Smith said he did not want her back. Fox, who is white, later posted an angry four-page letter on Facebook accusing university President Fred Whitt of “failing Black students and athletes on this campus.”
Now, the divisions within the Lutheran-affiliated university have surfaced 60 miles away in the Mecklenburg County courts as a $26 million lawsuit pitting the departing student-athletes against their former coach and school.
In their complaint, the players — including Butler High graduate Michaela Dixon of Matthews — say they were either thrown off the team or pressured to quit in retaliation for their stands against racism and police violence and in support of social justice. Five of the plaintiffs are white; four are black.
The lawsuit, which is being handled by the prominent Winston-Salem legal tandem of Harold and Harvey Kennedy, was filed within days of the school’s release of a report by two law partners at Parker Poe, which found “no evidence that the current women’s basketball staff promotes or facilitates a culture of racial insensitivity.”
Smith’s roster decisions involving his players, according to the investigators, “were motivated by legitimate reasons unrelated to race or social justice issues.”
The Charlotte lawyers did not talk to the departing players, who, according to the school, refused multiple requests for interviews.
Through a university spokesman, Whitt and Smith declined comment for this story.
In April, days after a former Minneapolis police officer was convicted of murdering Floyd, Whitt said in a video message to the campus that he and the school were committed to racial justice and the free exchange of opinions, and would get to the bottom of the allegations of racism in the women’s basketball program.
“I believe we all want the same things — for Lenoir-Rhyne to be a welcoming and inclusive place to live, to learn and to grow as a community. It is who we are as a university … It is who I am as a person,” Whitt said.
Yet, the players’ lawsuit not only names the president as a plaintiff, it also targets him with a $5 million libel claim stemming from a public statement in April in which Whitt challenged Fox’s “false claims on social media” that she had been thrown off the team “for speaking out against racism and advocating for social justice.”
Fox’s dismissal, the president said at the time, resulted from “a legitimate coaching decision, and suggestions to the contrary are simply false.”
The Parker Poe report later concluded that Smith cut ties with Fox due to “a loss of trust and what he perceived to be her lack of commitment and buy-in to the women’s basketball program.”
After Whitt issued his statement on April 17, Fox fired back on Facebook the next day.
“Declaring me a liar without even investigating my claims is an act of retaliation, not an act of sincere concern for me or any of the athletes,” she wrote.
In a similar vein, the libel claim within the players’ lawsuit describes Whitt’s comments toward Fox as “malicious and willful,” subjecting the student to “public hate … contempt, ridicule and infamy.”
The complaint against the school, Whitt and Smith also calls for millions of dollars in additional damages for breach of contract and negligent representation, among other claims.
Harold Kennedy said neither he nor his nine clients would comment about the case.
‘We have a voice’
Last September, as the 130-year-old university welcomed back its 2,700 students, many parts of the country still throbbed with outrage over the police killings of Floyd, Taylor and other Black Americans. On many campuses across the Carolinas, athletes staked out positions on controversial topics with unprecedented candor.
“Over the course of the past year, our community has witnessed some of the most atrocious racial injustices against countless black and African-American people,” then-Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence said in a September statement, which is included in the lawsuit.
As athletes, “we realize the power we have to enact this change,” said Lawrence, the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s NFL draft. “We, the players, have a voice, and we will use it to drive out injustice …”
At Lenoir-Rhyne, the effort started small.
According to the lawsuit, Fox, the team’s shooting guard the previous year, spearheaded a team symposium in early September to discuss the deaths of Taylor and Floyd, as well as the subsequent protests over racial injustice that had arisen across the country.
School administrators, including Assistant Provost Amy Wood, Athletic Director Kim Pate, and Director of Diversity and Inclusion Kim Sellers helped lead the discussion. Team members were required to hand over their cellphones to promote a free exchange, the lawsuit says.
Smith and his coaching staff also were on hand. Afterward, according to the lawsuit, the coach told an unidentified white student that his Black players had been “overly aggressive and overly hostile.”
The players weren’t finished. Fox, who had opted out of playing in the 2020-21 season due to the pandemic and was taking remote classes from her south Florida home, joined team manager Fatou Sall in organizing “The Talk,” a campuswide, racial-justice event held in the school auditorium and beamed live to students, faculty and staff.
The debate within the locker room also wasn’t over. According to the blog, the Her Hoops Stats Newsletter, Fox used a team chat link to voice her frustration about the failure of Kentucky prosecutors to charge police in connection with Breonna Taylor’s death, drawing a rebuke from one of her teammates.
The coaches canceled practice the next day and met individually with players. During her remote meeting with the coaches, Fox shared what she described as racially insensitive comments from white teammates about slavery and the police shootings.
“They were like, ‘We really appreciate what you’re doing and we encourage you to call out the racism (in the team meeting) later tonight, because to get over it we have to address the issue and we have to apologize and educate ourselves,’” Fox said, according to the newsletter.
The tone was different when Fox met with Smith and others by Zoom in March to discuss her status with the team. Fox, according to the coach, was no longer accepted by some of her teammates who now found her her to be a distraction.
“What does acceptance from others mean, because we called out racism at the beginning or the year?” Fox said, according to the recording she released afterward.
Smith, who upon taking the Lenoir-Rhyne job had talked Fox out of transferring, said the player’s behavior was not bringing “unity or harmony to our program.”
“People don’t want to be educated on things they don’t want to be educated on,” he said.