Officials with the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference have developed a plan of action for when transgender student-athletes wish to suit up and compete in sanctioned events.
The conference, a 51-member prep school organization that features more than 600 coaches and 19,000 student-athletes in five divisions, will be 80 years old this July. The OVAC fields teams in football, basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, tennis, swimming, wrestling, baseball, softball, and track and field in both West Virginia and East Ohio.
According to Dirk DeCoy, executive director of the conference, a transgender student-athlete has never competed for an OVAC-member school.
“But we’ve been having those conversations for about three years now, and that’s because we want to be fair when the scenario presents itself,” he explained. “We have come to realize there are two things the OVAC does not decide. We don’t decide champions because our champions are determined on the field, on the court, and so on. And No. 2, we don’t decide gender.
“So, when we have a transgender student-athlete, the school will tell us male or female and we’ll go from there. If a principal tells us this student-athlete is a female, then they participate in the female sports,” he said. “And it would be the same if the principal tells us a student-athlete is a male.”
Constitutional Law
Idaho was the first state (2020) to approve legislation that banned transgender females from competing in women’s sports at the high school and college levels, and the state of West Virginia adopted a similar law in 2021. The Mountain State’s legislation, in fact, was upheld earlier this month by a federal judge, and as of July 2022, 18 states in total had banned trans females from publicly funded athletic competition.
Despite the efforts of some Ohio lawmakers, the Buckeye State has not implemented a ban on transgender athletes on any level of competition.
“We at the OVAC just want to do it right, and that is why transgender student-athletes are welcome just like everyone else,” DeCoy said. “This is sports. There are a lot of more important things out there in life than sports. This is the fun stuff, and we want to make it fun, and we want to do it right.
“That’s why we’ve had a lot of discussions about it,” he added “And it comes down to the fact that the schools tell us the genders and it all goes from there.”
As always, if a female high school team does not enlist enough girls to compete, the student-athletes would be permitted to join the boy’s teams if they choose.
“The OVAC has permitted that for years, and it has nothing to do with gender identity. It does have to do with providing a student-athlete the opportunity to compete,” DeCoy said. “We’ve not had any issues with it for a while, but that’s what would take place because that’s the fair way to go about it. We just want to offer every young person the opportunity to participate if that’s what they want to do.”
