South Carolina women’s basketball has canceled a home-and-home series with BYU following a racist incident that occurred at a BYU-Duke volleyball game last week.
“As a head coach, my job is to do what’s best for my players and staff,” coach Dawn Staley said in a release. “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.”
After a Duke-BYU volleyball game in Provo, Utah, on Aug. 26, Duke sophomore Rachel Richardson, who is Black, wrote on Twitter that she and fellow Black players were “targeted and racially heckled throughout the entirety of the match.” In the wake of the incident, BYU suspended a fan from attending any future BYU home sporting events.
BYU athletics wrote in a follow-up release: “The use of a racial slur at any of our athletic events is absolutely unacceptable and BYU Athletics holds a zero-tolerance approach to this behavior.”
Staley had addressed the incident on Twitter on August 28, tweeting, “Rachel you and your teammates are incredibly brave. This is one more hurdle black athletes have to leap because they are black. Rachel…your mental strength and endurance should not have been tested in this manner….but when it was you passed. Godspeed…
