The women’s basketball team concludes a conference game in the 2023-24 season. (Jasmine Li | Student Life)

The 2017-18 women’s basketball freshman class had eight members on the roster. By their junior year, two years later, only one member of that class remained. 

The team has struggled with retention, with 21 players departing earlier than their senior year over the last seven years. Their retention rate — meaning the number of first-years, sophomores, and juniors who return to the team — has been at 72% year-to-year since former head coach Nancy Fahey left the program in 2017. In comparison, the men’s program has retained 81% of players over the same time period. 

The players who have left the team in the past seven years come from a wide range of backgrounds and skill levels. Their reasons for departure have also varied. Some student-athletes felt that their priorities had shifted after their freshman year. Others were dissuaded because of COVID-19.  For many players, their experience on the team radically changed their relationship with the sport that they once loved. 

“When I quit, I remember being in the locker room, just being like, ‘I hate basketball. Basketball is making me miserable.’ I couldn’t look at a basketball without sobbing,” Emily said. 

Another struggled with unclear boundaries through the walk-on process, never granted a roster seat to begin with but struggling through months of pre-season practice feeling like she was “being strung along…and then just discarded,” she said. When she went to the athletic department to express her concerns, she left feeling “disposable” and dissuaded.

Student Life talked to five former members of the team from four different grades. They all requested anonymity out of concern for their on-campus relationships with their former teammates, so all names in this piece are pseudonyms.

The toll of the commitment to the basketball team left the players wondering if their sacrifices were worth it. Some of them had a final straw — a humbling punishment where they had to bear-crawl across the weight-room floor, or a coaching staff conversation that the team overheard tearing apart the personal character of one specific player. Others were forced away because of repeated injuries. 

Multiple players were also troubled by what they described as differential treatment from the coaching staff, which frequently created a divided locker room. Head coach Randi Henderson did not respond to a request for comment about the concerns.

“I was really sad seeing great players penalized and demoralized to the point of breakdowns, like in the locker room. Girls would just be crying in their locker because of what Randi said to them,” a former player said.

“After my freshman year, basketball and non-basketball wise, I needed to go see a therapist, because I just could not handle it,” said Emily, a player who quit during her sophomore season. “Before practices, I would have huge panic attacks — I would sob in the bathroom. I had no clue what to expect — you have no clue what you’re gonna walk into that day.”

Coaches can, by occupation, personify tough love, and they often walk the line between supporting their athletes and pushing them to their physical potential. The tough-love approach is based on the strength of the player-coach relationship — a groundwork of mutual respect combined with the trust that a coach can bring out untapped potential in their athletes. Some of Henderson’s former athletes felt that they struggled with the former part of that tradeoff. 

“For tough love to be what it is, you [have to] know they truly love, care for you, want the best for you, whatever — but [that] they’re doing whatever ‘tough’ part in the best interest of that,” Emily said. “Where she crosses the line is that the ‘love’ part — if you will — is just not there.”

Others disagreed. Elizabeth, who came from a high-school program with a very demanding coach, said that to her, Henderson was simply “tough.”

“Randi tells you the truth. And it’s not nice. But it’s also not her job to coddle,” she said. 

“The times that maybe people felt manipulated is that it was not consistent from person to person,” Elizabeth continued. “Like, some people get more of it. Some people get less, some people get coddled, some people get yelled at. So that’s the hard part.”

After one game, Elizabeth was injured for the fourth time after a particularly hard hit. She broke down crying, and Henderson tracked her down after the game. “She was like, ‘I’m just happy that you’re here. I don’t care about your minutes.’ And I know other people don’t think that’s true. But I felt that that was true with me — she didn’t care how much I played. She just cared about me, and the person I was. Her being there like that changed my life a lot.”

Randi Henderson speaks to her players during a huddle. (Clara Richards | Student Life)

Players on the women’s team looked at the men’s team and felt envious of players who “said they were family and really meant it,” Elizabeth said. Virginia agreed, acknowledging there was a lot of competition on the men’s side, but that even the players who didn’t get time were “there for their brothers.”

