The federal government intervenes and then disappears

Many hours they should have spent practicing, Aaliyah Rivas and her teammates roamed the University of Nevada, Reno, softball field carrying shovels and buckets instead of bats and balls.

The athletic department rarely maintained the field. So plowing snow, pulling weeds and picking rocks, trash and goose poop out of the grass fell to coaches and players.

The team had complained for years about its dilapidated facilities. The dugout toilets didn’t flush. Its locker room – a 10-foot-wide converted metal shipping container – lacked running water and the doors didn’t lock. Many players changed into their uniforms in their cars.

The Nevada baseball team suffered none of those problems. Its field was wellmaintained. Its spacious clubhouse featured showers, lounges, indoor batting cages and pitching mounds, and a medical training room.

It was all a sad wake-up call for Rivas, whose lifelong goal had been to play NCAA Division I sports.

“You’d expect that at a DI university, it would be different,” she said. “But women’s sports still got the bare minimum.”

The college was among many whose athletic departments had made progress toward treating male and female players more equitably after the enactment of Title IX, the 1972 federal law that banned sex discrimination in schools.

But that progress all but stopped in 2013 under a new athletic director, Doug Knuth, whose impact was crushing for female athletes at Nevada. He has since amassed significant power over the future of women’s sports nationally.

Knuth, who left Nevada in spring 2022, was named the new athletic director at Southern Utah University that December. He was appointed six months later to the NCAA Division I Council, the body that makes key decisions affecting all 190,000 Division I athletes, half of whom are women.

Knuth declined to be interviewed or answer questions for this story. In an emailed statement, he defended his track record.

“I am and always have been an advocate for women’s athletics throughout my career as a leader in college athletics,” Knuth said. “During my tenure at Nevada, I led several initiatives to help solve decades-long issues of inequality that predated my time at the university.”

Recently, under a new president and athletic director, Nevada has started closing the athletic gaps. But former school leaders allowed the problems to fester for so long – while funneling money toward luxuries for men’s teams – that full solutions are now tens of millions of dollars out of reach.

Workplace complaints dog new athletic director at UNR

About 50 people gathered in the auditorium of Legacy Hall on the UNR campus to hear from the three finalists for the athletic director job.

Knuth was the only one with no experience running a Division I athletic department. But he sold himself on his fundraising prowess, knowledge of the Mountain West Conference and focus on athlete well-being.

“My job is not a fundraiser,” Knuth said at the March 2013 public forum. “It’s all about how we transform lives.”

Knuth got the job. He wasted little time wooing wealthy Wolf Pack boosters. Within five years, Nevada cut the ribbon on a $14 million football stadium upgrade, a new football locker room and player lounge, a state-of-the-art basketball practice gym and six outdoor tennis courts.

Erik Musselman, a former NBA coach Knuth hired in 2015, led the Nevada men’s basketball team to three straight Mountain West Conference titles and the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament. A surge in ticket sales, sponsorships and licensing deals followed.

Revenue for the department reached $38 million by the 2018-19 school year,

The University of Nevada, Reno’s freezing cold winters have caused cracks, potholes and icy puddles in the university’s track, shown here in 2016. The track was resurfaced later that year and repaired again six years later.

NCAA financial reports show – up $11 million since Knuth took over. University President Marc Johnson and the Board of Regents rewarded him, increasing his annual salary from $285,000 to $400,000.

Behind the scenes, however, complaints were stacking up about Knuth’s treatment of women in the workplace.

Several former employees complained that Knuth overwhelmingly hired men for major roles, paid men more than women and routinely excluded women from meetings, trips and other opportunities, according to interviews, emails and other documents.

The university hired a local law firm in 2018 to investigate allegations that Knuth created a hostile work environment for women, according to invoices and former employees. The school also twice investigated allegations of an inappropriate relationship between Knuth and an assistant cheerleading coach who worked for the department from 2011 to 2018, Johnson told USA TODAY.

