After filing a federal lawsuit against Virginia Tech University Women’s Soccer Coach Charles “Chugger” Adair back in 2021 for an alleged benching stemming from refusal to knee in support of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement, justice has been served.

Former Hokies Virginia Tech soccer player Kiersten Hening received a $100,000 payout from the school to drop the lawsuit.

The settlement does not require an admission of guilt from Coach Adair or the University, who denies the accusations of wrongdoing with a joint statement issued by 76 current and former Virginia Tech women’s soccer players.

But they sure didn’t want this to go to court, did they?

According to Hening, the refusal to kneel led to a “campaign of abuse and retaliation” that ended with her leaving the program during the 2020 season.

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.

According to the school’s athletics website, Hening played in 22 games in 2018 (starting 19 of them) before making 19 appearances and 18 starts in 2019. In 2020 she started the season opener at Virginia (when the kneeling incident occurred) and made just two more substitute appearances before quitting the team.

Looking at the numbers, a federal judge denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Dec. 2 because of the decreased playing time. Coach Aidar, however, argued that two other players also refused to kneel and weren’t punished with reduced playing time. Adair said Hening’s benching was only related to performance.

“I am pleased the case against me has been closed and I am free to move forward clear of any wrong doing,” Adair said in a statement on Twitter. “It’s unfortunate, but this ordeal was about a disappointment and disagreement about playing time. Today, we have clarity that this case lacked any standing, and without evidence, the truth has prevailed.”

Hening didn’t agree with her old coaches sentiment, and elaborated on Fox News.

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.

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.

It’s nice to see someone who stood her ground actual get something besides screwed by leftists and their ideologies. Congrats to Hening on her award, and we hope this is the start to a healing process for her.

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