Amid #WeAreUnited Movement, a Stanford Volleyball Star Fights to Save His Team

After about a month of organizing, student athletes in the Pac-12 conference created the #WeAreUnited movement, and issued a list of demands last Sunday related to health and safety, racial injustice and players’ economic rights. Unhappy with how their universities have handled those issues, they’re threatening to opt out of the upcoming season.

Athletes representing #WeAreUnited met with officials from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office on Tuesday, and with Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott in a late-evening call Thursday. Both meetings focused on players’ concerns with schools’ health and safety protocols around COVID-19, concerns outlined in one of their top demands:

Because we are being asked to play college sports in a pandemic in a system without enforced health and safety standards, and without transparency about COVID cases on our teams, the risks to ourselves, our families, and our communities, #WeAreUnited.

The group’s list of demands also includes a section on “preserving all existing sports by eliminating excessive expenditures” – a section which specifically calls out Stanford University.

“End lavish facility expenditures and use some endowment funds to preserve all sports,” the statement reads. “As an example, Stanford University should reinstate all sports discontinued by tapping into their $27.7 billion endowment.”

In July, Stanford University – a Pac-12 institution – announced its decision to eliminate 11 varsity sports teams at the end of the 2020-21 academic year, citing major financial concerns.

“As you can imagine this has been a heartbreaking day for all of us, especially with those student athletes and coaches involved,” Stanford Athletic Director Bernard Muir said when announcing the cuts. “It recently became painfully clear we would not remain financially stable and support 36 varsity sports at a nationally competitive level, which is what we desire.”

Comprising more than 240 student athletes and 22 coaches, the 11 teams on the chopping block were men’s and women’s fencing, field hockey, lightweight rowing, men’s rowing, co-ed and women’s sailing, squash, synchronized swimming, wrestling and men’s volleyball (but not women’s volleyball). The university also plans to cut 20 support staff positions.

Each of the teams are scheduled to have one final season of varsity competition in 2020-21, after which they can become club sports.

For Jaylen Jasper, a diehard member of the Stanford men’s volleyball team, that’s cold comfort.

His team’s previous season had already come to a screeching halt in early March when the university canceled in-person classes and sports due to the pandemic. To then learn that the university planned to eliminate the sport altogether, was nothing short of devastating, he said.

“Volleyball has been my whole life since I started playing end of my freshman, beginning of sophomore year of high school,” Jasper said from his hometown of Annapolis, Maryland, where he is spending the summer training, coaching youth leagues and organizing to save his team.

Jasper, 21, will be one of the team’s captains next season — if there is a next season. And until the announcement, he had planned to repeat his junior year so he could have two more full seasons of volleyball and complete a double major in psychology and political science. But faced with the prospect of having no team to play on, he’s reconsidering those plans.

“To hear that I’m not going to be able to play at the school that I’ve come to love so much was a shock,” he said. “It was heartbreaking, confusing.”

At a formidable 6-foot-7, Jasper plays the opposite hitter position, attacking the ball with an intimidating ferocity. One of the conference’s standout players, with hopes of playing professionally after college, he’s been an all-American honorable mention three years in a row, played on the youth and junior national teams, gone to the World University Games and made the collegiate national team roster, to name just a handful of distinctions.

Jasper is also one of the few people of color on his team — and the only one who identifies as African American — in a sport not widely known for its racial diversity.

“I’m half Black, quarter white, quarter Mexican. Tri-racial,” he said. “I mean, in all honesty, when I look at Division 1 men’s volleyball, it’s not the most diverse sport in the world. There are plenty of teams that I can pick out just the one or two Black kids they have. And honestly, a lot of them are also number 23. I’m not sure if that’s a trend or what’s going on. But a lot of Black volleyball players wear number 23, and that’s kind of interesting to me.”

That lack of diversity in men’s volleyball, Jasper said, was no doubt a major factor in the university’s decision to cut the team.

“They gave us a whole list of reasons why … But one of the reasons, or some of the reasons were, you know, diversity, that the teams that were cut weren’t the most diverse. They were (also) saying that we were having financial hardships from COVID-19 and the teams that were cut weren’t exactly moneymakers.”

Stanford officials earlier said the 11 teams cut were chosen “after a comprehensive evaluation of all of our sports across a broad set of criteria and considerations,” including local and national fan interest, each sport’s future success at Stanford – and its impact on diversity at the school.

“I understood, but at the same time, our sport is growing,” he said, noting that six historically Black colleges just added men’s volleyball teams at the Division 1 and Division 2 level. “So right there, that is just increasing diversity in the sport in general. And I come back home to Annapolis and Baltimore, and I go work at these camps and I see a lot of minorities playing. … I think you have to go to the right areas to actually see the diversity. You’re not going to see it at the top level.”

Beyond racial diversity, he said, the sport also has a large LGBTQ community and a strong culture of inclusion.