According to Johnson, none of the investigations found Knuth violated any school rules. Knuth addressed the investigations in his statement.

“All I can tell you is I fully participated and fully cooperated in every review or investigation,” he wrote. “I was never made aware of any wrongdoing and was cleared of all accusations.”

‘If there was more investment, maybe we would have done better’

As female employees spoke out about Knuth, frustrations over disparate treatment grew among Nevada’s female athletes.

Several team practice and competition facilities weren’t up to standard for women. That included the women’s indoor and outdoor track and field teams, which account for more than 40% of the school’s roster spots for female athletes.

Nevada’s outdoor track, which wraps around the football field, runs beneath bleachers added decades earlier for extra seating at football games. The resulting tunnel means runners disappear for a few hundred feet each lap, rendering the track unsuitable for meets.

Women also run indoor track, a winter sport, even though the campus has no indoor track. They practiced outdoors, sometimes in snow and ice.

Locker rooms were another glaring problem. While 85% of male athletes had access to an exclusive locker room, only 17% of athletes on women’s teams did, a 2020 assessment by the school’s Title IX coordinator found.

The women’s swimming and diving team’s locker room was open to the public – used by patrons of the school’s public pool. The soccer, track and field, and cross-country teams shared one locker room, which doubled as the locker room for visiting football teams. Forced to vacate it on football game days to make room for the visiting team’s men, the women sometimes returned to find their equipment damaged or stolen, according to a 2018 Title IX compliance review.

During Knuth’s tenure, the men’s basketball team spent double that of the women’s basketball team on travel – $4.8 million vs. $2.3 million, NCAA financial reports show. No other Mountain West Conference school spent more on its men’s team or had a bigger disparity.

When the topic of equal treatment came up several times in discussions with coaches and administrators, Sami Dinan – a Nevada women’s basketball player from 2016 to 2020 – said they were told that the men got more opportunities because they were nationally ranked, and the women’s team was not.

“If there was more investment,” Dinan told USA TODAY, “maybe we would have done better.”

In October 2019, Johnson received a letter from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, the federal agency that enforces Title IX: The office had received a complaint against the Nevada athletic department.

“The complainant alleged that the university discriminates, based on sex, against female student athletes,” it said. “OCR will proceed with the investigation of these allegations.”

A year earlier, an outside law firm hired by the school to assess the athletic department’s Title IX compliance found several “areas of concern,” including with practice and competition facilities, locker rooms and nutrition.

The university had done little to address the issues, however.

Faced with the potential of a full-blown federal investigation, the university opted to go another route. It asked to voluntarily resolve the case. The Office of Civil Rights agreed.

The agreement, signed in December 2019, required UNR to conduct an internal assessment first. The university’s then-Title IX coordinator, Maria Doucettperry, submitted a 26-page report acknowledging significant gender gaps in facilities and recruiting.

However, according to UNR spokesperson Scott Walquist, the university never heard back from the Office for Civil Rights, so it never developed an action plan to fix the problems.

After USA TODAY contacted the Education Department for comment, the Office for Civil Rights on April 17 sent UNR its first correspondence in four years, saying it was “currently preparing a response” to the school’s assessment.

Complaints about women’s teams’ facilities were near constant during Johnson’s presidency from 2011 to 2020, he told USA TODAY. He said he was unwilling to spend taxpayer and tuition dollars on improvements unless they benefited all students, not just athletes.

Johnson justified men’s basketball and football facility expansions by noting they were largely donor-funded and necessary to increase revenue for the whole department, but he acknowledged that the lopsided approach could violate Title IX.

“If we were called on it or investigated and were given sanctions of some kind, we would have to respond,” Johnson said. “We had complaints, not sanctions.”

Title IX campaign struggles amid fourth investigation

In early October 2020, a new president took over at the University of Nevada, Reno. Brian Sandoval, the state’s former two-term Republican governor, was briefed in his first weeks on campus about the athletic department’s gender inequity problems, he told USA TODAY.

