Girls can play on boys’ hockey teams

 The Manitoba High Schools Athletic Association has decided girls can play on boys’ high school hockey teams as of September.
    Executive director Morris Glimcher said yesterday the association will honour an adjudicator’s landmark human rights ruling in favour of twins Amy and Jesse Pasternak.
    Glimcher recently said the association had the right to maintain its ban on girls crossing gender lines because it had announced plans to appeal the adjudicator’s human rights ruling—something it hopes still will proceed this fall.
    Yesterday, though, Glimcher said it was never the association’s intention to defy the adjudicator’s ruling.
    “If the statutes are we have to honour it, we’ll honour it,” he said.
    The human rights commission recently had said it might have to ask the courts to impose a compliance order on the association if it maintained the ban this fall.
    So far, Glimcher said, no girls have come forward indicating they want to play on a boys’ high school hockey team in September.
    The Pasternak twins are graduating this week from West Kildonan Collegiate. They have declined repeated interview requests.
    They wanted to try out for the boys’ hockey team at West Kildonan Collegiate in the fall of 2004 when they were in Grade 10, but the association rejected their bid.
    The human rights commission concluded the Pasternaks were victims of gender discrimination, and after a two-week hearing last June, an adjudicator ruled the twins could try out for the boys’ team.
    They were cut after the final day of tryouts.
    The adjudicator specified that her ruling applied only to girls trying out for boys’ high school hockey.
    Her ruling cited the higher calibre of boys’ hockey at West Kildonan Collegiate, and said the Pasternaks always had played boys’ contact hockey while girls’ hockey is non-contact.