WeRALLCHARLIE

The @JeffcoSchoolsCo athlete who lost her position to a male student shared her heartbreaking story (through her mom). Please share and give her a voice. @Riley_Gaines_ @JenniferSey @xx_xyathletics @FoxNews @CivilRights @usedgov @ADFLegal @KristenWaggoner @Tyler2ONeil @nypost This isn’t about believing every girl should make a team. This isn’t about saying my daughter was entitled to a roster spot simply because she worked hard. Competitive sports involve difficult decisions. Coaches have to make cuts. Athletes don’t always get the outcome they want. But if girls’ sports are supposed to provide girls with athletic opportunities, parents have every right to ask what happens when a male athlete is given one of those opportunities instead. We are talking about my daughter. A real girl who loved her sport. A girl who trusted her coach. A girl who worked for an opportunity. A girl who had dreams of playing college volleyball. And a girl who was told she had been “beat out” by other athletes—only to discover that one of the athletes who received the opportunity was male. I open-enrolled my daughter into Dakota Ridge High School specifically because of the volleyball program. She loved volleyball. She had invested years into the sport, had dreams of playing in college, and had built her high-school experience around being part of this team. During this past summer, she was invited by the high school coaches to a special volleyball camp at Colorado Christian University that cost our family money. She also participated in additional training opportunities with the high school program. Then things started to become confusing. My daughter is a setter. That is her position. In June, the coach suddenly began encouraging her to try playing right side hitter. He told her she needed to try out as a right side hitter, even though hitting was not her position. She trusted him. She worked hard at the new position because she believed she was being given another opportunity to demonstrate what she could do. At the same time, families began noticing that something was different regarding one particular student. At first, we didn’t know what to make of it. The student’s mother previously had spoken publicly to the media in Missouri and even NPR, and those stories confirmed what families had been wondering: the athlete participating with the girls was male. My daughter went into tryouts believing she had a legitimate opportunity to make the team. Instead, on the night of tryouts after being forced to try out for a position she does not know, she was left until nearly the very end then brought into a room with a panel of four coaches and told they did not have a spot for her. Imagine being a teenage girl who has spent years working toward something, who changed schools for that opportunity, who was invited to additional training and a special camp, who was suddenly encouraged to learn an entirely new position—and then sitting in front of four coaches and being told there was no place for you. She was devastated and that’s just scratching the surface. The coach stated in writing, “She competed for a spot, other athletes ultimately demonstrated more consistency in the areas needed, and she was beat out.” Beat out-by a MALE. My daughter was not simply losing a spot on a volleyball roster, she was losing something she had built her life around and part of her identity. She has recently had to process the fact that the opportunity she had worked so hard for was given to a male. I’m just sick over it and something has to be done. Jeffco has told the community that no females have lost opportunities in sports! Try to imagine explaining that to your daughter. Girls should not have to wonder whether the athletic opportunities created for them will actually remain available to them. There’s so much more to say about fairness, safety, locker room issues and so on. But for now, thank you for reading this part of our story.