By Tiffany Wong
Chelsey Lucas, a 2007 Grambling State University graduate, went on the court for the Tigers, making her familiar. But in April, Lucas had angered parents, students, and athletes by removing all nineteen players from their roster. Grambling State disagreed with Lucas’s actions. Grambling State announced on Tuesday that they fired the first-year coach.
Grambling State’s women’s volleyball team was previously with coach Demetria Keys-Johnson. But Keys-Johnson took a different position. Lucas was then hired on February 14. Lucas’s relationship with Grambling State players was tough ever since the beginning.
On April 4th, Lucas called many meetings in which she informed players that she would not renew the 12 scholarships. Lucas offered four scholarship players the opportunity to stay on the team, but all four refused. “[Lucas] said that we weren’t able to practice much, which we weren’t, and she said based off of that she was not able to renew my scholarship, so I didn’t really get any time to show what I could do,” Maurisa Harris told KSLA News 12. “When I was in there and she told me, my heart completely broke. I didn’t cry in there, but I did when I left, and it just hurts really bad, the fact that it was snatched away so fast.”
One day a Change.org petition started calling for Lucas’s job and for the school to reinstate players’ scholarships, which got more than 3.7k signatures. Lucas told KSLA that she was forced not to speak to the media about the situation. “There were girls that I gave them reasons of why that you would no longer be a part of Grambling State University program, and there were young ladies, there were student-athletes, that I asked, that I asked, ‘I want you to be a part of this program,” she said. “The narrative of this team, even when I came in, from the administration, [was] that this was a bad character team. That’s what I was getting, but at the same time I wanted my administration to give me a fair chance to make sure I go in and be able to be the coach for them and evaluate and assess these young ladies on and off the court.”