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Basketball is for everyone!
- Or not?
Photo: Mika Volkmann/ imago images/Mika Volkmann
The girls from Spain Park School in Hoover, a city of 90,000 in Alabama, have been playing basketball together for years.
However, halfway through the season, the fifth-graders are told that they are no longer allowed to use the sports hall.
Only teams participating in the Hoover Recreation League - a boys' recreational league - are allowed to do this.
The girls' team registers, plays, gets involved, surpasses themselves and ultimately wins the league!
But the winner's award goes to the boys' team, which lost in the final - because it's a boys' league in which girls have no place?
What sounds like an empowerment film plot from the noughties actually happened in Hoover, Alabama, if the Facebook post by an angry mother is to be believed.
"Before the championship, they were told that they could play, but if they won they couldn't take the trophy," wrote Jayme Mashayekh, who says she is the mother of one of the basketball players.
Was it about "elite" instead of gender?
"What did they do to get disqualified?" asks Mashayekh.
'Didn't they play at a higher level in the competition?
Oh, it's because they're GIRLS?!?!' The girls would have played their hearts out.
"Playing against the boys was a challenge they took on," she writes.
"It made them better players and a better team." Only to be told, "No, sorry, you guys don't count."
The Facebook post is from March 1, but something has apparently changed in the meantime.
Mashayekh updated her post: The city and the sports facility, the Hoover Recreation Center, offered to "make things right for the girls."
The regional portal AL.com reported what that means.
Apparently it wasn't about gender at all.
The girls' team competed in a higher league as an "elite" team, according to a statement from the city of Hoover, seen by AL.com.
"If an 'elite' team takes part in a youth tournament and makes it to the championship round, according to the rules they cannot receive a trophy for that victory," the statement is quoted as saying.
"Only the team that corresponds to the grade level is entitled to be recognized as a tournament winner." This applies to both boys' and girls' teams.
However, the guidelines for youth sports leagues are now to be revised "to ensure that all competition and recognition processes are fair for all participants and that these processes are better understood".
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