Tennessee head coaches hold rare joint press conference

Most of the time when college coaches speak in public, their top priority is recruiting.

Women’s basketball coach Holly Warlick said the issues have been used in negative recruiting against the school. It was an attempt at a one-hour SEC Network infomercial in response to serious allegations of wrongdoing directed at the university and the football program. “There are great things going on on this campus”. The suit says that Bowles was assaulted twice by football players because of that action.

“Instead of us continuing to lay down and just kind of take it and take the beating”, soccer coach Brian Pensky said, “we felt as a coaching unit we want our administration to know that we have their back and that we have each other’s backs and that we have our student-athletes’ backs”.

Athletics director Dave Hart missed the news conference because of an out-of-town commitment, according to a department spokesman.

Softball co-head coach Karen Weekly highlighted the fact that football coach Butch Jones attended a softball doubleheader, and that the football team shares its facility with women’s teams.

“I’ve never been around a leader like Dave Hart”, Pensky said. That’s their right. I won’t judge how they feel about Tennessee’s culture based on their own experiences.

“It’s our job to continue to educate them and hold them responsible for their choices….”

Much of what they said may, in fact, be true.

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Multiple coaches also noted that the campus is safe for women and there’s plenty of support for women’s sports.

The suit focuses on five cases that were reported between 2013 and 2015, but one paragraph in the 64-page document refers to a sexual harassment complaint made by a Tennessee trainer in 1996 involving an incident involving Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning, who was then the Volunteers QB.

On Feb. 9, a group of six unidentified women alleged in a federal lawsuit that Tennessee created a “hostile sexual environment” through indifference toward assaults by student-athletes.

She added: “If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t hesitate to have her here at Tennessee”.

Whereas Crowder was no longer a UT football player at the time of his arrest, Jones swiftly suspended Johnson and will seemingly let the legal case play out before making a decision. “We’ll continue to be very proud of what we have here”.

“These isolated incidences are not an indication of what we have, the type of character that we have in our football program, and the culture that we have in our football program”, Jones said. Also, it’s not who we are. We have great individuals in our entire athletic department.

While expressing sympathy for the alleged victims, 16 Tennessee coaches circled the wagons to show unity that the accusations are the exception, not the rule.

“We’ve worked very hard to build our culture”, Jones said, via Wes Rucker of 247Sports. “Our competitors are using it against us”, Jones said. “That’s why we’re here today – because we want people to hear the positives”.

Jones defended his players, saying that he feels they are often “stereotyped”.

That favoritism, the complaint said, included “interfering with and stopping the disciplinary process, concealing charges and investigations involving male athletes, arranging for specialized defense counsel for male athletes… facing criminal and sexual assault charges”.