Kiersten Hening, Virginia Tech feuding after lawsuit settlement
The case is out of court — but what happened after Virginia Tech soccer player Kiersten Hening refused to kneel is a source of growing dissension.
A group of 76 current and former Virginia Tech women’s soccer players released a joint statement in support of Hokies head coach Charles “Chugger” Adair, who was accused in a lawsuit of benching a former player based on her political views. Hening responded in a Fox News interview afterwards calling the atmosphere around the team “toxic” and “suffocating.”
Hening — who filed the lawsuit against Adair in March 2021, claiming he violated her First Amendment rights — agreed to a settlement payout of $100,000, according to the Roanoke Times. Hening’s lawyer, Cameron Norris, told the outlet that the settlement includes no admission of wrongdoing by their client or her former coach.
Hening, who was a midfielder/defender for the Hokies from 2018 to 2020, claimed Adair “verbally attacked her” and decreased her playing time after she did not participate in kneeling with fellow teammates during the reading of a “unity statement” prior to the team’s match with Virginia on Sept. 12, 2020. The lawsuit states that Adair’s alleged treatment of Hening became so “intolerable that she felt compelled” to eventually leave the team.
The 76 current and former Hokies women’s soccer players described the allegations against Adair as “baseless” and a “distorted representation of the facts” in their statement, which was published Monday,
Adair reposted the statement on Twitter the day it was released.
“We have spent countless hours training, traveling and playing under his leadership and are devastated and appalled to see his character and integrity severely impugned,” the statement reads in part. “…As current and former players, we understand women’s collegiate soccer is demanding both physically and mentally, as well as exceptionally competitive. In this regard, we all believe that his behavior, both past and present, has consistently been of the highest professional caliber.
“Finally, we understand that a lawsuit may be settled for a host of different reasons, none of which may be related to guilt or innocence. We firmly believe that these allegations are nothing more than a distorted representation of the facts. Today, we join together to affirm that Coach Adair’s leadership has made each of us better players, teammates, and people.”
Adair released his own statement, writing in part last Wednesday:
“I am pleased the case against me has been closed and I am free to move forward clear of any wrong doing. It has been difficult not to being able to tell my side of the story… The people I care about and whose opinions matter to me know the truth. They know my coaching decisions are based purely on getting our team in a position to win.”
During a Tuesday appearance on Fox News, Hening was asked about that specific part of Adair’s statement, with anchor Laura Ingraham saying, “Now, implicit in that statement is that you are not good enough to play in a starting position on your team. Is that accurate?”
Hening, who claimed in her lawsuit that she was taken out of the starting lineup after refusing to kneel, disagreed.
“I don’t think that’s accurate, no,” Hening said. “I think that the numbers speak for themselves in that sense. Judge [Thomas] Cullen, who ruled on the summary judgement, summarized it perfectly: I think I averaged 74 minutes my freshman year, and 88 minutes my sophomore year, so there was definitely a significant decrease in playing time with no real explanation as to why.”
In the lawsuit, Hening said that while she “supports social justice and believes that black lives matter,” she “does not support BLM the organization,” due to “tactics and core tenets of its mission statement, including defunding the police.”
While speaking with Fox News, Hening explained why she objected to kneeling in support of the Black Lives Matter movement prior to ACC soccer games in the 2020 season.
“Personally, I didn’t feel like I need to kneel in order to support something,” she said. “Personally, I felt like I could stand and be in support of something. Personally, I think that the kneeling was very synonymous with the Colin Kaepernick movement and the BLM movement and I didn’t feel like I needed to.”
When asked about how she felt about Adair allegedly berating her in front of her teammates, Hening said, “It didn’t feel good. I’m someone, I kind of do my job and I was there for the love of the game and the love of the school. To me, putting on that jersey meant so much to me and to be called out like that, it was pretty harsh.”
Hening stated in the lawsuit that Adair allegedly pointed a finger “directly in her face” and said that she was “b–tching and moaning” after refusing to kneel.
Adair, 50, joined the Tech staff as an associate head coach in 2006, before being promoted to head coach after the 2010 season.
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