By: Alex Yang
Many volleyball teams and coaches work for years to become well known. However, within three months of being hired to the Grambling State volleyball team, Chelsey Lucas was making headlines. Lucas graduated from Grambling State in 2007, and by April, she had drawn the attention of parents and athletes after dropping all 19 players from the roster.
After joining the team in February, Lucas’s relationship with Grambling State players was tense, and many players had speculated that this was the case because of an incident when Arkansas Pine Bluff played Grambling State last year.
“Our school has like this chant, but at the end of the chant, you say, like, the B-word,” senior Sheila Borders told Landscape. “I guess she thought I was calling them B-words, but the whole school says it. They say it [games], and it is nothing personal.” When meeting the Grambling state players for the first time, Lucas said: “I bet you did not expect to see me again. I bet y’all will think twice about whom y’all call a b—-.”
Lucas working for Arkansas during this game definitely hurt the relationship between her and the players, as she felt extremely offended because of the chant.
In the weeks after the meeting, Lucas held three practices with very few volleyball drills and mostly punishment-related running. Some teammates tried to develop a relationship with Lucas. However, On April 4, Lucas called individual meetings in which she informed 12 players that she would not renew their scholarships for the upcoming season.
After the April meetings, players who had had their scholarships canceled started a petition calling for Lucas’s job and for the school to reinstate players’ scholarships, which acquired more than 3,700 signatures.
Three months later, the board fired Lucas, and all the players who had their scholarships canceled were reinstated. Athletic Director Trayvean Scott said in a statement that “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.”
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