Basketball player turned coach Camille LeNoir believes that her Christian faith and the fact that she is no longer a gay woman may have been the reason a longtime coach retracted a job opportunity.

LeNoir played the game at a high level since her college days at the University of Southern California. She's only 5'4 but she has played professionally on the Washington Mystics and in Greece. The Washington Post reports that she moved on from playing and went full throttle into coaching young people and inspiring the next wave of players.

When her old coach Mark Trakh, who was coaching at New Mexico State University and other places for 22 years, called her up and offered LeNoir a position as an assistant coach, she was excited. But that excitement was short-lived. Trakh retracted the offer and now LeNoir will sue the university in U.S. District Court because she believes she was discriminated against for being straight.

“I felt the job was taken away because of my heterosexuality,” LeNoir, 31, said in a recent interview.

Trakh discovered a video from 2011 where LeNoir was professing her faith and proclaiming her newfound heterosexuality. For the past seven years, she has been living as a straight woman. Most of her career as a player she was gay. In the video from 2011, she was interviewed by Christopher Hudson of the Forerunner Chronicles, a Christian organization that made headlines with its interview of Angus Jones, the former child star who quit the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men.

Her coach and mentor told her to take the video down if she wanted to work in college basketball. LeNoir said that she embraced heterosexuality for religious purposes and thought that Trakh and the school discriminated against her.

“It was tough. I ended my last relationship [and] I was in love. There was nothing that went wrong in that relationship,” she said. “And so it was just a constant wrestling with what I know the Bible says, my family says and my emotions. And so I got to the point where, like, I’m choosing this over that.”

The university has come out since the lawsuit to clear up the misconceptions surrounding the incident.

Court documents state that the university believes that LeNoir's views “would have had an adverse impact” on her “ability to effectively coach and recruit players who identify as LGBT.” New Mexico State also stated that Trakh did not have the authority to hire her in the first place.

The decision “was made without the knowledge or approval of any other employee or agent of NMSU” and that the coach was “required to post the position and go through NMSU’s standard recruitment process.”

LeNoir will continue to run her business, True Point Guard, that trains young players but the situation still leaves a bad taste in her mouth.

“I believe it was an injustice,” she said, “a huge injustice.”

Camille LeNoir

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