Swim Team Unite After Biological Born Male Tries To Join Team
By Extra-Ordinary Women
Nearly two years after Penn swimmer Lia Thomas made headlines by winning an NCAA women’s swimming national championship as a biological male, a new development unfolded on Thursday in Virginia. Ten members of the Roanoke College women’s swim team came together to voice their concerns about fairness in sports following an attempt by a biological male to join their team.
With their parents, supporters, and advocates of the fairness in sports movement, including Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan, a former teammate of Lia Thomas, present at a downtown Roanoke hotel, these ten teammates made history by being the first group of college athletes to collectively address the issue.
One by one, these teammates took the podium, delivering a consistent message: they felt “demoralized” and hurt by their Division III school. This feeling emerged as they returned to campus this fall, knowing that a biological male, who remains unnamed due to the team’s wishes, was attempting a situation similar to Lia Thomas’s.
Nineteen-year-old Kate Pearson, one of the team’s three captains, expressed her frustration, saying, “My feelings, our team’s feelings, and comfort were blatantly ignored, and only one athlete was prioritized.”
Bailey Gallagher, the senior captain at 20, echoed similar sentiments about the unfolding drama at Roanoke College, a private liberal arts school with nearly 1,900 students in Salem, VA.
“I felt unheard and unseen. Our comfort was undervalued and discarded. We repeatedly sought support from the school, only to be told to handle it ourselves or receive no response at all. The school even refused to share information with our parents. We were informed that even if our entire swim team decided to take a stand together and not participate in protest against the unfairness happening, our coach would still have a one-athlete swim team,” Bailey emphasized, adding, “A one-person swim team.”
“The revelation that our school was prioritizing one individual swimmer over 17 women, who simply requested fairness, was the most disheartening of all.”
OutKick reached out for comments from the school’s communications and public relations departments, but their messages remained unanswered. Emails to Roanoke College Athletic Director Curtis Campbell and women’s swim coach Brandon Ress also received no response.
Riley Gaines, the host of OutKick’s “Gaines for Girls” podcast, sees the events at Roanoke College as a significant turning point in her ongoing battle, which began when she shared a podium with Lia Thomas at the 2022 NCAA Women’s Swimming National Championships.
“The situation unfolding at Roanoke College mirrors the challenges my teammates and competitors faced with Lia Thomas,” Gaines remarked. “The key difference is that these young women have found their voice much sooner, uniting in their cause. This demonstrates that the tide is starting to turn. Courage is contagious, and there’s strength in numbers. I’m immensely proud and grateful for these women and their fight to uphold common sense.”
