Female soccer players at a New Hampshire high school boycotted a game on Tuesday because of safety concerns over a male player on the opposing team.
Several members of the Hillsboro-Deering High School Girls Soccer team refused to play against the Kearsarge Regional High School team, whose star athlete is a male named Maelle Jacques.
“This isn’t about transgenderism,” Heather Thyng, the mother of a Hillsboro-Deering player, told the NHJournal. “This is about biology for us and the increased physical risk when playing a full contact sport against the opposing sex.”
Thyng’s daughter is one of the players who withdrew. At least five girls on the varsity squad bowed out after learning of the male’s participation, Hillsboro-Deering parent Betsy Harrington told the outlet. Hillsboro-Deering had to call in JV players to compensate for the missing players.
“No one ever got near [Maelle,] so I guess they’ll never be in any danger if there’s enough girls to always have a weak team,” Harrington said. “If every game has a few girls refusing to play, we will never know the ability of the Kearsarge team. They have an advantage I hadn’t thought about. It’s that they get to always play a crippled team without all of their players.”
Thyng and her daughter agreed that refusing to compete is the best method of protest against the intrusion of male athletes into women’s sports. Jacques is nearly six feet tall, she said, and his competing presents a risk of injury to the female players he could come into contact with on the field.
While Republican governor Chris Sununu approved a law that banned men from women’s sports in fifth grade through high school, the Kearsarge School Board voted this summer to ignore the law.
Jacques has trounced the female competition in high school track and field as well, winning the girls’ high jump at the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association Division 2 state championship in February. He won the women’s category with a 5’2″ jump, which was ten inches lower than the best boys high jump at 6’0″.
The team’s coaches told Thyng that neither her daughter nor any other player will face retaliation for their decision to stay on the sidelines, the NHJournal reported.
“The coaches reassured me they told the girls there would be no negative repercussions for anyone who refuses to compete,” Thyng said. “They said they understood the increased risk and would be paying attention to the aggressiveness of the game, and if anyone was getting hurt or play was too rough, they were prepared to end the game.”