“Without exception,” he said, “every women’s sport needed help.”

Sandoval quickly addressed some of the lower-hanging fruit, launching a fund to provide meals to female athletes, commissioning new facility designs and raising the salaries of coaches of women’s teams – all below the conference median.

There was little money, however, to address the department’s biggest facility deficiencies. The school faced a 12% pandemic-related budget cut from the Legislature. The athletic department was $9 million in debt and operating in the red, financial reports show.

Knuth started planning a fundraising campaign at Sandoval’s request in April 2021, emails show. Called Elevate, draft campaign brochures billed it as a celebration of Title IX’s upcoming 50th anniversary.

After a year of courting donors, however, Elevate was scrapped and it’s unclear how much money Knuth and his team of fundraisers raised. In some internal

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documents, they claimed to have brought in more than $20 million. But that figure consisted mostly of pledges made before Elevate, and almost all of it was earmarked for projects primarily benefiting football, baseball, and men’s and women’s basketball and tennis.

According to donation data provided by the university, Knuth as of April 2022 had raised little money for the teams that needed it the most: $30,000 toward a locker room for the women’s swimming and diving team; $23,000 for softball stadium upgrades; and nothing for women’s track.

As the Elevate campaign floundered, the university quietly conducted a fourth investigation into Knuth’s conduct toward women.

A female athletic department employee complained to the university’s Title IX office in March 2021 that Knuth made disparaging comments about pregnant women. She accused the school of turning a “blind eye” toward Knuth’s sex discrimination in a letter her attorneys wrote to Sandoval that May.

One year later, the employee received a one-page letter from Doucettperry, the Title IX coordinator. No investigation report or rationale for the findings was attached – a standard practice at other universities.

“A preponderance of the evidence does not support a conclusion that you or other University employees within the Athletics Department were subjected to unlawful discrimination, harassment or retaliation,” the May 2022 letter from Doucettperry said. “The investigation is now closed.”

Athletic director Knuth gets payout and a new home

The sky was still dark when Nevada softball coaches and players arrived at their makeshift locker room early one morning in March 2022 to pick up their gear ahead of a road series. They quickly discovered that thousands of dollars worth of bats, gloves, equipment bags and sunglasses had been stolen.

The thieves appeared to have stayed a while. The team’s snacks had been eaten. A pair of pants and cheap camouflage glasses had been left behind. Several bags had been piled into a mattress of sorts.

“There was a homeless person we thought was living in there,” said Rivas, then a sophomore on the team.

A campus police investigation found no signs of forced entry and that the door locks didn’t work, emails show. Two athletes met with Knuth to discuss their concerns about the state of their facilities, emails show. Knuth later told Sandoval that it was “a really good conversation.”

Sandoval wasn’t having it.

“The feedback that I received from the meeting was that the athletes continue to be frustrated and were not at all satisfied with the meeting,” he emailed Knuth on April 6.

When Knuth’s contract came up for renewal two weeks later, Sandoval did not renew it. The university ultimately paid him $308,000 to leave. In a press release, Sandoval thanked Knuth for “the many positive steps he made” for the athletic department.

Sandoval named Knuth’s replacement that June: Stephanie Rempe, previously a deputy athletic director at Louisiana State University. Rempe has helped push across the finish line new locker rooms for women’s swimming, track and field, cross country and other teams, an initial round of softball stadium upgrades and track repairs, thanks in large part to a $6.9 million subsidy from the academic budget.

The university used another $2.3 million Knuth raised to remodel the football locker room and carve out a separate locker room space for women’s soccer. The football players got a video wall, barber shop, new shower area and new lockers; their old lockers were refurbished and given to women’s teams.

Today, most female athletes have a quality locker room, but softball players aren’t among them. While they continue to await a long-promised clubhouse, indoor practice facilities and lights – at an $11 million price tag, according to a 2022 estimate – they were given a second shipping container.

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