Girls basketball team banned from boys league after reaching championship

A sixth-grade girls' basketball team from northern Kentucky was banned from a boys' basketball league after romping through the regular season to reach the championship.

The squad from Next Level Girls Basketball notched a 7-1 record in a city-wide basketball league run by Southwestern Ohio Basketball and was preparing for the championship when league president Tom Sunderman notified the athletic academy that it would be too risky to let them play for the title, reported WVXU-FM.

"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," Sunderman said in a statement. "Then we have liability issues."

Sunderman said he coached against a team of boys from Next Level in the first game, and he said the team's gender was listed as male in it registration, but he said the rest of the games were played by girls.

"We entered them into the league assuming they were a boys' team as conveniently no roster was ever provided," Sunderman said in his statement.

"Subsequently, their first game was filled in by a boys 6th grade Next Level team ... 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."

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Next Level director Larry McGraw said he never felt the girls were in danger, but he said they faced gender-based scorn during the season.

"They got giggles, they got laughs, and people talked about them... you know, the looks," McGraw said. "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.'"

The league offered the team a chance to play in another year-end tournament for girls, but the club turned that down and removed all of its other teams from the league's tournaments in protest.