Nick Rolovich said in July he would not get a Covid-19 vaccine and maintained his stance once a state mandate was announced in August. Four of his assistants were also fired.
Washington State University fired its football coach, Nick Rolovich, and four of his assistants on Monday for failing to comply with the state’s Covid-19 vaccination mandate, making Rolovich one of the nation’s most prominent public employees to lose his job over a refusal to be vaccinated. Rolovich’s dismissal brings to a close the monthslong staredown between the state’s highest-paid employee and its most powerful political leaders, mirroring confrontations that have been taking place across the country as the coronavirus pandemic stretches well into its second year. “I just want to emphasize: People made a choice, and they had months to make that choice,” Washington State University’s president, Kirk Schulz, said in a news conference on Monday night. “This wasn’t something that just all of a sudden popped up.” In fact, Schulz said, the athletic department held educational seminars and the athletic director, Pat Chun, who hired Rolovich, had repeated conversations with the coach about his stance. Rolovich applied this month for a religious exemption from the mandate, which is among the strictest in the country. The exemption was provisionally approved by a committee that conducts blind reviews — without knowing the applicant’s name or department. But then it was up to Chun, in consultation with human resources and environmental health and safety department officials, to determine whether the coach could perform his job duties without posing a danger to the public. Chun said Rolovich’s request for an accommodation had been denied, without elaborating. Monday was the deadline Gov. Jay Inslee set for state workers to be fully vaccinated or to receive a religious or medical exemption allowing them to keep their jobs. A state agency report from earlier this month showed that about 90 percent of state employees who would be affected by the mandate had already been vaccinated. Earlier in the day, a Superior Court judge rejected a request by hundreds of Washington State Patrol troopers, corrections officers, ferry workers and other public employees for a temporary injunction to block Inslee’s mandate, though the lawsuit they have filed can still go forward. Rolovich,42, who was in the second year of a five-year, $15.6 million contract, had become the public face of the showdown with Inslee, who repeatedly said there would be no exceptions.
