A Forfeit Cost This School Everything. Now Vermont Is Paying It Back.

A small Christian school in Quechee, Vermont, forfeited one girls basketball playoff game. For that, the state’s high school sports authority threw it out of every sport.

This week the bill came due.

Vermont Public reported that the Vermont Principals’ Association agreed to pay $566,000 in damages and attorney fees to Mid Vermont Christian School.

That is more than half a million dollars for punishing a school that simply did not want its girls competing against a biological male.

VICTORY – $566,000!

Our client, Mid Vermont Christian School, has won more than half a million dollars after it was punished for standing up for women’s sports.

Read more in the @FoxNews exclusive below.@JackThompsonFOX https://t.co/hAjvmFKj0C

— Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal) April 29, 2026

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit laid out the core Free Exercise dispute this way:

Mid Vermont Christian School forfeited a girls’ playoff basketball game to avoid playing a team with a transgender athlete. The school believes that forcing girls to compete against biological males would affirm that those males are females, in violation of its religious beliefs.

In response to the forfeit, the Vermont Principals’ Association (“VPA”) expelled the school from all state-sponsored extracurricular activities.

Plaintiffs Mid Vermont and several students and parents sued, bringing a Free Exercise claim and seeking a preliminary injunction to reinstate the school’s VPA membership and for other relief. The district court denied the motion.

We conclude that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing that the VPA’s expulsion of Mid Vermont was not neutral because it displayed hostility toward the school’s religious beliefs; Plaintiffs are therefore likely to prevail on their Free Exercise claim. Because Plaintiffs also satisfy the remaining requirements for injunctive relief, the order of the district court is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings and with instructions to grant Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction insofar as it seeks Mid Vermont’s reinstatement in the VPA.

Here is how it started. In 2023, Mid Vermont’s varsity girls forfeited a playoff game against the Long Trail School in Dorset because Long Trail had a transgender athlete on the roster.

The school’s reasoning was straightforward. Putting girls on the court against a male would affirm a belief the school does not hold, and that conflicts with its religious convictions.

The principals’ association did not accept the forfeit and move on. It expelled Mid Vermont from all state-sponsored extracurricular activities.

So a family from the school sued. They brought a Free Exercise claim and asked a court to put the school back into the association.

The district court said no. The U.S.

Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said the district court got it wrong.

Here is how the appeals court summarized the case.

Then the court got to the part that should worry every state agency that handles a religious school with contempt.

Hostility. That is the word the court used, and it is the word the whole case turns on.

The government is allowed to write neutral rules. What it cannot do is single out a religious school for harsher treatment because of what that school believes.

The Second Circuit reversed and sent the case back with instructions to grant the injunction reinstating Mid Vermont. WCAX reported the school’s teams were allowed to compete again after the appeals court ruling.

Then came the money.

Vermont Public laid out the settlement.

The same report explained why the association said it acted the way it did.

Notice what is missing from that defense. Nowhere in there is any room for a school that believes God made men and women, and that the difference matters on a basketball court.

The association treated its own policy as the only acceptable belief. The court treated that posture as the legal problem it is.

Even after writing the check, association Executive Director Jay Nichols offered no public contrition. He declined to comment on the settlement but said in an email, “We will continue to follow Vermont law and advocate for all Vermont children.”

All Vermont children. Except, apparently, the girls who did not want to play against a boy, and the school that backed them up.

Alliance Defending Freedom represented the school, and they were not quiet about the result.

READ: "Mid Vermont Christian School will receive $566,000 under the agreement, more than three years after it was removed from the state athletic association for forfeiting the game."@zach_d_jewell in @realDailyWire https://t.co/kXz08YLx2A

— Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal) May 1, 2026

I do not love that it took three years and a federal appeals court to get here. A school made a quiet, principled decision about its own girls’ team, and the punishment was total expulsion from sports.

The forfeit hurt no one. The retaliation hit a whole school full of kids who had nothing to do with the matchup.

This is what happens when an institution decides that a religious conviction is the same thing as bigotry. It stops governing and starts punishing.

The good news is that the law still has teeth here. Free Exercise is not a polite suggestion the state gets to override whenever a trendy policy gets in the way.

And $566,000 is the kind of number that makes the next association think twice before it tries to crush the next small Christian school over the same convictions.

Vermont can keep insisting it was just following its own rules. The court already said the truth about those rules, and the school got both its season and its day in court.

What do you think the state of Vermont actually learned here? Tell me in the comments.