Was the Lesbian U. Texas Track Coach Treated to a Racist/Sexist Double-Standard?

Allie Grasgreen

Last month, the women’s track and field coach Bev Kearney was forced out of her 20-year-long job at the University of Texas at Austin, two months after she admitted to having had a relationship with an athlete on her team in 2002.

Days later, the university — staring down a potential lawsuit by Kearney, USA Today reported — announced that an assistant football coach, Major Applewhite, had faced an 11-month salary freeze and mandated counseling after revealing he had a one-night-stand with a student athletic trainer four years ago.

Kearney is a black lesbian who was due for a pay raise and contract extension before admitting her indiscretion in November. Applewhite is a white, heterosexual former Texas quarterback who has been promoted and whose salary has more than doubled since the freeze lifted.

The juxtaposition of the two cases of coach-student affairs has raised questions of fairness, discrimination and policy, not even a year after the NCAA released a report urging colleges to codify rules prohibiting relationships between coaches and athletes.

“They’re both doing roughly the same behavior, and they’re getting very different punishment,” said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a law professor at Florida Coastal School of Law and senior director of advocacy for the Women’s Sports Foundation. “Gay and lesbian coaches in particular suffer far harsher consequences for having relationships with athletes.”

The University of Texas System’s Board of Regents met last weekend to discuss the issue of staff-student relationships. The board announced afterward that it would create a task force to review “policies concerning disciplinary actions and procedures,” but took no immediate action. The board declined to comment.

After Kearney resigned but before Applewhite was exposed, Kearney’s lawyer suggested she was treated unfairly.

“We believe that Ms. Kearney has been subjected to a double standard and has received far harsher punishment than that being given to her male counterparts who have engaged in similar conduct,” Kearney’s lawyer, Derek A. Howard, told the Austin American-Statesman. (Howard did not respond to request for comment.)