Texas Longhorns Fire Basketball Coach After Domestic Assault Charge

Chris Beard was fired on Thursday as the pinnacle coach of the College of Texas males’s basketball staff, weeks after he was arrested on a felony home violence cost in Austin.

Chris Del Conte, the college’s vice chairman and athletic director, mentioned in an announcement on Thursday that the college had determined to terminate Beard’s contract efficient instantly.

Beard, 49, was suspended with out pay on Dec. 12 after he was arrested and charged with assault on a member of a household or family by impeding breath circulation, a third-degree felony, based on the Travis County Sheriff’s Workplace. Beard posted a money bond of $10,000 and was launched from jail the day of his arrest.

Rodney Terry, the staff’s affiliate head coach, has been serving as performing head coach of the Texas Longhorns males’s basketball staff since Beard was suspended. Del Conte mentioned that Terry would end the season because the staff’s performing head coach.

“This has been a troublesome scenario that we’ve been diligently working by way of,” Del Conte mentioned.

The Austin Police Division mentioned officers responded to a name a few disturbance at a house in Austin at round 12:15 a.m. on Dec. 12. The caller informed the police that the disturbance had ended and that one particular person on the house had left, the police mentioned in an announcement. When the police arrived on the home, a girl informed them that Beard had assaulted and choked her.

Perry Minton, a lawyer for Beard, mentioned in an announcement on Thursday that Beard was “crushed on the information he is not going to be teaching on the College of Texas.”

“On the outset of Coach Beard’s suspension, the college promised they’d conduct an unbiased investigation surrounding the allegations and decide concerning his employment solely after that they had performed so,” Minton mentioned. “They proceeded to terminate Coach Beard with out asking a single query of him or his fiancée.”

The college declined to touch upon its investigation.

Just a few days after Beard was arrested, Randi Trew, Beard’s fiancée, mentioned in an announcement that her lawyer shared with The Related Press that the 2 had engaged in a “bodily battle” after she broke his glasses in “frustration.” Beard, she added, “didn’t strangle me.”

“Chris has acknowledged that he was performing in self-defense, and I don’t refute that,” she mentioned. “I don’t imagine Chris was making an attempt to deliberately hurt me in any manner. It was by no means my intent to have him arrested or prosecuted.” A college spokesman confirmed that Beard had been provided the chance to resign or have his contracted terminated by the college. Minton, Beard’s lawyer, informed James Davis, the college’s vice chairman of authorized affairs, in a letter on Thursday that the supply “got here as a shock.”

“With this, I need to be on report as emphatically stating, and herein memorializing, that Coach Beard has not performed something to violate any provision of his contract with the College of Texas,” Minton mentioned within the letter. “He was arrested, then his fiancée retracted her beforehand reported assertion.”

The Texas Longhorns named Beard head coach in April 2021 after he spent 5 seasons as the pinnacle coach of the boys’s basketball staff at Texas Tech College, which he led to the N.C.A.A. nationwide championship recreation in 2019.

Earlier than teaching the Longhorns, Beard was the pinnacle coach of the boys’s basketball groups on the College of Arkansas at Little Rock; Angelo State College in San Angelo, Texas; McMurry College in Abilene, Texas; Seminole State School in Seminole, Okla.; and Fort Scott Neighborhood School in Fort Scott, Kan. Beard graduated from the College of Texas in 1995 with a bachelor’s diploma in kinesiology, the examine of human movement.