Racial Hate Crimes Cause Utah Women’s Basketball to Move Hotels
The NCAA Tournament provides college basketball players with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to etch their names into the history of their sport’s greatest event.
It also provides a source of entertainment for fans, players, coaches, and people from all walks of life, allowing them to escape the turbidity of the world around them for a few hours at a time.
Unfortunately, the Utah women’s basketball team wasn’t able to fully enjoy their trip to Spokane (Wash.) for the NCAA Tournament after having to deal with an act of hate toward members of their team.
According to Josh Furlong of KSL.com, the basketball team was met with racial hate crimes just hours after arriving for their first night in a hotel in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, just 35 minutes away from where they’d play in Spokane.
Team officials reported, per Furlong, that while the team was walking to a nearby restaurant for dinner when a white truck pulled up near the team and revved its engine to make its presence known before yelling the N-word toward the team and speeding off.
“We all just were in shock, and we looked at each other like, did we just hear that? … Everybody was in shock — our cheerleaders, our students that were in that area that heard it clearly were just frozen,” Utah deputy athletics director Charmelle Green told Furlong. “We kept walking, just shaking our heads like I can’t believe that.”
The team went ahead and went to dinner, but as they left the restaurant, they were met with a similar and yet more intimidating gesture. This time, two trucks began revving their engines in an intimidating fashion and yelled the N-word at the team yet again.
After that, the team walked back to the hotel as a group, but the damage had already been done after such egregious and unacceptable actions toward the members of the Utah team and staff.
“I got emotional and started to cry,” Green said. “I went back [to the hotel] and had some alone time. I was just numb the entire night.”
Green wasn’t the only person feeling the shock of the situation, though. Utah head coach Lynn Roberts shared her feelings on Monday night.
“Incredibly upsetting for all of us,” Roberts said. “You think in our world, in athletics and the university settings, it’s shocking. There’s so much diversity on a college campus and so you’re just not exposed to that very often. And so when you are, it’s like, you have people say, ‘Man, I can’t believe that happened.’ But racism is real, and it happens, and it’s awful.
“So for our players, whether they are white, black, green, whatever, no one knew how to handle it and it was really upsetting. And for our players and staff to not feel safe in an NCAA Tournament environment, that’s messed up.”
Deputy AD Green said that the accommodations that they were provided with were “incredibly problematic” to begin with, but after the events of Thursday night, there was simply no way that the team could continue to stay where they were. After working with the NCAA and host school, Gonzaga, the Utes were able to find accommodations in Spokane. Despite that, the situation left a lasting impact on a team that was supposed to enjoy the reward of such a great season with a trip to the tournament.
“It was a distraction, and upsetting and unfortunate,” Roberts said. “This should be a positive for everybody involved. It should be a joyous time for our program. And to have kind of a black eye on that experiences is unfortunate. … It was really unfortunate and disappointing, and upsetting, and all the things. When this experience shouldn’t be any of those things. The shock of like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe that happened.’ Yeah, I think it happens a lot, and it doesn’t get talked about enough.”
Utah athletic director Mark Harlan called the situation “disturbing” and said that the Utes shouldn’t have been put in that position in the first place.
“When we’re on the road, we don’t want to go through anything that was described,” Harlan said to KSL.com. “We should not have been there. I do appreciate the NCAA and Gonzaga moving us from that situation, but we should never have been there in the first place. So a lot of folks need to get home and heal from the whole matter.
“But for Charmelle Green and what she’s done in terms of being the director of this group, being the victim of this, along with so many others, is something that is going to take a long time for us all to process. It’s not the experience that our student-athletes and our students overall should have experienced.”
Utah has filed a police report concerning the incident, but Furlong reports that there have been no updates since it was filed.