“It is a community that is so accepting … that diversity can thrive,” he said. “And we’re just building on it every day and we pride ourselves on it. So it was painful to hear that (Stanford officials) don’t see it how we see it.”

While he was not an organizer with the #WeAreUnited players movement, Jasper expressed support and said he was encouraged and thankful when he first read their list of demands.

“I am so proud of the athletes that are standing up for themselves and what they believe is right and demanding better from the people who essentially control their way of life,” he said.

“Football is the sport everyone has their eyes on, and will most likely have the most impact on the conference and the NCAA, so to see them come together and not only try to better the situation for themselves, but trying to better the situation for ALL college athletes – and specifically Stanford athletes including myself and my team – is amazing. I am beyond grateful for their courage and their inclusivity.”

Both of Jasper’s parents were college athletes: His mom played basketball and his dad football at the University of Hawaii where they met. As a kid, his dad pushed him to play football, and in defiance he picked basketball. And when his dad then pressured him to take that sport more seriously, he went searching for something else.

“So I told myself, I’m going to pick one sport you know nothing about and just go with that,” Jasper said. He was introduced to volleyball when his sister started playing in high school.

Jasper said he had until then struggled to find his passion, but became enamored with volleyball “as soon as I stepped onto the court.” He quickly formed a club team with some friends and was soon getting national recognition for his skills.

“It’s a non-contact team sport that’s played where balls are hit damn near 70, 80, 90 miles an hour, and you have to angle your arm to get it to a 2-foot radius on the court,” he said. “It was intellectually stimulating. And I loved the challenge athletically. And the people that I met were some of the nicest, most generous, accepting people that I’ve ever met in my life.”

He added, “It changed me for the better, because I learned how to be a good teammate, how to be encouraging, how to, you know, show up on time, how to be a leader.”

Stanford was among the many colleges that recruited Jasper, offering him an athletic scholarship that covered most of his tuition (the university has agreed to honor all athletic scholarships, even for sports being eliminated).

“I just remember talking to our athletic director and him welcoming me into the Stanford family and that Stanford prides itself on its amazing academics, but also its amazing athletics,” he said. “So that’s really what attracted me to the school in the first place.”

It’s also what makes the Stanford’s decision to eliminate his sport such a bitter pill to swallow, one that he said left Jasper and his teammates feeling “very blindsided and almost lied to.”

It’s hardly surprising the school is prioritizing more popular, revenue-generating teams like football, he said, but argues that shouldn’t come at the expense of equally valuable, if less appreciated, sports.

Immediately after the announcement was made, Jasper said, the men’s volleyball alumni network stepped in to try to save the program.

“It was just so cool to see — some people that had graduated so long ago still care so much about the program and what it did for them.”

The group of current and former players has since started a crowdfunding campaign and social media blitz.

“We’re just trying to raise as much awareness and get as much publicity as possible, because in order to actually have anything done, we need the biggest base possible to basically pressure the university and make it a PR nightmare for them,” he said.

And although the athletic director made clear that the decision is final, officials told Jasper’s group they were willing to at least continue the discussion, he said.

“So in all honesty, I really don’t know what the chances are, but I do know that it is not going to be a sprint,” he said. “We’re not going to accomplish anything in the next month or so. It’s going to be a marathon and we’re going to be fighting this battle for a while. If I have to be fighting it until the end of next year and then on through that, and they just keep cracking the door open, eventually we’re gonna bust that door down.”

At the same time, Jasper also got involved in another organizing effort, joining a group of more than 50 other Stanford athletes of color in response to the police killing of George Floyd and the movement it galvanized.

Some of the athletes involved were, like him, among the only people of color on their teams. And in that moment of intense racial reckoning, many felt isolated.

“I didn’t know who to talk to either,” he said. “So I guess we also just wanted a space for us to talk, which we basically ended up creating ourselves.”

But beyond that, the group also wanted the athletic department to actively acknowledge racial injustice and take a strong stand against it.

“None of us really felt like our teams or coaches really understood, and like, decided to say something. We were very unhappy with, I guess, the privilege that a lot of the athletic department was showing,” he said.

“After that, I feel like it just got picked up and became a thing. All the teams put out a statement saying, we don’t support racism, we love diversity. And then I feel like it just kind of became a trend for companies and whatever, and basically everyone just started saying that. But it was better than nothing and it was putting it out there.”

Immersing himself in both campaigns this summer, Jasper said, has made him that much more aware of the tremendous influence volleyball has had in almost every facet in his life, particularly in shaping into a leader and a fighter.

“It really hit me how much volleyball has taught me. And I don’t know what I would do or where I would be without it. And I’m forever in debt. I love the sport,” he said. “And, you know, like with everything that we’re going through right now, I’ve got to fight as hard as I can to make sure that that opportunity that I have exists for the next kid down the road and that the community can to continue to thrive and grow.”

KQED’s David Marks contributed to this story.