Utah women’s team victim of ‘racial hate’

Utah women’s basketball coach Lynne Roberts said her team experienced a series of “racial hate crimes” after arriving at its first NCAA Tournament hotel and was forced to change accommodations during the event for safety concerns.

Roberts revealed what happened after Utah lost to Gonzaga in the second round of the tournament Monday night. She didn’t go into detail but said there were several incidents that happened Thursday night after the team arrived in the Spokane, Washington, area for the tournament and they were disturbing to the traveling party to the point there were concerns about safety.

Utah was staying about 30 miles away in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and was relocated to a different hotel Friday.

“We had several instances of some kind of racial hate crimes toward our program and (it was) incredibly upsetting for all of us,” Roberts said.

Tony Stewart, an official with the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, said in a news conference Tuesday

the Utes were walking from the hotel to a restaurant when a truck with a Confederate flag drove up. The driver began using racist language, including the N-word.

After the team left the restaurant, the same driver returned “now reinforced by others,” Stewart said, and they revved their engines and again yelled at the players.

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