Wilkes University’s former baseball coach says the school fired him two years ago because he reported a white player for making “offensive racial comments” toward a Black player.
In a federal lawsuit filed Friday, Kevin Gryboski, a star baseball player at Wilkes who played Major League Baseball, contends the school violated his civil rights by firing him without a good reason on May 25, 2023.
Efforts to obtain comment from Wilkes general counsel Elizabeth Leo were not immediately successful.
Gryboski says he enjoyed great success as a Wilkes’ head coach since 2019 and “was held in high esteem by his peers, players, staff and university students.”
“Mr. Gryboski enjoyed an exemplary reputation both with the university and the community at large,” the lawsuit says.
On March 13, 2023, he emailed Leo to report many of his players told him that the white player made “offensive racial comments” against the black player. He did that because school policy and federal law requires reporting, the suit says.
The school investigated and determined Gryboski’s report was “founded,” but fired him “in retaliation for his report of the racially offensive comments made by one player to another player of a different color, race and national origin,” according to the suit.
The firing was “reckless, outrageous and performed with an extreme indifference to the rights of Mr. Gryboski,” the suit says.
The firing humiliated, shamed and embarrassed him and damaged his personal and professional reputation, according to the suit.
The suit seeks back pay, unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, courts costs and reasonable attorneys’ fees.
Gryboski, a graduate of the former Bishop Hoban High School in Wilkes-Barre, starred in baseball at Wilkes from 1992 to 1995. He still holds the school record for pitching the most career complete games and ranks in the top 10 for most strikeouts, innings pitched, wins and games started, according to a biography still posted on the school website.
The biography also says the school no longer employs Gryboski and the page remains posted as “part of a historical archive.”
By his fourth season as coach, Wilkes won 24 games, the most since the 2009 season, won the 1,000th game in school history and four players were named Middle Atlantic Conference all stars, according to the biography.
The team slumped in 2023, winning only 17 games while losing 24, according to the school’s athletic department website.
Gryboski's coaching career followed five years as a professional baseball player.
The Cincinnati Reds drafted Gryboski in the 16th round of the 1994 Major League Baseball draft. He returned to Wilkes for his senior season and was drafted in the 16th round in 1995 by the Seattle Mariners.
Traded to the Atlanta Braves in 2002, he pitched in the majors for parts of five seasons, including the final two with the Texas Rangers and Washington Nationals. For Atlanta, he appeared in 13 playoff games from 2002-2004 with a 1.64 earned run average over 11 innings with 10 strikeouts. He finished his professional career with 12 wins, eight losses and a 4.07 ERA in 238 regular season games, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
Wilkes inducted him into its athletics hall of fame in 2005. He was inducted to the Luzerne County Hall of Fame in 2012 and the Plains American Legion Hall of Fame in 2011.
Gryboski graduated from Wilkes with a degree in environmental sciences with a minor in physics, according to the biography.
