TAKE YER BALL AND GO HOME
Judge keeps girl off boys's team
A New Jersey Catholic school has won the right to keep a seventh-grader from playing on its basketball team because she is a girl, leaving the 13-year-old heartbroken.
Sydney Phillips of Scotch Plains, NJ, told The Post that she learned a valuable lesson from the ruling, handed down on Thursday in New Jersey Superior Court.
“Girls are just as good as boys,” she said, citing a pickup game she won at recess earlier in the day — against a group of boys.
Newark Judge Donald Kes- sler said that Sydney could not join the boys team at St. Theresa’s School in Kenilworth because it would disrupt “the status quo.”
Sydney asked to play on the boys’ team only after the girls’ team was dismantled for lack of players.
There are only 17 kids in her grade at St. Theresa’s, she said.
When the school objected, citing rules that call for separate boys’ and girls’ teams, Sidney’s parents sued the Archdiocese of Newark, which runs the athletic programs at St. Theresa.
The family demanded a preliminary injunction to force the school to let Sydney join the team, arguing that there are no rules prohibiting girls from playing on boys’ teams.
Sydney is a good player who could “boost morale and allow them to win a couple of games,” the family’s lawyer, Susan McCrea, told the judge. The archdiocese disagreed. “We have rules or we don’t,” argued lawyer Chris Westrick. “If we have to break rules for the Phillips family, we have to break rules for everybody.”
Kessler ruled against Sydney, saying that “putting her on the boys’ team would be a change of the status quo,” and create “a circumstance which does not now exist.”
The judge also said the school’s religious status protects it from bias claims under New Jersey’s discrimination laws.
The judge welcomed Sydney’s parents to return to him with more evidence, but the school’s basketball season ends in February.
Sydney’s dad, Scott Phillips, said he is not sure if he and his wife will appeal the judge’s ruling or continue their lawsuit.
“We didn’t sue them for money. We just wanted her to play basketball,” Phillips said.