According to a report by KSL.com’s Josh Furlong, the incident happened the first night the team was stationed in a hotel in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The hotel was “about 35 minutes” from the McCarthey Athletic Center in Spokane where Utah was playing in the first and second rounds of the tournament.
Per Furlong, the team, along with members of the band and cheerleading team, was headed out for dinner. During their walk to a restaurant, a white truck “got near the team, revved its engines to make its presence known, and then yelled the N-word toward the team before speeding off.”
“We all just were in shock, and we looked at each other like, did we just hear that? … Everybody was in shock — our cheerleaders, our students that were in that area that heard it clearly were just frozen,” Utah deputy athletics director Charmelle Green said, according to Furlong’s report. “We kept walking, just shaking our heads like I can’t believe that.”
Things didn’t end there.
The report added that after the dinner, two hours later, two trucks were “revving their engines and making a lot of noise in an intimidating way while yelling the N-word again to those present.”
Green said she “got emotional and started to cry,” per the report.
Furlong wrote that Utah “coordinated a way to walk each other back to the hotel to stay safe and avoid having to go in small groups.”
The report added that the Utes “worked with” the NCAA and the host Bulldogs to relocate the team to a hotel in Spokane.
Green and others were still shaken up by the situation.
“I will never forget the sound that I heard, the intimidation of the noise that came from that engine, and the word (N-word),” Green said. “I go to bed and I hear it every night since I’ve been here. … I couldn’t imagine us having to stay there and relive those moments.”
According to the report, the University of Utah filed a police report, but there haven’t been any updates.
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