Dontcha know Kellie is aware?
Coach Harper's statements about how this has been "nothing outside of basketball" strike me as very odd.
Sure, there are some line in the sand issues, like team rules. It doesn't matter if you are Candace Parker or a walk-on, the rules apply to everyone, equally as do the consequences for breaking them.
After the odd UCF game, this "situation" looks more like something that is going in practice with attitude or effort but on the flipside, RJ had been killing it in games, scoring, assisting, getting rebounds, and to my untrained eye, working pretty hard on defense.
So, if a coach wants something more or different in practice, I think creating a speculation spectacle by announcing an "indefinite suspension" is not good player management. A coach should be able to motivate a player in more subtle ways. Sometimes star players are higher maintenance and demands for coaching patience come with the territory of running with race horses and not plow horses,
And putting RJ in as a garbage time player in what should have been her tune-up game for the nationally televised Stanford meeting (and right after Rickea had a great outing against UCF), is an almost unfathomable change in tone. I can't see how anything positive comes out of that coaching decision and whatever message it was intended to send.
I am generally pro-player because they are the ones who win you games, so that is my bias when it comes to coach v. player power struggles.
