Adeela Hartman didn’t receive pleasant news when she returned home from a long family vacation in Guyana. The Thomas Jefferson senior got a call from a teammate telling her the girls soccer team had to forfeit its season opener against Brooklyn International due to an insufficient number of players.
“Right about now it is totally unfair,” Hartman said. “We had a game on a day where there was not school and Labor Day just went by.”
The Orange Wave were one of six PSAL soccer teams, including Brooklyn International in a double forfeit, forced to forfeit a game Tuesday because it did not have the minimum 11 girls necessary to start the match. School of the Future, Columbus, Lafayette and Van Buren all could not play their games. More forfeits are likely to follow.
“It’s hard,” Hartman said. “Who knows how the season will go? They already forfeited a game.”
Jefferson has just six players who have come to practice on a regular basis and first-year coach Winston Lewis expects at least three more players, including Hartman, to return from vacation for the start of school Wednesday. The girls still need to participate in eight practices before they are eligible to play, something that could lead to more forfeits, frustration and possibly no team at all.
“It’s been tough on the girls and frustrating,” Lewis said. “They are ready to give up. I may end up losing the few kids that I have. … They have to rearrange schedules, rearrange jobs. … Because of the change in the season, change in the schedule, it’s disturbing their lives.”
The season was moved to the fall because parents of players from Beacon, Bronx Science and School of the Future, with support from the NYCLU, threatened to file a Title IX lawsuit against the city, the Department of Education and the PSAL had the girls’ season not been changed. Their argument for litigation was that there was an uneven playing field for boys and girls, because club season, where players compete on non-school, travel teams, runs in the spring.
“We are not dropping teams,” DOE spokeswoman Marge Feinberg said in a statement. “We announced in January that we agreed to move the girls’ soccer season to the fall from the spring. The NYCLU expressed concern that hosting girls soccer in the spring violated Title IX because fall is the customary season for soccer and that the boys and girls season should be contemporaneous. While the Department of Education believes that girls and boys soccer have been treated equally, the DOE agreed to move the girls season to avoid potentially complex litigation and uncertainty in the PSAL program.”
The switch has caused teams throughout the city to struggle putting together a full roster, leading to forfeits. Forest Hill coach Bob Sprance said he has received emails from 16 programs saying their roster numbers are lower than past seasons, nine of which he said were in danger of not being able to field a team right away.
“Having the [season] start before school started is what absolutely killed us,” Brooklyn International coach Megan Driscoll said. “If the game that was scheduled today was scheduled for Thursday, there is no doubt in my mind that we would have had a full team and we would have been able to play.”
Driscoll said she had just nine girls who could have played today, but expects to increase that number when school opens with players returning and possibly drawing from the incoming freshman to fill out her roster.
“The girls that have been there have tried to get in touch with girls,” Driscoll said. “Kids have to work all summer, kids are away on vacation. I’m pretty confident that we are going to be OK for the remainder of the season.”
Teams across the city are hoping for the same.