San Jose State’s women’s volleyball team lost 3-1 to San Diego State on Saturday amid an ongoing national controversy surrounding a trans athlete on the team.
Redshirt senior Blaire Fleming led the game in kills with 15, raising an individual season total to 252. It is the second 250+ kill season of Fleming’s career. Fleming previously recorded a staggering 311 kills in a debut season at San Jose State in 2022, after transferring from Coastal Carolina.
Fleming went into Saturday’s game with the third-best kills-per-serve percentage in the entire Mountain West conference with 3.76, but still well behind the conference’s leader in Colorado State’s Malaya Jones.
Fleming has racked up these numbers despite the fact that a total of seven of San Jose State’s matches have been forfeited amid the ongoing controversy. And yet, anchored by Fleming’s production, the entire team is third in the conference in kills-per-serve average and first in hitting percentage across the Mountain West.
But it is Fleming’s teammate Brooke Slusser who is anchoring the team’s top hitting percentage ranking. Slusser leads the team and is currently fourth in the entire conference with a .377 hitting percentage.
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Slusser is also currently engaged in a lawsuit against the NCAA over Fleming’s presence on the team. Slusser has alleged that the university hid Fleming’s biological sex from her and teammates over the last two years since their arrival at San Jose State. Slusser also alleges that Fleming’s spikes traveled at 80 miles per hour during practice.
“Brooke estimates that Fleming’s spikes were traveling upward of 80 mph, which was faster than she had ever seen a woman hit a volleyball,” Slusser’s complaint read. “The girls were doing everything they could to dodge Fleming’s spikes but still could not fully protect themselves.”
Fleming previously set a single-game record at John Champe High School with 30 kills in a match and a single-season record of 266 kills for the school’s girls’ volleyball team.
Footage from the athlete’s Hudl page of the school-record 30-kill match in September 2019 shows how hard and fast Fleming’s spikes came down at the high school level against girl opponents.
President Trump even went out of his way to comment about footage of one of Fleming’s plays in which the player spiked a ball at San Diego State player Keira Herron in a match earlier this season.
“I saw the slam, it was a slam. I never saw a ball hit so hard,” Trump said during a Fox News town hall. “But other people, even in volleyball, they’ve been permanently — I mean, they’ve been really hurt badly. Women playing men.”
In another match against New Mexico on October 18, one of Fleming’s spikes knocked an opposing player to the ground.
The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) requires transgender women to submit documentation including testosterone levels before a decision is made on their eligibility to play. San José State has said the program is in full compliance with NCAA rules, in a statement to Fox News Digital.
Still, Fleming’s participation has brought about questions over legality at the state level and whether female athletes should share the same court and locker rooms.
Five programs have already forfeited their games against San Jose State this season, with Southern Utah, Boise State, Utah State, Wyoming and Nevada all declining to face the Spartans. Boise State and Wyoming forfeited two matches each, taking multiple loss to avoid competition against Fleming.
Questions have arisen over the potential conflict that could erupt when San Jose State competes in the Mountain West tournament at the end of November. It’s possible the Spartans would get paired up to play a team that has already forfeited against them in the regular season in that tournament.
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Slusser told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview that she and her teammates are in limbo about what a potential postseason run might look like as they navigate a demoralized locker room.
“We’re just mostly wondering, are teams even gonna play us, period if we go there? Because of just everything that’s happened this season,” Slusser said. “It seems like every few days it looks like It’ll be a fine day and everything’s normal and then something else happens. So I truly do think everyone’s just kind of taking things day by day and taking the punches as they come.”
Slusser and her teammates are reeling from the recent suspension of assistant coach Melissa Batie-Smoose, who was put on leave after it was revealed she filed a Title IX complaint against the school. Batie-Smoose’s complaint alleged favoritism by the university toward Fleming over Slusser throughout the controversy.
“I feel like not just me but a lot of people are just kind of fed up and over the whole situation. And so I do think it’s caused tension in the locker room and on the court just because one person is causing all these issues,” Slusser said.
Colorado State University police behind the San Jose State University Spartans bench monitor Moby Arena during an NCAA Mountain West women’s volleyball game between the Spartans and the Colorado State Rams in Fort Collins, Colo., on Thursday, Oct. 03, 2024. (Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
The dismissal of Batie-Smoose has been a particularly jarring development for the players, as Slusser claims that she and her teammates now feel unsafe.
“After we found out that she was released, a lot of the team just kind of broke down and was kind of freaking out, and even one of my teammates was like, ‘I don’t feel safe anymore,’ because there’s no one now that we feel like we can go and talk to about our concerns or our actual feelings and can actually speak freely in front of,” Slusser said.
Slusser says she does not feel safe speaking with anyone else involved in the program, not even head coach Todd Kress.
“You can’t truly voice how you’re feeling without them just trying to cover it up or act like it’s all OK. With Melissa, you could voice how you felt, and she could comfort you and validate your feelings and at least make you feel heard compared to the other coaches,” Slusser said.
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Slusser says she has not spoken with Fleming at all since joining the lawsuit. When reflecting on interactions with Fleming prior to knowing the player’s natural birth gender, Slusser admits she regrets “opening up” with the trans player in ways that she wouldn’t have had she known Fleming was a biological male.
Still, when the two players took the court on Saturday, as they have all season, they played as normal teammates would. They walked into the huddle together and patted each other on the back in between plays.
On multiple occasions in recent games, Slusser has even set Fleming up for one of Fleming’s signature spikes.
With their previously-scheduled games against Wyoming and Boise State now canceled, San Jose State only has two matches left. With a 13-4 record, Slusser and Fleming will play against Colorado State and Fresno State at home in their final two matches of the regular season.
Then their fate will rest in the Mountain West Tournament.
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