Republicans Have Made It Their Signature Issue. What’s Really Happening Shows How Cynical That Is.

This fall, Ryann Allison is finally a senior at Stephen F. Austin State University, a midsize public university in Nacogdoches, a town in rural East Texas, where the men’s and women’s Division I sports teams are known as the Lumberjacks and the Ladyjacks, respectively. The mascots are a nod to the school’s proximity to the state’s timber and forestry industries as well as to good old-fashioned gender roles.A driven and organized young woman who grew up in Texas, Allison usually looks forward to returning to campus and her intense schedule. But not this year. For the first time since she arrived on campus, she isn’t playing on the school’s beach volleyball team. In a way, she feels she’s lost an important part of her identity.

In May, just after the end of the spring season, Allison was called into head coach Gretchen Hand’s office. She assumed it was a conversation about a scholarship that she’d been promised for the following year—she didn’t think anything of it. “But before I could say anything, I was informed that I would not be renewed for next year, and that I wasn’t a fit for the team anymore,” Allison said in a recent interview.

Allison, who was one of the team’s top players and had helped Hand recruit and organize new players the previous fall and winter, was stunned. “I remember being absolutely shell-shocked and not knowing what to even say. I remember continually saying, ‘I don’t understand.’ And she was like, ‘Well, you actually don’t have to understand.’ ”

When Allison’s best friend and teammate, Brynn Dowd, called to ask how it had gone, Allison replied: “I was cut.”

“Ha, ha. You’re funny. What actually happened?” Dowd said, because the concept was so out of touch with reality. But Allison wasn’t joking. And later that day, when Dowd went into her meeting with Hand, she was told that she, too, would no longer be on the roster. Representatives from Stephen F. Austin State University and Coach Hand did not respond to requests for comment.

Neither Dowd nor Allison was ever told explicitly why they were cut from the team. But they have a strong suspicion: retaliation.

Though Allison and Dowd were shocked to be dumped from the roster, the future of the school’s beach volleyball program overall had been precarious. It wasn’t the first time they had received abrupt and destabilizing news. Back in May 2025, Ryann Allison signed on to a Zoom meeting along with 20 of her teammates where they were unceremoniously told that their program would no longer exist due to the university’s “financial constraints.” It was a shock as the team had just finished its most successful season in program history, notching 22 wins, juggling workouts and practices nearly every day while flying all over the South to attend tournaments. “There was not a dry eye in the Zoom,” Allison recalls.

For Allison, volleyball provided the structure that underpinned the rest of her life. As a premed student, Allison said the intense scheduling required by being a student athlete helped her lead a structured college life that included many difficult courses, labs, and research—and allowed her to find the confidence to have big goals. While the majority of her teammates transferred schools to continue their beach volleyball careers, Allison worried her playing time would be over—she’d already transferred once before to find a better fit of a school and team. It didn’t seem feasible to do that again. “I was a rising junior, and if I want to be a doctor, I can’t just leave all of these people that I’ve made these connections with in my research and try to start that over again,” said Allison, recalling her mindset at the time. “I just can’t take that chance.”

Other women’s sports teams at Stephen F. Austin were also slashed that spring. The women’s golf and women’s bowling teams had been told that their programs were being eliminated, too. Allison banded together with a group of rising seniors on the beach volleyball team and two athletes from the golf and bowling teams to file a Title IX lawsuit against the school to try to get the teams reinstated on the basis that the team cuts were violating the gender-equity law. The group bonded over the infeasibility of just transferring colleges. As Sophia Myers, a beach volleyball player and then–rising senior who joined the suit, said in an interview, “I was pretty deeply rooted [at SFA], so it was kind of hard to pick up and leave.” They decided instead to fight.

Stephen F. Austin State University, a public Division I university that is part of the University of Texas system, was almost certainly in violation of Title IX, even prior to the spring 2025 bloodbath. According to a Title IX report commissioned by the university that year and completed by an outside consultant, women made up 63 percent of the undergraduate student population at SFA during the 2024–25 school year but received only 40 percent of the athletic roster spots available. The report noted that “SFA is not providing male and female athletics participation rates in substantial proportionality to the male and female undergraduate enrollment rate.” The report actually suggested adding more women’s teams to achieve compliance. Instead, the athletic department did the opposite just a few months later. Representatives from the athletic department did not respond to our request for comment on this.

