Former CCU lacrosse staff members, civil rights attorney support fired coach Selvage
Two former staff members of the Coastal Carolina University women’s lacrosse program under recently fired coach Kristen Selvage defended the head coach’s treatment of her players in interviews with The Sun News.
Neither wanted to be named for fear it could be detrimental to their careers moving forward, they said.
The lacrosse team collectively submitted a 54-page complaint to university officials following the 2020-21 season that included letters from 26 players alleging mistreatment and boorish behavior by Selvage, who was the program’s head coach for six seasons. She was fired on July 20.
Selvage submitted a written statement to The Sun News defending her actions as coach.
Both former lacrosse team staff members interviewed by The Sun News deny witnessing any treatment of players that they would deem abusive.
“If I were to see any type of abusive behavior I would have addressed that issue, or I wouldn’t even be a part of that environment,” staff member No. 1 said. “I would not say that I’ve ever experienced abusive behavior from her. She is not that person these letters say she is. She has always cared about her team more than anything, about lacrosse more than anything. She’s always willing to talk through things.”
Both former staff members also said they believe the players exaggerated their claims of mistreatment because they thought the team was underperforming, and many of them did not like Selvage either personally or as their coach and wanted her fired.
“I do not think she was abusive towards any athlete,” staff member No. 2 said. “I know that her team wanted to have a lot of success and felt like we had the resources necessary to have success, but they weren’t getting as much out of their experience as they would have liked so they wanted a change, and I think for them they had to be that extreme almost in their words just to make the point.
“. . . I know there were a lot of letters written but I do think the severity of them was an effort to have their point be heard because I don’t think it would have necessarily been heard if they just said, ‘We don’t like her and she’s not a good coach.’ ”
Staff member No. 2 supported Selvage’s assertion in her statement that she cared about her players’ well-being.
“She has always preached that her door is always open and that she is there for them,” staff member No. 2 said. “Whether people really felt that I’m not sure. I think ultimately, her as a person, she cared about them as much as she cared about her own children.”
Staff member No. 2 said she was proud of the players for speaking up for something they believed in, but is disappointed they did it at someone’s expense.
“As a female in athletics I think we work every single day to empower and tell them to speak up, and I’m proud of the fact that they spoke up for something they felt this strongly about,” staff member No. 2 said. “I do wish it was a little bit more truthful. They wanted a change and they spoke up and they got what they wanted.”
Staff member No. 1 believes there is a different standard of behavior that is accepted for male coaches and by male teams compared to female teams coached by female coaches, and Selvage was a victim of that double standard.
“If this was a male team this would never happen,” staff member No. 1 said. “I think probably male coaches do even worse things than what these players said that Kristen had done, but I feel that’s the nature or culture of men’s teams. They take more and they don’t [complain].”
The national gender bias in coaching phenomenon?
Selvage has another ally in Thomas Newkirk, a civil rights attorney in Des Moines, Iowa, who has become an expert in implicit gender bias in collegiate coaching.
Newkirk said his firm has identified 150 female coaches who have received gender bias-driven complaints about their behavior who were then investigated, suspended or fired, and he has represented several of them in settled lawsuits.
After reading the CCU player complaints, Newkirk believes Selvage may be the victim of the bias in women’s collegiate athletics that he says has become a national phenomenon.
Newkirk agrees with the former staff member’s sentiment, and believes the disparity between the behavior that is accepted for a male coach compared to a female coach is largely due to the socialization process of males and females combined with a subconscious implicit gender bias.
“We judge women differently for the same thing or for less than what men do,” Newkirk said. “ . . . These young women have interpreted the actions of their female coach via a biased lens.”
Newkirk has been a civil rights attorney for the past 20 years and has founded Implicit Bias Campus LLC. “My passion is that I see this so often that it becomes tiring to see it again and again and again,” Newkirk said.
Newkirk said there are three contributing components to female college coaches being held to a different standard.
First, he said young women and young men are socialized to complain differently about things that bother them. “[A woman] is more likely to bring forward things that bother them than a male will on the same team,” Newkirk said.
Second, subconscious gender bias is a factor. “Females still have implicit bias that affects the evaluation of them as leaders. That’s why we don’t have a female president,” Newkirk said. “When women get into a leadership role we have a tendency to evaluate them more negatively than men doing the same thing. And a coach is a leader.”
Gender bias is also a factor in how female athletes subconsciously expect female coaches to respond to them experiencing adversity, Newkirk said. “She’s expected to become nurturing, caring, putting her arm around the athlete far more than a male coach would ever do,” he said. “So as a result of both the implicit bias and socialization process, the female will complain about the female coach, even though she’s coaching exactly like the male [coaches]. . . . She’ll get complaints of being mean, a bully, abusive.”
Third, Newkirk said implicit bias can also affect the response of administration to the concerns of the athletes depending on their gender, and female complaints may be taken more seriously than male complaints.
Newkirk has represented many female coaches that he believes were unjustly fired.
Newkirk recently helped former Stony Brook women’s swim coach Janelle Atkinson reach an out-of-court settlement with the school for $385,000 in a gender and race discrimination lawsuit. She was fired in January 2018 following allegations of emotional abuse by members of the women’s team.
In 2017, Newkirk negotiated a $6.5 million settlement from the University of Iowa of a gender and sexual orientation lawsuit stemming from the firing of a female field hockey coach over what the athletic director said were complaints about her abusive behavior toward athletes. A university investigation of the coach found no policy violations.
In 2018, Newkirk settled a lawsuit against Rutgers for $725,000 over the firing of a female women’s swimming and diving head coach following player allegations of abuse and a toxic culture within her program.
This story was originally published October 19, 2021 at 5:05 AM.
