S.C. Women's Basketball Coach Dawn Staley Cancels Games With BYU Due To Unsubstantiated Racist Volleyball Incident
In today's ridiculous and dangerous woke moment, South Carolina basketball coach Dawn Staley cancelled a scheduled home-and-home series with BYU that was supposed to start this year.
South Carolina was going to open their season at home against BYU on November 7th, with the Gamecocks scheduled to travel to Provo during the 2023-2024 season.
But Staley announced Friday in a statement that due to "the incident" at BYU, they were calling off the series entirely, since it's her job to "do what's best" for the program:
"As a head coach, my job is to do what's best for my players and staff," Staley said in a statement released by South Carolina on Friday. "The incident at BYU has led me to reevaluate our home-and-home, and I don't feel that this is the right time for us to engage in this series."
"The incident," of course, refers to the alleged racist slurs directed at Duke University volleyball player Rachel Richardson.
Almost immediately after Richardson's account of the event went public, holes in the story emerged, with the BYU Police saying they were unable to confirm that a fan or anyone had yelled slurs at her:
Even BYU's associate athletics director admitted that they found no evidence that the person who was banned from BYU games actually used slurs:
“The person who was banned was the person identified by Duke as using racial slurs,” BYU associate athletics director Jon McBride told The Salt Lake Tribune. “However, we have been unable to find any evidence of that person using slurs in the match.”
Rachel Richardson at BYU
There continues to be significant discrepancies between Robinson's account of the event and that of eyewitnesses, casting doubt on what actually happened.
Apparently none of that uncertainty has made its way to South Carolina, since Staley cancelled a game that is more than two months away. This indicates she accepts as fact that a fan or fans at the BYU game were able to continually yell racist slurs at a black athlete without someone recording video or sound of it happening, without any negative reaction from people near the alleged racist and without any eyewitnesses corroborating Richardson’s claims.
Inexplicably, ESPN's report says that the South Carolina athletic director supported the move to cancel the games based on an unconfirmed report by the one volleyball player who happens to have a godmother running for office with a history of racist remarks against white people. That godmother was also the first person to make the claims by Richardson public.
Staley also recently absurdly blamed racism for one of her players being snubbed for an ESPY invitation:
In case her immediate throwing of the race card wasn't enough to give Staley's political viewpoints away, her team also refused to come out of the locker room for the National Anthem during the Women's College Basketball Final Four earlier this year.
However, BYU is also partially to blame for this ridiculous cancellation.
By immediately falling on their sword instead of waiting to do a thorough investigation that would have revealed the lack of evidence behind Richardson's claims, they essentially gave cover to activists like Staley to paint BYU as a racist institution.
Even after statements from the police and reports from those at the game made it clear that this was an entirely unconfirmed and uncorroborated incident, BYU cancelled their student section.
Their desperation to bend over backwards to try and quell the woke mob has only invited people like Staley to exploit the situation.
And of course, Harvard's women's volleyball team immediately pounced on the opportunity to signal their virtue over an incident that may not have even happened:
You'd think those at Harvard would be intelligent enough to get updated information, but that might be setting expectations too high for anyone at far left institutions these days. And Harvard isn’t alone. OutKick's Dan Zaksheske has a disturbing report on the Friday night actions across college athletics.
COLLEGE TEAMS TRIP OVER THEMSELVES TO SHOW SUPPORT FOR RACHEL RICHARDSON EVEN AS HER STORY UNRAVELS
BYU's immediate reaction to this entirely unsubstantiated incident has opened the floodgates for virtue signaling race baiters to paint the mostly white religious University as a bastion of racism. In 2022, the fact that the allegation may be false no longer matters.