“Is it always like this?” Delaney Hopen asked her teammate Josie Cole after numerous times of being allegedly denied treatment from University of Oregon athletic trainers in 2020. The women’s beach volleyball athlete, who is now a landscape designer at Portland planning firm Cameron McCarthy, had recounted times where she would wait for more than an hour for a trainer to arrive, but if she arrived late, she wouldn’t be given the treatment she needed.
“This is normal,” Cole, the team’s captain from 2018 to 2021, replied. “This is how it’s been the whole time I’ve been here. This isn’t anything new.”
A Dec. 1, 2023 class action lawsuit filed by 32 current and former women’s beach volleyball and women’s club rowing athletes accuses the University of Oregon of Title IX sexual discrimination. The university has denied all allegations.
The complaint revealed that women make up a little over 49% of varsity athletes at Oregon while receiving only 25% of its athletic funding and 15% of its recruiting budget.
“There were a lot of situations where I just felt like my team and my teammates weren’t given standard respect,” Hopen, who played on the beach volleyball team in the 2020-21 season, said.
Before coming to UO for her master’s degree in architecture, Hopen played indoor volleyball at the University of Idaho. During her undergraduate career, Hopen “was super happy there. I loved the team environment and I loved all the girls so much,” she said.
After graduating from Idaho, Hopen had discovered UO had a new beach volleyball program and reached out to then-head coach Janice Harrer. In her independent research, she believed the program would be a good fit.
But her and her teammates’ experience said otherwise.
The athletic department’s staffing “was super challenging for me,” Hopen said. The particular staffing issue she noted was the beach volleyball team’s lack of an available trainer.
The team’s one athletic trainer handled two other sports, according to Hopen, making it difficult to have reliable access to appointments.
“[It] is very odd from a very pretty well-known athletic department and medical staff,” she said.
In the 115-page legal complaint, Zoe Almanza, a team member from 2019 to 2023, said that on a campus tour before committing to Oregon, the university said the team would receive scholarships and stipends by her second year there. Almanza stated she never received fulfillment of those promises.
This pattern of unfulfilled promises from UO is described by 32 current and former team members, including Almanza.
After Almanza and her other teammates complained about the unfair treatment, “Oregon told the women they should just be grateful for what they were given, even though it was nothing close to what the men’s teams were given,” the complaint read.
During the 2020-21 season, the team set up a meeting with Lisa Peterson, the University of Oregon’s former senior women’s administrator. Peterson told Hopen and her women’s beach volleyball teammates that their unfair treatment from UO can’t be improved because they “don’t make money,” Hopen said.
The meeting was intended to address why UO’s athletic recruiters had falsely promised scholarships, equipment and facilities to the beach volleyball players. But, according to Hopen, the university blamed the lack of financial and physical resources on the number of beach volleyball fans.
The resources for student-athletes “greatly” vary among men’s and women’s teams, according to the complaint. Men’s baseball and football teams receive multiple uniforms and team clothing each year, which they get to keep once the season ends. UO’s football team equips its athletes, whether on scholarship or not, with access to replacement equipment at all times.
The women’s beach volleyball team has one gear drop at the start of the season with gear that is often used, ill-fitting and sometimes from other teams, such as the indoor volleyball or women’s golf teams.
Bailey Glasser, the law firm representing the two women’s teams, said UO harmed each plaintiff by creating a “sex-based barrier” to financial aid and inflicting intentional “degrading and stigmatizing second-class treatment.”
The firm argued in the complaint that financial awards and resources should be allocated to student-athletes based on the number of players on teams rather than the number of fans each team has.
Due to a lack of financial assistance, some members say they had to take on staff responsibilities and outside work, all while still playing as an athlete.
In the complaint, Cole wrote that she did “so much of the administrative work to keep the team organized, she felt like an assistant administrator and coach rather than a student and a player.”
UO denied Cole’s allegations, stating that the beach team had a head coach, an assistant coach and three team managers “that handle the administrative work for the team.”
However, the work Cole did for her team, without any athletic financial aid, led her to work another job in order to afford necessities like food. Cole played her fifth and final year of beach volleyball at Tulane University, where she said she “finally” encountered a Division I beach volleyball program that “supports and respects its athletes.”
“It’s just such a bad environment right now,” Hopen said. “Playing outside when you don’t know what’s gonna be in your sand, or if you don’t have flip flops ready at practice to run to the bathroom … It gets exhausting.”
The exhaustion from Hopen’s time with the beach volleyball team, paired with the commitment to her master’s program, drained her over the three years she spent at Oregon. After not enjoying her season on beach volleyball, she tried to move on, feeling alone in her negative experience with Oregon.
Reflecting on the athletic department’s treatment of her and her team, Hopen felt that in a lot of Oregon environments, she “felt like I was kind of being treated like a child.”
“This is wrong. I know what’s going on here’s wrong because I was in a great department with great leaders, and great people and great staff,” she said. “I want it to get better.”
UO denied all allegations of sexual discrimination listed in the complaint in an 89-page response on March 4.
“I really do feel like I had a similar love for [my] teammates at Oregon that I did with Idaho,” Hopen said. “Our experience at Oregon was just so hard.”
Female student athletes from the University of Oregon gathered at Johnson Johnson Lucas & Middleton in Eugene to announce the filing of a Title IX sex discrimination lawsuit against the UO on Friday, Dec. 1. Ashley Schroeder and Batia Rotshtein were present at the press conference from Oregon women’s beach volleyball along with Elise Haverland, captain of the women’s club rowing team. (Santiago/Emerald)
