By: Sarah Zhong
On July 5th, Grambling State University fired their volleyball coach, Chelsey Lucas. The decision came a few months after her choice to cut volleyball players on scholarship.
Lucas is very experienced. As a 2007 Grambling State graduate, she was on the court for the Tigers. By April, however, she had frustrated the athletes, parents, and alumni after cutting all 19 players from the team. Even though Grambling State’s administration originally supported Lucas’s decisions, the university fired the first-year coach amid an ongoing investigation.
“The decision was made due to the determination of an internal investigation within the volleyball program,” Grambling State said.
Lucas was hired on Feb. 14th after accumulating a 37-44 record in three seasons at Arkansas Pine Bluff, including an 18-15 season last year.
Lucas’s attitude was already bitter from the start, according to many reports, which quoted players who stated that Lucas remained resentful over an incident that occurred last season when Arkansas Pine Bluff played against Grambling State.
“When we played them at home, and we beat them, our school has like this chant, but at the end of the chant, you say, like, the B-word,” Sheila Borders, a senior, said. “I guess she thought I was calling them B-words, but, like, the whole school says it. They say it at basketball games and football games. It’s nothing personal.”
During her first gathering with the Grambling State players, Lucas allegedly said, “I bet you didn’t expect to see me again. I bet y’all will think twice about who y’all call a b****.” In the following weeks, she held three practice sessions, “most of which consisted of very few volleyball related drills and a lot of punishment-related running.”
On April 4th, Lucas held individual meetings where she informed the 12 scholarship players that she would not renew their scholarships for the next season. Seven walk-ons were told their spots wouldn’t be renewed. Lucas offered four former scholarship players the choice to remain on the team as walk-ons, but all of them declined.
“[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. 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,” Maurisa Harris, a junior, said.
The players who were cut started a petition calling for the players’ scholarships to be reinstated, which got more than 3,700 signatures. The university hired an outside firm to investigate the allegations. Then, in early July, Lucas was fired.
The athletic director, Scott, said, “As we move forward in this transition and commence a national search for the next coach, all volleyball student-athletes who received scholarships for the 2022-23 academic year will keep their scholarships and remain on the team. Walk-ons will also continue to hold their roster spot.”
Even though the volleyball team doesn’t currently have a coachthe players will all be back on the team. The university is sure to look more carefully for a new coach to lead the players to success.