Many of the players who quit under contentious conditions reached out to the athletic department. Emily’s parents sent a 925-word email to Athletic Director Anthony Azama, outlining why their daughter left the basketball program. “We entrust the care and support of the university and our daughter’s case to the sports program she is participating in,” they wrote.  “Our daughter is leaving the Athletic Department of WashU … due to the lapses of that care and support.”

They received a 27-word email back from Azama, saying that he would “review [their] feedback and will look into each concern raised.” The family said that they did not hear back from Azama again.

Virginia scheduled a meeting with the athletic department, specifically Athletic Director Anthony Azama and Senior Associate Athletic Director Summer Hutcheson, to talk about her experience on the team. She brought up the questions of practice time exceeding the 20-hour-a-week rule imposed by the NCAA on Division I and II athletes. There, she was told that Division III had no time limits on hours of practice. She said she left the meeting feeling “dismissed.”

Multiple players said that they were interviewed by a member of Washington University’s human resources department over two years ago as part of an official investigation filed with the Athletic Department, but said that they never heard anything past the initial interview. In response to a set of specific questions about the results of the investigation, Azama told Student Life that the department “[does] not comment on personnel matters” but that the athletic department “will always take [student] concerns seriously.”

“We will follow up accordingly when issues are brought to us. The health and well-being of our student-athletes is always our highest priority,” Azama wrote. 

Above everything, many of the former players who spoke with Student Life said that they felt disposable — to the coaching staff, to the program, and to the Athletic Department.

Many left the program confused by the lack of accountability from the department, pointing to the low retention rate as a “red flag.” 

“Why were those numbers not raising red flags?” Helen, a two-year player who graduated in 2023, asked. “At least, rather than waiting for young women, who are in a very vulnerable and difficult position to find the courage and unionize in a way to initiate it from the bottom up.”

Virginia met with members of the athletic department because she felt that she “owed it to future players — that they don’t have the same experiences as I do.” 

“I just want the athletic department to listen,” Emily, who emailed Azama directly and didn’t get a response for weeks until she sent a followup email, said. “So many people have quit. So many people have tried to talk to them. It sends a really strong message to the rest of the people who are on the team that people are going, leaving, going through stuff, and nothing is going to change.” 

Some of WashU women’s basketball’s former members are playing club basketball. Virginia only wants to play in the most informal settings, off the glossy hardwood of the fieldhouse and cleaning up on the basketball court of the ResLife College Olympics. She currently has her basketball gear in a box that she still doesn’t want to open. And others haven’t touched a basketball since, can’t bear to lace up their shoes and practice the drills that are still built into their muscle memory.

While women’s basketball might be an individual example of the challenges that players have gone through, it ultimately is a microcosm of the mental-health challenges facing athletes in Division III sports. WashU has recently added a mental-health resident to support all Varsity athletes for the 2023-24 academic year, and is one of a few DIII programs around the country with psychologist residents.  

“I think this extends way beyond basketball,”  Elizabeth said. “I know basketball is a perfect case study. But […] every single team here has gone through some sort of extreme mental struggles at this point. Only the elite of the elite don’t struggle.”

Despite the emotional impact of their time on the team, the former players definitely miss some elements of being part of the program. They miss being surrounded by teammates — “amazing, dynamic, and just funny people,” Helen described. They miss having basketball goals: seeing their name on an all-conference list or joking around with their teammates about it being “ring season.”

Having now moved on, the five women interviewed are split about whether, knowing what they know now, they would still have played basketball at WashU. “I don’t know if it was worth the mental and the physical trauma,” Virginia said. 

“I think this is what’s so hard,”  Elizabeth said.  “I’m happy I had that experience because it made me learn such a hard lesson.  In itself, that’s negative, but I’m happy because I learned really hard lessons — on what it means to work hard and the difference between happiness and fulfillment.”