A peculiar report
A school district in Virginia said it received a peculiar report last week from one of its junior varsity girls’ basketball games: An assistant coach for the Churchland High School Truckers had stepped on the court on Jan. 21, and played against teenagers.
The assistant coach and the head coach are no longer working at the school, the Times tactfully adds.
Details of how exactly an adult coaching staff member had managed to put on a jersey and play alongside the teenage athletes in their game against Nansemond River High School were still unclear on Tuesday as the district continued its investigation.
Yes you’d think it would be kind of obvious, wouldn’t you, and yet…
Churchland High School is not the only school to have dealt with adults posing as teenagers in games in recent years, possibly using experience and size to their competitive advantage.
Possibly? What mean, possibly? Typo for “obviously”?
In Dallas, a 25-year-old man posed as a 17-year-old student and played in a high school basketball team, becoming a star player before he was arrested in 2018 and charged with tampering with government records, The Dallas Morning News reported. He was sentenced to six years probation in 2019, the newspaper reported.
And in Memphis, in 2013, a 22-year-old man was accused of faking transcripts in order to join a high school basketball team, according to Fox 2, a local television station.
And that’s not ok?
No, of course it’s not ok. So why is it ok for men to do it to women???
H/t Sackbut
What, no trans teenagers are teenagers?
I “love” that picture. it’s powerful, like the ones of the two boys running against the girls.
Not only is it considered “OK”, but for men “identifying” as women, governments are encouraging, and assisting with the tampering.
It’s also soooooooooooooooo pathetic. The dopey bastard has to convince all & sundry, including himself, that he really is a teenage girl in order to secure for himself the satisfaction of being on a winning team. Did none of the fathers of the girls on either of the sides raise an objection? Or attempt to have this clown disqualified.?
Yes. Quite.
But look on the bright side. An overgrown toddler has had an ego boost, almost certainly available to him by no other means.
The coach is a woman. I probably misled you via the photo – it’s several years old, and has been passed around many times, so I didn’t bother to label it.
“Details of how exactly an adult coaching staff member had managed to put on a jersey and play alongside the teenage athletes in their game against Nansemond River High School were still unclear…”
Depending on the age of the coach… not really all that perplexing to my mind, if they’re the same sex and only a few years older than the players. There’s a substantial amount of morphological overlap between 18yo and 22yo women (or men), especially if you’re looking at a subset of particularly athletic people.
Much easier to spot sex differences, of course. But then again of course males would not be “using experience and size to their competitive advantage.” Right? /s
FWIW, the three incidents mentioned in the article are:
• A woman of unspecified age, who had been working with the high school for less than a year, and was an assistant coach, played in a JV game;
• A 25-year-old man pretended to be a 17-year-old student and played on the basketball team;
• A 22-year-old man faked transcripts and played on a high school basketball team.
In that third case, I suspect it’s legitimate for a 22-year-old man who never finished high school to play on a high school basketball team if he is a student there. I had a 21-year-old classmate my freshman year of high school. This other man’s error was fraudulently becoming a student, not pretending to be younger, as far as I can tell.
(OK, I just looked up what I think are the relevant Texas eligibility standards, and it does require that student athletes be no older than 19, so I was wrong about that.)
The first case, everyone knows she’s older, and a staff member rather than a student, but she played in a game anyway. Just guessing, but maybe she didn’t think it mattered because it was junior varsity, not varsity. It’s very strange.
Ok I went hunting because I couldn’t read the NYT article, and found this:
https://www.foxsports.com.au/basketball/high-school-basketball-coach-fired-after-wild-impersonation-attempt/news-story/c8d21dd669dc0a3b62b2e38454e89841
Admittedly more of a difference than I’d expected, knowing nothing about US school sports ;-) Still less of a size difference than I’d expect between teenage girls and a teenage male, though.
ibbica, thanks for that article. It appears that both head coaches have also been fired. It isn’t completely clear from the article, but I gather that the assistant coach was impersonating one of the students (who was away), and that student has now decided not to return to the school next year.
It’s possible that the team didn’t have enough players. I was under the impression that being unable to field a team usually results in a forfeit, and sometimes they let kids play an unofficial game with maybe mixed up teams, since they are already there. None of it counts in the record books, but they have fun. I could see a coach taking the court in an off-the-books game, just so they have enough players. Except for size difference, of course.
But doing this in an official game sounds completely improper, and impersonating a student is terribly unethical.
Sackbut, that’s sort of similar to an experience I had when I worked for a headhunter (for those who don’t know what that means, an agency that seeks out people who need a job and people who need employees and matches them). They wanted to get a particular list of graduates from a school notorious for being impossible. They asked me to tell the school I was a student in biology at a particular college (all true) in hopes they would think I was interested in their school. I was, though not in that program. I did it, because it did not require me to lie.
Then they had another woman do the same. She was not in college, and had not finished high school. Her use of language was so transparently unfamiliar with college-speak that she could not possibly have fooled anyone. She wasn’t even able to give them the name of the college she was attending, which would make her more suspicious. She did it, because an attorney (not working as an attorney, but for the agency as a recruiter, and a co-owner) told her it was legal.
IANAL, but my understanding was it is always illegal to misrepresent yourself in such a situation. Perhaps Screechy could enlighten us?