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CV NEWS FEED // This week in federal district court, the legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) represented four female athletes who sued the Connecticut Association of Schools after being forced to compete against male athletes in high school track.
Attorneys with the firm are representing Selina Soule, Alanna Smith, Chelsea Mitchell, and Ashley Nicoletti, four Connecticut athletes who lost multiple titles, championships, and college opportunities to male athletes while competing during high school, according to an ADF news release.
The male athletes started entering high school competitions after the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference adopted a new policy that allowed males claiming to be females to participate in girls’ sports.
In 2017, two male athletes started competing in Connecticut girls’ high school track teams. By 2019, those two male athletes “broke 17 girls’ track meet records, deprived girls of more than 85 opportunities to advance to the next level of competition, and took 15 women’s state track championship titles,” according to the news release, prompting the plaintiffs to sue.
Initially, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit denied the girls’ case, but in December it reinstated the case, allowing it to proceed in district court.
Mitchell said in the news release: “Besides the psychological toll of experiencing unfair losses over and over, the CIAC’s policy has more tangible harms for women.”
The policy “robs girls of the chance to race in front of college scouts who show up for elite meets, and to compete for the scholarships and opportunities that come with college recruitment,” Mitchell said. “I’ll never know how my own college recruitment was impacted by losing those four state championship titles to a male.”
