Young Harris College has announced that they have canceled the remainder of the season for their men’s lacrosse team. In a statement released on Wednesday, the Young Harris’ president, Dr. Drew Van Horn, said the school had recruited Jay Goldsmith to take over the program for this season. Goldsmith was previously an assistant lacrosse coach at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, N.C., where he had earned a health and physical education degree in 2015. In the previous three seasons, the Young Harris team was led by now-former head coach Forrest MacConnell.
“When a new coach enters an existing culture that he or she has been tasked to change, the choice for the student-athlete is not complicated: either the student-athlete will play under the new culture or will not,” Van Horn said. “Unfortunately, in the case of our Men’s Lacrosse program, it has become obvious to me that the old culture is unwilling to adapt to the new coach and his system.”
Van Horn said that “after careful thought and observation,” he and athletic director Jennifer Rushton together made the decision to cancel the remainder of the men’s lacrosse team. “It was not fair to ask Coach Goldsmith to expend his emotional, mental and physical energy with a group of student-athletes that has communicated and exemplified its unwillingness to adapt,” Van Horn said.
This is also Rushton’s first year as athletics director at the north Georgia college. She became AD at Young Harris this year after most recently serving as senior associate director of athletics for compliance/senior woman administrator for the school. President Van Horn said that the school takes any and all accusations of abuse and harassment seriously. “As of today, we have not received any formal complaints from any individual associated with the Men’s Lacrosse Team,” Van Horn said. “If any formal complaints are filed, the College will follow its policy of incident investigation by Title IX standards.”
The Young Harris College Mountain Lions play lacrosse in the Peach Belt Conference in NCAA Division II.