Re “Culver High vs. Student: Should She Be Allowed to Play”
The mystery deepened yesterday afternoon over why a senior member of the Culver City High School girls soccer team was “inexplicably” excluded from the roster for the new season that was announced late last month.
“There are extenuating circumstances that we can’t give,” Principal Pam Magee told the newspaper. “But there is definitely… There is more to it.
“I am not going to say anything more than that other than we can’t elaborate.”
Before Ms. Magee’s assertion, the reason for the player’s exclusion appeared to be her membership in an off-campus organization that the coach reportedly contended interfered with the exclusivity commitment he sought from his players.
“Students have to choose how they are going to make their time commitments,” said Ms. Magee, seeming to confirm that the player’s membership in a group was the tipping point.
Maybe. Maybe not. The school is not saying.
According to the principal, the whole story has not been told. The absent fact is a crucial one.
After acknowledging that one portion of this puzzle is missing, Ms. Magee said, “We can’t provide it.”
A policy of confidentiality, she contended, prohibited her from explaining more precisely.
Those statements only intensified the clouds hanging over a story that seems a distance from being resolved.
The family is most unhappy, and school officials effectively are not talking.
John Cohn, the father of Maya Cohn, brought the case to community attention in last Monday’s edition of this newspaper.
He filed a nearly 3,000-word report that relied heavily on an exchange of email correspondence with longtime Culver High Athletic Director Jerry Chabola.
When a reporter questioningly asked Ms. Magee, “The parent hasn’t told the whole story?” she said, “Perhaps that is the case.”
Although high school students all over the country routinely enter and exit from athletic rosters, the disputatious case of Maya Cohn appears veiled behind an uncommon — and so far unfathomable — mystery.
Ms. Cohn was shocked and hurt, according to her family, when Coach Scott Mair posted the soccer roster a few days before Thanksgiving, and she was not listed.
Especially, said her father, Mr. Cohn, a daily essayist for this newspaper, since she not only had played for Coach Mair the last two seasons, he had pointedly recruited her from the cheerleading team to join his soccer team.
Before Ms. Magee spoke up yesterday at an interview with the newspaper that the school had requested, it was the family’s understanding that Ms. Cohn was excluded because she was deemed insufficiently committed to the soccer team she dearly loves.
Mr. Cohn said his daughter’s membership in an off-campus group, the YMCA’s Youth and Government, cost her a place on the soccer roster. Even though she had belonged to Youth and Government the past two years, Coach Mair recently redefined his policy for eligibility for the new season more narrowly than in the past.
