OUR VIEW: Athletics tight-lipped on Coach’s dismissal

In case you haven’t heard, long-time USU men’s and women’s tennis coach Christian Wright was fired, as announced Wednesday in a press release sent by the Athletics Department.
Utah State Athletics Director Scott Barnes said Wright was released because of repeated NCAA violations. When Statesman reporters dug a little bit deeper, we found Wright had been giving private lessons to high school students.
While there are some who argue this does or does not constitute an NCAA violation, Barnes and the rest of the USU officials responsible for making the call obviously believed it was and hired two interim head coaches.
Interim head coach Lukas Bouton is the tennis director and head pro at the Sports Academy and Racquet Club in Logan. Will he have to give up his position there so he is not giving lessons to prospective youth?
Interim head coach Bryan Marchant was quoted saying the decision to terminate Wright’s employment was “ridiculous.”
“Pretty much every college coach in the nation does it,” Marchant said, calling it “a stupid little thing.”
Oh really? So why isn’t every Division I tennis coach looking for a new job?
Former USU tennis player Kimi Watts said Wright did not recruit the players he gave private lessons to, so we can see how it can be difficult to discern the line between helping the community and breaking the rules in this instance.
Can we really fault a guy for trying to earn a couple extra bucks by being a mentor to kids by teaching them how to play a sport he loves?
While we at The Statesman do not know the average salary for a Division I tennis coach, we can guarantee it’s not nearly as much as a Division I football or basketball coach.
It is also interesting to us how quickly this termination came after the announcement of head football coach Gary Andersen’s shiny new contract extension and pay raise.
Wright has coached at USU for 22 years. It’s not hard to imagine his salary was substantially higher than when he started, and while we are not insinuating Wright was hired to clear some space in the ledger for Andersen’s assistant coaches, the timing does raise a few eyebrows.
The thing that bothers us the most is how quiet University officials are about the details. Barnes barely spoke about it and even Wright declined to be quoted in an interview.
We won’t argue whether or not we feel Wright should have been fired, but we feel details are missing.