Skip to content
Search AI Powered

Latest Stories

Girls Basketball Team Kicked Out Of Boys League Championship After Defeating Boys Teams

Young female student holding a basketball on the court
miodrag ignjatovic/GettyImages

A 6th grade girls team from Kentucky was set to go for the year-end championship tournament, but was told they were banned due to fears boys teams might 'retaliate' if they lost to the girls team.

A 6th-grade girls basketball squad from Next Level Academy in Kentucky that had been dominating all season playing in a boys' league was suddenly banned from participating in the final championship game.

The city-wide basketball league, Southwestern Ohio Basketball (SWOB), made the call because they believed that 11 to 12-year-old girls and boys competing against each other on the court could pose a liability risk leading to violence, even though the girls team had been winning 7-1 all season without incident.


SWOB President Tom Sunderman expressed concern in a statement:

"Doing this for 28 years, what we have worried about is a boys team losing to a girls team (especially in the year end tourney), they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl."
"Then we have liability issues.”

Prez, a social media user on X (Formerly Twitter), didn't buy it. 

"What he meant to say was they can’t have their boys being emasculated by a better girls team… it would be a blow to their developing manhood to get beat by girls."

Next Level team director Larry McGraw didn't think twice when he registered the team to play on the boy's league as "male," given the precedent that the rules of youth basketball were akin to, as he put it, the "Wild West," with different leagues and tournaments across the country applying varying rules and regulations.

McGraw said that in his experience, younger players at an advanced level have challenged themselves in the past by entering a league with older players. He also said it wasn't unheard of for a girl to play on a boys' team or for a girls' team to compete against boys.

Yet Sunderman maintained that the registration was a deception on Next Level's part.

He said he coached against a team of boys for the first game last November but was disappointed to discover the rest of the games were being played by girls.

He explained:

"In November of 2023, Next Level and Larry McGraw deceptively registered a girls team into the 6th grade boys league and under the gender listed as MALE."
"We entered them into the league assuming they were a boys’ team as conveniently no roster was ever provided."
"Subsequently, their first game was filled in by a boys 6th grade Next Level team because they played the 6th grade boys Cincinnati Royals team - coached by myself, so there was no reason to suspect anything different."

He continued:

"It wasn’t until late January/early February that several teams from the 6th-grade division started traveling down to Kentucky to play their scheduled games, that it became apparent that the Next Level team was, in fact, a girls team."
"Several complaints from coaches and teams were filed because of this deception."

Social media users, however, saw SWOB's statement as deflecting from another issue, one that accused the league of trying to keep their feelings from getting hurt in the event the boys were defeated by girls.

X user @WithChem summed it up perfectly, saying the league banned Next Level girls basketball from playing in the championship simply because they were girls.

Users wanted answers.




Letisha Engracia Cardoso Brown, a University of Cincinnati assistant professor, said the issue wasn't whether or not rules were broken but more about the rules and their impact on aspiring young women.

Brown, who focuses on Black women and girls in sports and how they're portrayed in the media, saw this as an instance where women are punished for being successful.

She said:

"It happens all the time. There's this mythos that boys and men are innately always better than girls and women when it comes to sports."

"Shouldn't we be more concerned that they would feel the need to retaliate because they feel like they lost to someone who's supposedly inferior to them? Is that the argument?" said Brown, adding:

"If that's the rhetoric, then that's where we need to start making changes."

McGraw said the girls were never in any real danger during the games, aside from the occasional side-eye.

He recalled:

"They got giggles, they got laughs, and people talked about them... you know, the looks."
"There's a lot of that and I think this was a great opportunity for them to say, 'Yeah, we're pretty darn good and you should respect us.'"

Sunderman said the league offered the girls' team a chance to play in another end-of-year tournament for girls, "just like all other girls teams," but the academy turned down SWOB's offer and pulled its other teams from their tournaments in protest.

More from Trending

Donald Trump
Scott Olson/Getty Images

Fox News Just Listed Off Trump's 'Accomplishments' So Far—And They're Completely Bananas

As shown during coverage of a cabinet meeting when members spent time telling the President how great he is, MAGA Republican President Donald Trump's biggest priority is Donald Trump's image and ego.

Also caught on video was Trump telling a Fox News correspondent to make sure the network praised his cabinet meeting.

Keep ReadingShow less
Screenshot of Donald Trump and Terry Moran
ABC News

Trump Bizarrely Clashes With Reporter Over Photoshopped 'Tattoo' On Abrego Garcia's Knuckles

President Donald Trump sparked criticism after claiming during an interview with ABC News’ Terry Moran that an edited photo depicting tattoos of wrongly-deported Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia showed that he has an alleged connection to the MS-13 gang.

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who arrived in the U.S. in 2012, was labeled a threat in 2019 due to an alleged connection to MS-13. He spent months in detention before an immigration judge found he had a credible fear of persecution—not from MS-13, but from a rival group, Barrio 18, which he said had been extorting his family.

Keep ReadingShow less
Karoline Leavitt; Jeff Bezos
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images; Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Leavitt Lashes Out At Amazon Over 'Hostile' Plan To Display Added Tariff Costs For Products On Website

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt lashed out at Amazon over news that the commerce giant planned to display increased "import charges" on items on their Amazon Haul website, essentially showing to customers the extra money they'd have to shell out as a result of President Donald Trump's tariffs.

Trump has escalated a growing trade war by imposing tariffs of up to 145% on Chinese imports, prompting China to retaliate with its own 125% tariffs on American goods. Additionally, the U.S. has slapped a 10% tax on imports from most other countries, while temporarily suspending higher rates for several nations for 90 days.

Keep ReadingShow less
Screenshot of Canadian voter
CNN

Canadian Voter's Epic Take On Trump In Viral Interview Clip Has The Internet Cheering

A Canadian woman has gone viral following her NSFW interview with CNN in which she explained that her decision of whom to support for prime minister In Monday's election was based primarily on who could "take care of" President Donald Trump, who had threatened Canadian sovereignty amid an ongoing trade war.

In the end, Canadian voters returned the Liberal Party to power for a fourth consecutive term, although Prime Minister Mark Carney will lead a minority government, according to projections from CNN’s broadcast partner CBC.

Keep ReadingShow less
man and woman with cardboard boxes on their heads with faces drawn on them
julio andres rosario ortiz on Unsplash

People Describe The Most Unhinged Things They've Seen Someone Do In Public

One person's "most unhinged thing they've ever seen" is another person's everyday occurrence. It's all about perspective.

If you live 24/7 in an insane environment, unhinged starts to seem completely normal.

Keep ReadingShow less