According to the Title IX class-action lawsuit filed by the plaintiffs, “SFA’s decision to cut three women’s teams from its program significantly increased and exacerbated its violation of Title IX.”

Title IX requires educational institutions receiving federal funds to ensure no one is discriminated against “on the basis of sex,” which includes in athletic programs. Since implementation of the law in the 1980s, women’s sports have exploded, and not just on college campuses. It’s undeniable that access to competitive sports in the education system has led to the massive growth of women’s professional sports leagues in the U.S. American women have become international leaders in sports, with booming professional leagues for basketball, soccer, hockey, and volleyball, as well as Olympic champions in sports ranging from figure skating to long jump. That growth has made athletes like Megan Rapinoe, Caitlin Clark, Trinity Rodman—and yes, even beach volleyball players like Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings—household names.

Still, male student athletes outnumber female student athletes pretty much everywhere. According to a recent report, women have accounted for about 43 percent of athletes in the NCAA since the 1990s, though they make up nearly 55 percent of undergraduates. When a school doesn’t have parity, it can still follow the rules if it passes a “three-prong test” that was introduced in 1979. For a school to be considered in compliance with Title IX, it must show at least one of the following is true regarding sports participation opportunities on offer: athletic opportunities sponsored by the school are “substantially proportionate” to their undergraduate student enrollment rate, or the institution is expandingthe programs on offer to women athletes (the historically underrepresented sex in most college athletic programs), or the school shows it is “fully and effectively accommodating” the interests and abilities of the women at the school.

According to the Title IX lawsuit, SFA is not offering “substantially proportionate” opportunities, as their own data showed; nor can they show they are expanding programs for women when they just cut three women’s teams; nor can they argue they are accommodating the interests of the women at the school. After all, there Allison and 39 other women athletes were, students at Stephen F. Austin who were very interested in playing the three sports their school had just cut.

SFA’s initial response to the suit claimed that they actually don’t have to do any of those things anymore because of a recent Supreme Court decision that they argue essentially negated the decades-old “three-prong test” in favor of the very brief language of Title IX itself. The case the defendants cited, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, essentially overturned a decision saying that courts need to defer to the interpretation of law by federal agencies. In other words, they say that the three-prong test is not settled law, even if Title IX is. Title IX itself is simple. It’s a 37-word amendment attached to a larger education omnibus bill saying that discrimination by publicly funded education programs “on the basis of sex” is illegal. So figuring out what that means for school sports has had a long, complicated legal history.

While the Trump administration has talked a big game about “protecting women’s sports” by writing executive orders that bar transgender women and girls from participating in school athletics, they also severely stunted at least one avenue for Title IX enforcement when the Department of Government Efficiency gutted the Department of Education in early 2024, specifically the Office for Civil Rights, which is the entity responsible for investigating violations. And the administration directed said department to prioritize Title IX investigations regarding transgender athletes—of which there are very few—over those looking into unequal treatment of women athletes compared with men—of which there are many. If the recent report by the Heritage Foundation, which calls Title IX a “failed experiment,” is an indication of where the Trump administration and the GOP are headed next, Title IX could very well be on the chopping block altogether.

Although the plaintiffs in the Title IX lawsuit have been granted a preliminary injunction—good news!—it’s still hard to tell how a judge might rule in a Title IX case at this point, especially in a district court in eastern Texas known for conservative justices. While Loper would seem to defang Title IX via the three-prong test—SFA’s initial defense—a more recent Supreme Court case dealing with bans on transgender athletes, Little v. Hecox, appears to have affirmed it, explained Barbara Osborne, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law specializing in intercollegiate athletics. It’s almost as though by pushing so hard on the conservative pet project of barring transgender athletes from women’s sports, conservative politicians have reaffirmed that the three-prong test is settled law.

“People will have different opinions about whether that was a good Supreme Court decision or not,” Osborne said. “But as a Title IX advocate, having the Supreme Court unequivocally state that Loper Bright’s disqualification of regulations doesn’t apply to Title IX is a very important, and maybe the most positive, thing that comes out of that case.”

Taking on a university in a Title IX case, in any context, is no small risk for a college athlete who largely just wants to play the sport they love for as long as they’re eligible and get their degree. Perhaps that’s why out of the 21 beach volleyball players on the 2025 roster, just five joined the Title IX case, four of them rising seniors, and Allison, a rising junior. The majority of the roster entered the transfer portal, opting out of an uncertain future at SFA but moving their lives, educations, and athletic careers elsewhere.

