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N.H. high school soccer team forfeits game against team with transgender player
Bishop Brady High School in Concord was unable to field enough players and did not forfeit its game Friday as an act of protest, the school superintendent maintained.
A New Hampshire Catholic high school recently found itself at the center of debate surrounding transgender student-athletes when its girls soccer team pulled out of a match against a team with a trans goalkeeper.
Bishop Brady High School in Concord did not forfeit its game Friday with Kearsarge Regional High School as an act of protest, said David Thibault, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Diocese of Manchester. In a statement Tuesday, Thibault explained that the high school’s girls soccer team did not have enough players for the game, between injuries and “a few” students who opted not to play.
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With only eight girls available to play, the school forfeited by default, he said. Kearsarge Regional High School’s athletic director and girls soccer coach did not respond to a request for comment.
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“Every person is made in God’s image with a body and soul, male and female. Therefore, every person’s dignity, and every student athlete’s dignity, must be upheld,” Thibault said in a previous statement. “This includes student athletes from every school, public, private, or Catholic. We aim to participate with the best of sportsmanship and fairness based on our faith as Catholic Christians.”
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He added: “Any student who discerns to opt out of playing for their own reasons are supported and never penalized.”
Thibault did not say why some players opted out of the Kearsarge game, though Concord Patch reported Bishop Brady’s principal received inquiries about canceling the game in the weeks preceding. According to Concord Patch, some of the concern stemmed from the transgender Kearsarge player’s father, Marc Jacques, who was sentenced last month to five years in federal prison for distributing child pornography.
Court records indicate Jacques — who was due to report to prison in December — was arrested again Friday after investigators allegedly found he violated the terms of his release by possessing a data storage device that held more sexually explicit images. According to WMUR, concerned parents also contacted authorities to say they saw Jacques at his daughter’s soccer games, though the news station reported that Jacques had no conditions preventing him from attending high school sporting events before beginning his sentence.
The Kearsarge Regional School District’s school board voted in August to allow Jacques’s daughter and other transgender girls to play on girls teams. The decision came soon after a controversial New Hampshire law that would require student-athletes play on teams matching the sex on their birth certificates (the families of two other trans students are challenging the law in federal court).
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Bishop Brady’s forfeited game comes amid a growing number of protests and debate that followed the New Hampshire law, turning soccer pitches into political battlefields. Earlier this month, some varsity players from Hillsboro-Deering High School did not attend a scheduled game with Kearsarge, though the game went on with junior-varsity athletes filling out the roster, the Concord Monitor reported.
The Hillsborough County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national conservative organization that has fought to roll back LGBTQ+ protections, applauded the Bishop Brady girls soccer team for pulling out of last week’s game. On social media, the local chapter called the players who abstained “brave” and praised them for “saying NO to unfair competition.”
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