Albany High School retaliates against track athletes for organizing petition against bad dress code policy
This isn’t directly labor related, but its certainly indicative of how poorly athletes are treated, especially women. These athletes organized a petition in opposition of poor policy recently enforced by the Albany High School athletic director and the school opted to retaliate against the athletes with suspensions. The excuses for the suspension (an allegation of vulgar language that somehow encompasses 13 athletes) and the policy (claiming its distracting to male coaches) from the school administration are laughable.
As an Albany High School and Albany High Track & Field athlete alum and the school's 1 mile and 3000m indoor track record holder in 2006, from which I went on to run for Boston College at the Division 1 level in the NCAA, I fully support the petition created by the Albany High School Girls Track & Field team against this ridiculous rule that demonstrates a severe lack of understanding of the sport.
One can merely run a Google search and find a few other similar controversies where clearly Ms. Chapple and the school administration who adopted this archaic rule are on the wrong side of the issue and it implies something very creepy that the school's coaches can't control themselves over a teenage girls' sport bra. Because of this, Albany High is choosing to prioritize the athletic director's presumption of coaches' inability of self-control over these young girls' physical comfort and future goals.
(As seen below, this school took the side of the Track girls team over a football coach who claimed this attire was distracting)
https://www.nytimes.com/.../rowan-sports-bra-controversy...
This was never an issue or an enforced policy during my time as a Track & Field athlete at Albany High School.
It's the standard practice attire for the sport. It gets hot and during practice a track athlete is pushing their body as far as possible to pass that threshold of as fast as they can run. That's how athletes improve and get faster times. I ran a 4:23 mile for Albany High School. I've thrown up after practices from exerting myself as hard as I physically could. I mostly practiced shirtless, even indoors. It was never a problem and sports bras during practice for the girls team were never an issue then either.
The suspensions should all be rescinded and the school district needs to apologize to every single athlete who was impacted by this sexist regressive decision to retaliate against these athletes, impugn their record and undermine their capabilities in applying to colleges by putting a suspension on their records.