Stephen F. Austin State University is far from the only educational institution to have cut sports teams last year. In June 2025, college sports programs across the country were thrown into crisis when a $2.75 billion settlement was approved in a class-action lawsuit known as House v. NCAA. In short, that’s because name, image, and likeness payments for college athletes had opened legal avenues for student athletes to be paid for the first time ever, instead of being essentially used as revenue earners for their schools but unable to cash in themselves. Former college athletes sued the NCAA for back pay, arguing that extremely strict rules against payment to athletes in the past violated antitrust laws. The settlement means that all colleges with Division I sports have to pay up, in back pay and going forward, to remain competitive in recruiting. According to the new rules, each DI school could spend an estimated $20 million to $22 million in direct payments to student athletes from athletic department revenue.

All of this boils down to athletic departments, and universities as a whole, scrambling to figure out the new financial landscape, said Osborne. And often, when financial times are bad, or just complicated, the programs that get cut are those that are considered “non-revenue.” Historically, this has meant women’s programs and the more niche “Olympic” sports—that is, sports that don’t necessarily make big money in TV revenue for a school but do provide some cultural cachet and an important pipeline into the international attention that comes once every four years during the Olympics. Beach volleyball, of course, is both.

In the past two years, Title IX lawsuits have been filed over the shuttering of women’s sports teams at schools large and small, public and private, DI and DIII, from swim and dive to tennis to sailing—and nearly all cite financial reasons for the cuts. While there is a bipartisan bill making its way through the Senate to attempt to address some of these issues by instituting spending caps and quotas for Olympic sports, its future remains unclear in the current political environment.

But it’s not necessarily accurate to call this a revenue problem in the first place, said Jaime Gordon, CEO of the American Volleyball Coaches Association. “Right now in college athletics there is more money being spent in the budgets than there ever has been,” he said. “It’s not a revenue problem, it’s a spending problem.”

Gordon says forward-thinking institutions should see sports like beach volleyball, which is relatively inexpensive to run and brings in a fair amount of tuition money because most athletes aren’t on full scholarship, as financially beneficial, even if sponsorships and revenues aren’t as high as they could be. And in the future, those figures could be much bigger.

Beach volleyball has shown massive opportunity for growth in the past decade alone. While it is much smaller than its indoor sibling, beach volleyball became the fastest sport ever to achieve an NCAA championship—in 2016. Which means there’s enough interest in the sport that television rights deals, ticket revenue, and athlete brand deals all have major growth potential.    

“Women’s sports in the country, at the professional level and the Olympic level, are having this moment when people are paying attention and sponsors are investing in them,” said Osborne. “There are some schools that are making investments in promoting their women’s sports because they’re trying to do everything they can to support teams.” Those investments can pay off. Take the massive jump in revenue women’s college basketball received when they finally were allowed to use the March Madness moniker—or how the University of Nebraska sold out their football stadium for a women’s volleyball match played there.

Of course, sports like beach volleyball are more than potentially sound investments. They also help schools comply with the law regarding Title IX gender parity. But when those teams are cut, the opportunities for women athletes, and the growth potential for the sport, are cut off at the root.

At SFA last fall, the newly hired beach volleyball coach, Gretchen Hand, arrived on campus to a roster of only six athletes. While a judge initially ruled through a preliminary injunction that the school had to reinstate the team as the Title IX suit played out, the vast majority of the team had already transferred schools to attend institutions where their sport wasn’t in the crosshairs of a legal battle. Ryann Allison was so glad the team was being reinstated that she wanted to do all she could to keep it afloat. “I had kind of taken a leadership role,” she said, explaining that she assisted in recruiting players who were already on campus, helped with navigating practice schedules, and explained to the new recruits what being a college athlete would entail.

One person she worked hard to convince to join the team was her roommate and best friend, Brynn Dowd. She and Dowd met on the beach volleyball team in spring 2024 when both were joining the team for the first time as transfer students. Dowd started her career at Arizona State University, one of the top beach volleyball programs in the country, and, like Allison, had moved to SFA in part because she missed her Texas home. But, in the fall of 2025, she was cut by the team’s former coach (who was fired soon after). Dowd says the former coach cut her for being “a verbal leader,” which was not something they were looking for on the team at that time. She was heartbroken and confused.

