Posted on 02/02/2017 9:14:59 AM PST by oh8eleven
The New Jersey seventh-grader whose family sued the Catholic school that refused to let her play basketball on the boys team was abruptly expelled from her middle school Wednesday.
The parents of 12-year-old Sydney Phillips were sent a letter from an Archdiocese of Newark lawyer saying that both Sydney and her sister Kaitlyn should not attend St. Theresa “tomorrow morning or any day thereafter.”
The Phillips family was hoping Sydney would be able to play with the boys after the girls team was disbanded last school year.
When the Kenilworth school nixed that idea, her dad took legal action against the archdiocese and St. Theresa.
Apparently the school charter maintains that it can boot a student whose family brings a suit against it.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Obama would have dispatched the Justice Dept., the IRS, the Gaystapo and his allies in the Media to harass the school into compliance.
She asked to be put on the Boys Team.
The School said no.
The Parent’s Sued.
The School expelled their Children because the School enforced the part of their Contract with the School that stated that bringing a Suit would result in Expulsion.
They did not expel the Girl because she asked to be put on the Boy’s Team as the Headline suggests.
The world isn’t fair. The school owes her nothing but an education unless she had a basketball contract. As we used to say, “tough luck”.
I would think the benefit of attending a Christian school would far outweigh the benefit of being able to play a sport at the middle school level. If the parent’s view is different, they are missing the primary purpose of Christian school in the first place.
Rarely used but still works.
The school has completely undermined the parents' case by expelling the kids. Since the girl is no longer a student at the school, she couldn't play on any of its sports teams anyway -- even if they win the case.
If this were a public school, they might have a case, but since this is a private school, they have none....................
Correct.
Had they not sued, she would not have been expelled............
The School knows Obama’s Nazi DOJ is gone
Good point.
You and a few others make some good points.
What gets me about all of this, is why in the sam hill are we in a lawsuit situation over a girl wanting to play basketball??
All of the reasonable solutions go out the window, when certain people decide they would rather deal with it in a courtroom.
The school had a policy. It stuck to it. The father said, “Oh no you don’t.”
Well, oh yes they did.
If you don’t like the policies of an organization, don’t be a part of that organization.
Since this is so important to dear old dad, he should pack up the family and move to a place where the school has a girl’s team.
This school has zero obligation to this family, when it comes to bending the rules.
Girls are really happy to have girl exclusive things, like clubs and events. Some even like going to an all girl school. Fine. It works the other way around too.
Guys have a right to an all guy thing too. Who knew?
Title 9? Private school. Title 9 sucks anyway.
Men are wired to be active. They have a need to compete in sports, and it’s physical as well as mental.
Girls can sit in class all day from an early age. Boys go bat S crazy if they can’t get outside and burn off energy.
Boys are different than girls, no matter what Leftists think.
A religious school certainly has the right to decide what sports if any it will make coed. Period.
It may also be the case that the league rules dictate playing time. This could easily affect the decision. My daughter played a couple of seasons of CYO basketball when her elementary and middle school could scrape up enough girls to field a team. In her league, every player had to play a minimum number of minutes (iirc, at least a quarter). A rule like that could be a factor, depending on whether or not this girl is good enough to hang with the guys. (In middle school, she just might.) More information is needed.
That said, I am very familiar with situations in club soccer where a few of the more athletic girls play successfully on the boys teams through middle school and into their high school years. If a girl can play up, I'm not opposed to letting her do it on a case-by-case basis, especially if there is no girls' team and she'd be out of the sport otherwise. By the same token, I have no problem with a precocious athlete playing up a year (or two) in age if they're good enough. (My daughter's team had been riddled by graduation by the time they reached U18, and they were always trying to get U16's and U17's to guest.) The consideration should always be what's best for the athlete.
A number of posters on this thread seem to be conflating this situation with the current gender bender issue. That is not the case at all. This is just a girl who had been happily playing on a girls' team. That team was dropped. If she's in 7th or 8th grade, she probably doesn't want to change schools and leave all her friends. I don't see a problem with accommodating her on the boys team provided that she is good enough to hold her own.
If there is such a thing as a girl’s team, there is no justification whatever for a mixed team - only a boys’ team. There being no question of allowing boys on the girls’ team.In this case they don’t have a girl’s team, but they presumably don’t have mixed competition to play against.
That said, in competitive leagues there should be no question of allowing boys on the girls' team -- while girls on the boys' team may be ok -- because players can "play up," but they can't "play down." This is common in youth sports in age-defined competitions and in tiered leagues with defined divisional structures, but I think the same principle can (and sometimes does) apply to girls playing on boys' teams.
(In rec leagues, girls play successfully with the boys in the earlier years; then puberty hits and most of the girls can't keep up; very few can hang in with the boys into the high school years. In areas with well-developed youth programs, most of the competitive girls will have migrated to girls' teams and girls' leagues before that happens.)
