Bay Area high school coaches file Title IX complaint over field, bathroom conditions

The coaches of the Tennyson High School (Hayward, Calif.) softball team have had enough. Now they’re doing something about their problem.

As reported by San Francisco CBS affiliate KPIX, the coaches of the softball team at the school which sits between Oakland and San Jose expressed persistent concerns about the poor condition of the softball field. Those concerns were put in sharp relief when the softball field was compared to the school’s better-maintained baseball field. When added to persistent issues related to the girls locker room and bathroom availability, the need for a gender equity lawsuit became too much to overlook.

That’s why on Tuesday they re-filed a complaint against the Hayward Unified School District with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The new complaint follows on from an original complaint filed in February and calls out the school district for not making amends to the situation after the initial legal complaint.

The deplorable state of the girls bathroom at the field, which doubles as the girls locker room when the former is (allegedly almost always) closed, lays bare the impetus for the coaches to get the situation fixed immediately.

“When you walk into the girls’ bathroom, if it’s open, there’s a tank with water, and it constantly leaks, so the floors are completely wet,” 16-year-old Kayla Birdsell told KPIX. and we’re forced to change in there and it’s just really disgusting.”

While the district released a statement expressing its concern that some of its students felt the softball field was unsafe — and writing off culpability for the field’s condition by noting it was not included in prior bonds that funded other facility renovations — Tennyson softball coach Gabriel Hernandez made clear that the district’s sentiment won’t cut it when it comes to the safety and well-being of young female student athletes.

“Someone’s gotta give these girls a voice, and someone’s eventually gotta listen to them, and so if that’s me and coach and doing what we gotta do, if it costs us our jobs, then whatever. Bottom line, someone’s going to listen to these girls at some point,” said Hernandez.