The ban keeping nine St. Francis Prep girls’ basketball players from playing school sports for the rest of their high school careers has been overturned, according to a report in the New York Daily News.
In a letter mailed to those players’ homes on Wednesday, April 8, principal Brother Leonard Conway wrote that he decided to rescind the previous prohibition, which had been issued after the nine girls refused to board the team bus for a game on February 11.
They had been instructed by their parents to boycott the game, after the school failed to immediately respond to a letter calling for head coach JoAnn Wagner’s removal.
After meeting with Conway recently, it was indeed the parents who bore the brunt of the school’s amended punishment. They will be forbidden from attending all of the team’s home and away basketball games from this point forward.
“In meeting with the parents, many of them told Brother Conway that they were responsible, not their daughters,” St. Francis Prep athletic director Sal Fischetti told the newspaper. “It was, ‘Don’t punish our daughters, please punish us.’”
Their daughters, meanwhile, may return to the basketball team, still coached by JoAnn Wagner, on a probationary basis.
The Courier has previously reported on the team’s response to the original bar. The Terriers’ season was saved as a result of six players’ last-minute arrival. Three team managers and three other St. Francis Prep students banned together to fill out the roster and finish the season.
On March 10, an online column for The Courier called for the ban to be rescinded.
“It was hard for them. It wasn’t really their decision,” St. Francis Prep player Kalyssa Daley, a former manager, said on March 4. “They could have gone about it in a different way.”
“The parents, I’m sure, understood there would be repercussions,” said Mike Simon, the parent of an original player who elected not to participate in the boycott. “Maybe they needed to take a different course of action.”
Fischetti could not be reached for comment on Monday.
