The 2023-24 season was a dream for the Lakeland College Rustlers Women’s basketball team.
The Rustlers, competing in the Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA), went undefeated through 26 games, won their conference banner in the Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference for the first time, and ended the season with a national championship victory on their home court.
Chris King, Rustlers Head Coach for the past 16 seasons, was named CCAA Coach of the Year.
It was a fairytale ending to a perfect season.
The next season began just as the last one had ended, with the Rustlers winning. A lot. They were 8-0 going into late November games when the losses started piling up. Twelve straight losses in their remaining 12 games of the season, to be exact, all by a score of 2-0.
In early December 2024, Taylor Weaver, Managing Editor at Lloydminster Meridian Source newspaper, sat down at his desk and reviewed local sports scores from the weekend prior. Seeing the women’s team’s forfeits alerted the journalist, who had covered Rustler’s athletics for more than a decade, that something unsettling was going on.
“The team, under the direction of one of the most decorated coaches in Canadian sports history, hadn’t lost a game in two calendar years,” wrote Weaver. “The forfeits came after the entire team decided to stand behind the coach and not play after King was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. King was fired seven days after being put on administrative leave.
“The whole situation has garnered more questions than answers … and the answers the Source want seem impossible to get.”
Until now.
The players who stood behind their coach and refused to play after he was placed on administrative leave and eventually fired, the same ones who petitioned No King. No Ring - Fair Treatment and Support For Coach Chris King & The Lakeland WBB Team, the same ones who littered Lakeland College with sticky notes supporting their outcast coach, are the stars of episode 2 of Shift Change.
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