When the team as a whole was cut later that year—then reinstated, and suddenly a new coach wanted her to join—she was skeptical. “I was very hesitant because of what had happened to me in the past,” Dowd said with emotion in her voice. “It was really, really, really hard to move on from playing collegiate beach volleyball. I joined a sorority. I filled my life with other things.”

After Allison introduced Dowd to coach Hand, though, Dowd said Hand began a three-week period of “really, really fighting for me to be on that team.” Dowd said after all of the courting, she trusted the new coach. “She told me she would never hurt me. … She just wants to give me a better experience. … She wants to be the coach that I invite to my wedding.” That was exactly what Dowd wanted to hear. Coach Hand did not respond to requests for comment from Slate.

The team’s reduced roster of six was able to play in just one fall tournament. (Usually, these are used by teams as preseason warmup and qualifier matches for duos.) But by the start of the official spring season, after recruiting several former and indoor volleyball players from around campus and a few international students, the roster was up to 17, enough to field a full team. In beach volleyball, athletes play in pairs, and at tournaments each team plays their top five pairs against the other team’s top five pairs. The team that wins three out of five of those matchups wins. For most of the season, Allison and Dowd played in the top two pairs.

At first, the two were thrilled to be playing together again, even under the unusual circumstances. “We had a ton of new girls, and I remember talking to Brynn about how I really like all of the girls that our coaches brought in,” Allison said.

Allison started the year as Hand’s “right-hand man,” Dowd recalls. Then “at one point it sort of shifted.”

Around one month into the competitive season, at the end of March, both athletes agree Hand’s attitude toward the two of them changed. Suddenly they were out of favor. “She still relied on us for the court, and she wanted us to be there as players, but she didn’t really seem to give us that much energy as young women,” Dowd said.

Allison described the treatment as confusing. “I didn’t know what was happening, because all of a sudden someone that used to come to me every day to ask about different lineups, to ask about schedules, ask about anything, just stopped talking to me.” Others on the team noticed the change, too. In fact, according to Sophia Myers and Berklee Andrews, both seniors at the time and named plaintiffs in the Title IX lawsuit, the team’s initial closeness changed quickly. “Coach Hand kept some people at an arm’s distance and was very careful about what she would say or do with everybody that was involved in the lawsuit,” Myers said.

If anything, Allison had hoped that the fact the team was back on campus because of the Title IX case would help rally the team toward unity.Allison and Dowd would often use the lawsuit while speaking to teammates as an example for why they should treasure this opportunity to play hard together. But by the time competition began, coach Hand clearly wanted any discussion of the case to cease, both women said. “I specifically remember an instance in the spring that she told the entire team, ‘The returners have worked really hard to get here, but that’s over now. And we need to move on with the season,’ ” said Allison.

Then came a real turning point. Even though the team had been practicing together since January, and Allison and Dowd and a couple of seniors had taken on leadership roles on the team, Hand called for a vote for team captains in March. Hand announced the new captains would be neither Allison nor Dowd, nor any of the returning seniors, but two underclassmen who were not part of the Title IX lawsuit at all. None of the four players interviewed said they voted for either player as captain.

Eventually, Allison said, whenever anyone brought up the case, Hand would shut it down. That felt disrespectful to Allison and Dowd. “I understand she’s in a difficult position,” Allison said, “But she said stuff that made us feel unseen a lot of the time.”

Throughout the spring season, Dowd and Allison grew more and more emotionally and physically exhausted by the case, making time to talk with lawyers, being treated like pariahs by their coach, and dealing with the usual toil of being a DI student athlete. The travel schedule was particularly brutal: Since the team had been reinstated so late, they hadn’t been able to schedule any home tournaments, so every weekend from late February to early April was spent on the road. Allison, who took the MCATs midseason, says she was spread thin between academics and volleyball. Usually, she relished the feeling of exhaustion and hard work, but that year felt emotionally draining.

“I remember coming home from long weekends and us just kind of sitting in that bed and staring at the wall and being like, ‘You know what, at least we have each other,’ ” Dowd said.

Myers also felt the coach treated her differently for being a plaintiff. Despite being one of the top performers on the team, and consistently beating others in practice, Myers was not put on the travel team to go to tournaments as one of the top 10 players all season. “She literally refused to travel me and play me, and I had never not made a travel roster.”

