Female player promised full ride to San Jose State for volleyball stuck with full-year tuition bills after trans player takes her spot

Former San Jose State volleyball player Elle Patterson was promised a full athletic scholarship that was not fully honored to her, as her transgender-identifying biological male teammate continued to receive his scholarship.

Patterson was originally committed to Fairfield University on a full athletic scholarship before following her recruiting coach, Todd Kress, to San Jose State. She said she was told she would again receive a full scholarship offer.

"I had a phone call with Todd and he said, 'yes, it will be a full ride again,'" Patterson explained to Fox News. "I was an out-of-state kid, so I didn't want to have to be paying a lot for my school when I went somewhere to get it paid for. So he confirmed that to me verbally."

Patterson, however, never actually saw that money from the scholarship. Her family was forced to pay out-of-pocket for her freshman year as she played back-up for a transgender-identifying teammate. Her family wasn’t prepared for the financial burden, but they made it work with the belief that the scholarship would take effect next year. Patterson said Kress told her, "We will not be covering your first year. But we will be covering your last three."

But when the first year ended, she never received the scholarship. Patterson then claimed that as she continued to play, she realized Kress wasn't who she thought he was.

"He didn't seem like the type of coach and the person who recruited me when he was actually coaching at San Jose," Patterson said. "The way in which he went about certain situations and just playing was more along the lines of just completely tearing you down as a person and not building you back up. But it definitely felt like he had certain people, one being the man on our team, that he would have done anything for... but it didn't feel like he had the support and belief in some of the other girls on our team."

Patterson said she was then told she wouldn't receive her scholarship and was told it was due to an injury that required her to miss a few games.

"We go through the entire season. I get to my end-of-the-year meeting with them. And that is when I was sitting in the office with him and the assistant coach at the time and they said that they weren't going to give me a scholarship anymore," Patterson said.

"They tried to say that it was because of [my injury]. And because I wasn't like back to where I had been before."

However, trans-identifying teammate Blaire Fleming, who was also injured and missed even more games than Paterson, was able to keep his scholarship, according to the Department of Education’s written findings of its Title IX investigation into SJSU in 2025 and 2026.

"Student 2, a woman on the volleyball team, lost her scholarship when she was injured during the 2023 season, yet Student 1, a man on the women’s volleyball team, was permitted to retain his scholarship when he was also injured during the 2023 season, despite Student 1 missing more games than Student 2," the findings said. "Student 2 was wrongfully refused a women’s volleyball scholarship while Student 1 was permitted to maintain a women’s volleyball scholarship."