A great story for International Women's Day. Or not.

The following story struck me as just right for the eighth of March, International Women’s Day.

It’s about a basketball team of fifth grade girls – ten or eleven years old, generally – in the town of Hoover, Alabama. Called the ‘Lady Jags’, they had been practising on municipal basketball courts but were told, it seems, that they couldn’t keep using them (or at least, using them for free) if they didn’t compete in a local league with boys’ teams. 

So they competed.

Well, they didn’t just compete, they won. They came out on top. They were the champions.

And that’s when things turned a little sour.

Because although they won, they were denied the trophy. It was presented, instead, to the boys’ team they’d just beaten. Appalling, right?

Oddly, the Jags are on the official record of the competition as having won, even though they were denied the prize.

Jayme Mashayekh, the mother of one of the girls on the winning team thought this shameful. She posted the story on Facebook, and from there it went viral. Her post included the following sad recrimination:

'Excuse me? What?' What did they do to get disqualified? Did they not pay their dues? Did they not play up a level in competition? Oh, it's because they're GIRLS?!?! So sure enough these 5th grade girls played their hearts out, left it all on the floor and battled their male counterparts only to be told, 'No, I'm sorry you don't count.'

The BBC World News programme The Context invites two guests to sit in on each show and, at the end, turns to them to come up with some curious little story for the day. It was from one such guest that I first heard this story. Now, it’s fashionable to knock the BBC, but I like its journalism, and I feel it takes trouble to check what it broadcasts and apply good standards to its output.

So, I thought this was a wonderful illustration of how, far from achieving the aims of the #metoo campaign, we’re still stuck in #anybodyratherthanus as far as the issues aired on International Women’s day are concerned.

That’s why I thought the story so apt.

But it turns out that things aren’t quite that simple. While the BBC applies professional standards to its journalists, it apparently doesn’t to its guests. There’s more to the tale from Hoover than at first meets the eye.

It seems that the players on the Lady Jag team are carefully selected based on their skill level. The boys’ league is ‘regular’, according to the city authorities. By that I think they mean that teams are open to anyone who is keen to play, and they’ll mix good and weaker players together into teams in a way that avoids getting uniformly strong teams others can’t compete against. The Lady Jags are, by those standards, an ‘elite’ team.

Because they’re a team that’s essentially different from the others, they were told that while they could compete with them, they couldn’t win the trophy even if they won the championship. They knew that all along, the city authorities say. And so does their coach.

Besides, the Lady Jags weren’t the only team that this happened to. Another elite team, this time of boys, also won a championship game. Again, and for the same reason, they were denied a trophy.

The lousy press that the viral story generated led to the mayor of Hoover inviting the Lady Jags to meet the city council. They declined that perhaps slightly too public honour but accepted an invitation to meet the mayor in his office, so he could present them with a trophy of their own and some winners’ medals.

The Lady Jags honoured. Eventually. By the mayor

Honour satisfied. Or at least I like to think it is. I hope the Lady Jags agree.

Still, it strikes me as weird that the situation arose at all. It may be that I’m not being sufficiently imaginative, but it seems to me that no team that is, by its very nature, ruled out of winning a tournament should be allowed to take part.

Or, to put it another way, if you’re allowed into a competition, it must be possible for you to win it. If you play well enough.

Apparently, Hoover is wondering whether that might not be a sensible approach and is considering banning elite teams from regular competitions.

At any rate, whatever else, discovering what really lay behind the story gave me a useful lesson.  If you want to make something of a story, and pass it on, you have to make sure you know it’s true.

Or, to put it another way, the story is less about one of the great problems of our time, the denial of women’s rights, and a great illustration of another, the danger of spreading fake news.

And with that, I just hope that you’re having, or have already enjoyed, an excellent International Women’s Day.