All in all, the season wasn’t an easy one, and SFA ended up with a dismal 6–22 record. Nonetheless, Allison and Dowd kept their top spots all season, and Allison was named to the Southland Conference’s All-Academic Team.

That didn’t stop them from being cut from the roster shortly after the season ended. For Dowd, who had already been cut from the team once before despite her athletic skill, the emotional blow was extremely difficult. “There was no mental preparation that I could have told myself to handle that situation, because this is someone that repeatedly told me to trust her, and said she wanted to be at my wedding, and for her to tell me the words that ‘We’re not going to renew you for the roster for next season’? I was hyperventilating over this news.”

Other members of the team were in shock, too. “My mind couldn’t wrap around the fact that [they] had just gotten cut from the team. … I don’t even understand how there could be a reason to cut your No. 1 player,” Andrews said. Allison and Dowd had been excited about the coming year. “This year is supposed to be our year of celebrating our athletic and academic careers and accomplishing something that’s really difficult to do. It’s difficult to go to college, let alone be a student athlete in college and have a full-time job with your school. And it was supposed to be our year of celebrating everything that we’ve accomplished. It felt even more so because we’ve accomplished not only just being a member of a team, but also getting a team back onto campus, and now it feels like going into our senior year, it’s almost like we’re taboo,” Allison said.

Now, instead of celebrating those wins, the two are stressed. “We’re not sleeping. It’s affecting us so much more than just the logistics of it,” said Dowd. And the logistics will be tough. The original Title IX case is due to go to trial in December, with just two plaintiffs remaining, as the judge dismissed the claims by the five students who have now graduated. While the plaintiffs’ attorneys are seeking class-action certification, a norm for Title IX cases of this kind, SFA continues to oppose it. As for the retaliation suit, those are difficult to win no matter what, according to Osborne. It’s simply nearly impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt why anyone was let go from a team. While the university has not responded officially to the retaliation suit yet, they have filed a sworn testimony from Hand to try to oppose the class-action certification that alleges that Allison was cut because she was not “one of the team’s strongest players,” and that her skills were so low that she was “a danger to herself and others,” citing a concussion suffered by Dowd during a match when she and Allison were partners.

But multiple members of the team said in interviews that Allison was considered one of the strongest players by the rest of the team—and by the coach herself, who consistently played her in the top two pairs all year. Dowd has filed a sworn statement with the courts saying as much, including that her concussion was caused by her chin hitting the ground when she laid out for a hit, nothing to do with Allison as her partner. “During the season, the coaching staff repeatedly placed Ryann [Allison] at the top of SFA’s lineup; when Ryann and I played together, we were placed at No. 1 in all eight matches; I did not consider Ryann unsafe to play with; Ryann did not cause my concussion; and when I was removed from the team, Coach Hand expressly told me that the decision ‘wasn’t about ability,’ ” her statement reads.

And even if the two were reinstated at this point, they say they wouldn’t want to play for a coach and a university who seemingly don’t want them there. So instead, their careers as collegiate athletes are just over.

People love to celebrate Title IX as a defining point of progress. And in some ways, it was—there’s no doubt that women’s sports successes today can be traced in part to that piece of legislation. But what often gets forgotten is that every inch of progress had to be fought for in its implementation and enforcement. Nothing was handed over in women’s sports. Athletes and coaches and educators and advocates had to fight over and over again, for decades, in courtrooms and in school board meetings and at the federal government, just for teams to exist, for uniforms to be paid for, for fields that were safe. Again and again and again. And they’re still fighting.

Because compliance is far from universal. Programs are cut, and women athletes feel it disproportionately. Budgets are forever lopsided. Women’s college basketball players earn less than 10 percent what the male players are making in NIL deals, while they receive three times the online harassment. Lawsuits are filed, and the cases drag on and on, and judicial precedent shifts. University investigations are basically nonexistent without any federal enforcement. And so it’s no surprise when famous college quarterbacks make light of videos of women being slapped, or when male hockey players laugh at sexist jokes made by the U.S. president about women hockey players. Or that abuse in women’s sport is sky-high, and women college athletes are far more likely than men to experience mental health problems, and their suicide rates have increased.

For all the political speech, debate, and legislation that’s described as “protecting women’s sports” over the past 10 years, very little of it seems to be trying to solve these actual, complex, nuanced problems facing real women athletes. Problems that mean women like Ryann Allison and Brynn Dowd don’t get to finish out their careers as college athletes. And they won’t be the last.