"Playing up" is ok because a girl does not gain an unfair competitive advantage by virtue of being a girl. Some leagues are quite accommodating on this, especially if a particular club does not have a girls' team at some particular age level. (E.g., the girls' team folded at U15 because too many of the girls, now in high school, moved to other activities; a handful are left and want to keep playing soccer, so the club puts them on the appropriate boys' team.)
The gender benders, of course, turn this principle on its head and insist that boys who want to pretend to be girls should be placed on the girls' team. The problem, of course, is that the boys in this situation DO gain an unfair competitive advantage; in gender terms, they are "playing down," which you can't do in any legitimate league. It doesn't matter if there is a big tournament or heated rivalry game coming up: varsity players can't step down to the JV; U17 players can't moonlight with the U14s; Division 1 soccer players can't play for a Division 5 sister team in the same club.
A very few girls playing up on boys' teams is not the same thing as a coed team/league. There are some recreational leagues that blur the difference; they are nominally coed but the reality is that most of the girls have dropped out, and only one or two girls are still playing for what is, in reality, a boys' team. In a real coed league, you need quotas for the girls, with both teams fielding similar numbers. This produces an elaborate game within the game. Years ago, I coached a team in a very competitive adult league playing coed touch football. We became a very good team, with a number of ex-college players and the rest of the guys being pretty good athletes as well. The challenge was always to use offensive and defensive schemes that matched our girls vs. their girls, and the guys vs. the guys. You certainly couldn't afford to get caught in a mismatch where one of the girls got isolated in coverage against one of their guys.
Ah, memories. This changed for us in a big way when one of the athletic guys brought his girlfriend who had played Division 1 college basketball, and she brought one of her former teammates. They were good, not quite as fast as the guys (and they would not have survived in the tackle version of the game), but very competent all-around athletes. You would want them on your adult rec football or softball team, and not just to make your quota; they more than held their own. When you get a couple of girls who can run with the guys in a coed league, you will blow most other teams away, and we did.
There are too many posters on this thread treating this as a ritual purity issue. This is not about a trans-whatever trying to impose its fantasy on everyone else. This is just a girl whose team disappeared and who would like to keep playing. If she can run with the boys, I'm ok with it. If she's not good, she won't get playing time. That's ok. If she is good, some of the boys might get shown up by a girl. That's ok too.
I second your entire post.
That said, sympathy is due to the boy who suffers in comparison with the girl who can “play up.” The boy who would start, but doesn’t because of the outlier girl’s completion and, worse, the boy who would have made the team but doesn’t, because he couldn’t play better than “a girl.”That has to sting, knowing that the greatest girl Little League player is ain’t even gonna make Triple A, let alone the majors. It bothered me that the Phillies made a fuss over the girl who played championship Little League as a pitcher (who will not proceed to compete with pro-level male pitchers when she’s 19 - or even, most likely, with a good HS baseball pitcher).
Youth sports are a desirable, healthy activity. Not everyone chooses to play, and that's fine. But in general, the more opportunities that we can make available, the better. In theory, the goal should be a team for every player, and an appropriate competitive level for every team. In the real world, we run into constraints on fields and coaches, and we work around those as best we can.
The club model is inherently superior to the school-based model because clubs can be as broad as needed at the bottom; well-developed clubs start with no-cut recreational teams at the entry level and more competitive teams as one moves up the ladder. Club play at the top levels is extremely competitive and is often dramatically superior to the game being played in the high schools. School-based models, on the other hand, are inherently narrow; a high school will pick a JV and a varsity team, and everyone else is out of the sport. (Including superior players who got cut because the coaches misjudged them in a short tryout; players who are late bloomers and who would have been great players at age 16, but missed the cut at 13; players who turned up sick or injured at tryouts; and players who got cut due to coaching favoritism, nepotism being one of the infamous banes of high school athletics. In a club system, all of these players get to stay in the sport with a chance to improve, get healthy, prove themselves and rise over time.)
In any youth sports context, my goal would be to afford an opportunity to play for any kid who wants to play. If the kid isn't very good, that's fine; he can play at a lower level. But I would do whatever I could to broaden the base. I don't have a problem with allowing a girl to try out for the boys team if there is no girls team in her sport. As a practical matter, this will be pretty rare. If a small school doesn't have a girls' basketball team, girls who really want to play basketball will go somewhere else (at least, in a major metro area where there are alternatives). But mostly, if there is no girls' team, the girls will never get basketball on their agenda to begin with. Youth sports is highly social, especially at the younger ages, and the girls will play something else with their friends.
This case is unusual because the school had had a girls' team, and dropped it, leaving this 12 year old stranded. She got caught in a transition. My reaction would be to find a way to let her stay in the sport, provided she is good enough to make the boys team. The story doesn't give enough detail to answer all the questions. Is she a good player? Is high school basketball a goal? Is there a strong local club team she can join? Why did her school drop girls' basketball to begin with? (Lack of players would be my guess.) I agree that a lawsuit isn't the right way for her parents to respond to the situation, but I hate to see an established player pushed out a sport because the adults can't get a team organized.
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