Daniel Libit shares the story behind the story of The Intercollegiate/USA TODAY investigation into athlete-abuse allegations against Marlene Stollings.

On Wednesday, that request materialized in a joint investigation story published in USA TODAY, which discovered myriad allegations of psychological torment wrought by head coach Marlene Stollings; inappropriate touching and sexual harassment by her hand-picked basketball trainer; and a potentially dangerous system of coerced overexertion, involving heart-rate monitors, which one former player described as, “basically like a torture mechanism.”

In a statement, Stollings did not address any of the specific allegations, other than suggesting the complaints were part of the process of her improving the program’s on-court success. Athletic Director Kirby Hocutt confirmed that, “based on information received,” the school had assembled a four-person committee to review the various allegations and that he had since “discussed this review with coach Stollings.” He made no mention of any specific action that had been taken.

What distinguishes this particular story from the ever-growing list of athlete-abuse claims made against college coaches, is how they have been so thoroughly documented by Texas Tech  —  and yet, thus far, to little evident effect. For at least the last two seasons, Stollings has carried forth as head coach, pocketing over $700,000 in annual salary, despite the school maintaining a lengthening paper trail of alarming and widely-shared expressions of misery from numerous players on her team.

And yet, if not for what Texas Tech’s in-house lawyers would later describe as a “clerical error,” it very well might not have come to light.

In the state of Texas, the public information law allows governmental bodies (such as state universities) to appeal to the state Attorney General if it feels that records being requested are exempt from disclosure. This process is often done reflexively: I’ve probably made at least 50 requests to Texas universities over the last year, and at least half have been sent to the AG — a number of which quite obviously merited no exemption. In theory, this outside adjudicator seems helpful, but in practice it amounts to an easy delay tactic. Once a request is made, the governmental body (state university) has up to 15 business days to file a brief to the Attorney General Open Records Division, arguing its legal basis for a denial. If it fails to do so successfully, or within that permitted time frame, it must disclose the records or file a challenge in state district court.

As it came to pass, Texas Tech attempted to file its denial brief about my request on July 11, 2019 — the 15th business day after I had emailed it — but accidentally uploaded the wrong document into the public records electronic filing system. The school evidently was not aware of this error for two more months when, on Sept. 9,  it received notice from the AG’s Office that it had failed to comply with the procedural requirements for an appeal and was therefore required to turn over the documents to me, posthaste.

Instead, in a Sept. 26 letter to Attorney General Ken Paton, the school pleaded for a mulligan. 

“It is evident that TTU simply made a clerical error and by no means was attempting to delay or impede the public’s access to public information,” the letter, written by the school’s associate general counsel Ronny Wall, stated. “Thus, TTU is of the opinion that while it may have violated the technicalities of the statute, it did not violate the true purpose of the statute.”

Unbidden, it nonetheless provided the brief it had failed to file on time — a telling document in the context of what we now know the school was attempting to conceal. But also a telling document in the larger context of the debate over college athlete rights. 

Indeed, in trying to prevent the release of its athlete exit interviews, Texas Tech argued that it was a “competitive bidder” in an athletic talent marketplace, in which it would be irreparably harmed if the information I requested got out.

Here’s how it fleshed out that argument:

“TTU has specific marketplace interests in the attached information. For TTU to participate in NCAA Division 1 and be a member of the Big 12 conference, it must recruit student athletes throughout the nation to come to TTU to participate in collegiate athletics…Recruiting students within the nation, and specifically Texas, is a very hard task and a competitive marketplace exists. In addition, there are millions of dollars in TV revenue and tuition at stake based on how well TTU athletic teams perform. Applications to TTU typically increase after particularly successful seasons (men’s basketball for example) due to the nationwide publicity received from competing at the highest levels.”

(As a digression, but not diversion: That’s a hell of a case from a P5 school to grant college athletes their full economic freedoms, what with this being a “competitive marketplace” and all, where “millions of dollars in TV revenue and tuition (are) at stake.”)

The rest of Texas Tech’s argument — a full page’s worth — was redacted on the copy provided to me, since it revealed “the substance of the documents” that the school was still endeavoring to withhold. It took another two months for that futile effort to be so declared.

On Dec. 5 — with the college basketball season now well underway — the state AG wrote back to Texas Tech to reaffirm that the school was not entitled to ask for a reconsideration of its ruling and could only delay the matter further by going to court. Otherwise, they were to fork them over.

Then, another two months went by, without a word.

In Mid-February, I checked in for a status update, and was told by the university’s lawyers that they were almost finished with the redaction process (“checking for student identifying information”). 

Then finally, in the last week of February, I opened The Intercollegiate’s P.O. Box to discover it stuffed with a bulging manilla envelope postmarked from Lubbock. The enclosed ream of papers included RealRecruit survey results from 14 of Texas Tech’s 15 athletic programs — notably, I was later told, no men’s basketball players participated. But nine of the 15 women’s basketball players did participate, and their criticisms stood out, both individually and in aggregate:

While there was plenty of salient athlete criticism we discovered in the scores of other exit interviews we obtained from schools around the country, the Texas Tech women’s basketball documents were of a different nature. They told an important story, in and of itself.

We originally floated our findings in March to another national media outlet, but the pandemic put that collaboration on ice. So, we approached USA TODAY in mid-May about partnering on a story. The paper assigned the article to Jori Epstein, their Dallas-based NFL writer who, reporting on it ‘twixt Cowboys off-season coverage and Gannett furloughs, did a magnificent job, getting 10 players to discuss their experiences, four on-the-record. We were also able to obtain investigative notes from a previous head-coaching abuse scandal at New Mexico State in 2003, when Stollings was an assistant there. The main target of those allegations, former NMSU head coach Nikita Lowry Dawkins, is currently Stollings’ top assistant at Texas Tech.

In early July, Jori suggested we request Texas Tech’s most recent batch of exit interviews, from 2019-20, to see how they compared to the despair memorialized in the previous year’s. After enduring an eight-month foot-dragging in Round 1, I was more than a little dismissive of our prospects.

Nevertheless, the request was made and, two weeks later, the documents showed up (as PDFs!) in my email inbox, just like that. They were, as Wednesday’s story noted, also quite notable, insofar as they documented so much more of the same:

In 2020 exit interviews, a player said coaches “used fear to motivate you,” and that there was “not one person on this roster that feels comfortable going up to our coaches (sic) office.”

“Do something about the coaches,” one player wrote, “so that my teammates don’t have to continue suffering in silence.”

Why didn’t Texas Tech take me for a half-year joyride the second time around? 

For now, that remains mysterious: the university did not respond to a request for comment about its handling of my FOIAs.