Chris Goodwin thought Vermont athletic-association officials were trying to make an example out of Mid Vermont Christian School.
Now, after a $566,000 settlement, he feels even more certain.
Goodwin, the school’s girls basketball coach, joined OutKick’s Dan Dakich on “Don’t @ Me” along with ADF attorney David Cortman to discuss the settlement and the years-long fight.
Dakich asked Goodwin whether he thought officials with Vermont’s interscholastic athletic association were pandering or whether they truly believed a male athlete should be allowed to compete in girls sports.
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Goodwin said he believes it was both.
“I also think they were sending a message to all the other schools across this state,” Goodwin told Dakich.
As Fox News Digital’s Jackson Thompson reported, the Vermont Principals’ Association paid $566,000 in damages and legal fees to Mid Vermont Christian School and Alliance Defending Freedom (as part of a partial settlement) after the school was banned from Vermont’s state-sponsored competitions run by the VPA for more than two years.
The dispute began when Mid Vermont’s girls’ team withdrew from a 2023 postseason matchup after learning the opposing roster included a trans-identifying male athlete.
In April 2025, Goodwin told OutKick that Mid Vermont had been kicked out of the Vermont Principals’ Association, removed from girls basketball and banned from every sport the VPA runs, including volleyball, track and cross-country. At the time, he said the punishment had lasted two seasons.
“We all understood that there would probably be some kickback from the state [but] we didn’t expect it to be as severe as it was,” Goodwin told OutKick at the time. “They were probably making an example out of us, letting other coaches, other teams and other players know that if they decided to do what we did, that they’d be in the same boat. So, I think it was kind of a bully move as well.”
A year later, with the partial settlement finalized, Goodwin’s view hasn’t changed.
He told Dakich that he heard privately from other coaches and athletic directors who supported Mid Vermont’s decision, even if they weren’t willing to say so publicly.
“I had some phone calls from other coaches and other athletic directors saying that they couldn’t say it out loud, but they let me know that they are in support of the decision we made,” Goodwin said.
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A lot of people agreed with Mid Vermont Christian. But few were willing to say it out loud when they saw the state’s school-sports establishment exacting retribution.
Goodwin said the school found out during the season that, if the bracket broke a certain way, Mid Vermont would be matched up against a team with a male athlete.
After conversations with administrators, parents and the players, the school made its decision.
“Instead of going against our faith and our religious beliefs and knowing also that it’s an unfair situation, also a potentially dangerous situation, we weren’t going to put our girls in that situation,” Goodwin told Dakich. “So we decided to withdraw from the tournament.”
That decision triggered a punishment that went well beyond one basketball tournament. Goodwin said that about 48 hours after the school announced it was withdrawing and explained why, Mid Vermont was removed from all VPA-sanctioned athletic competition in Vermont.
And not just athletics.
“They removed us from all athletic competition in the state,” Goodwin said. “And…on top of that, spelling bees, math fairs, everything that goes along with scholastic competition.”
The ban forced Mid Vermont’s athletic teams and scholastic groups to look beyond Vermont for competition, often traveling out of state for events like spelling bees and math fairs.
Dakich asked Goodwin whether Vermont officials ever tried to work out a compromise. According to the coach, that never happened.
“It was pretty much they’re just doing it,” Goodwin said. “They sent us the letter. They communicated with us saying that we were out and unless we changed our minds, that we’re going to stay out.”
Cortman, who represented the school through ADF, said the same thing.
“It was remarkable because there was no back and forth,” Cortman told Dakich. “This was an edict put out by the state, and they basically said, ‘Look, you can come back in whenever you decide to compromise on your religious beliefs and do something that goes against your faith.’”
Cortman was referring to Vermont’s interscholastic athletic association, the VPA, which the Second Circuit treated as a state actor.
That was also the argument ADF made when OutKick spoke with the school in April 2025.
ADF senior counsel Ryan Tucker told OutKick at the time that schools can forfeit games for any number of reasons, but Mid Vermont was treated differently because its reason was religious. Tucker said other schools had forfeited in the past because of COVID or a lack of available players and faced no punishment beyond taking a loss.
“The punishment itself is absolutely nuts,” Tucker told OutKick in 2025. “If a school can forfeit a game for secular reasons, why can’t they forfeit for a religious one?”
That’s still the simplest way to understand this story. Schools forfeit games all the time. They don’t usually get kicked out of every sport and every academic competition for years.
Mid Vermont Christian forfeited one basketball game because it didn’t want to violate its religious beliefs or put its girls in what it believed was an unfair and unsafe situation. The state’s athletic association responded by punishing the entire school for years.
In the 2025 interview, Goodwin laid out the school’s position in more detail.
“We believe that God created us distinctly male and female, and when those male and female people grow up, they become male and female high school athletes and the body doesn’t change,” Goodwin told OutKick. “The male body has a lot of advantages over the female body when it comes to sports: strength, speed, agility, height, size, all of that. An extension of those religious beliefs just shows us that it’s going to be unfair competition. It’s going to be a much more demonstrably unsafe competition.”
Goodwin also told OutKick then that the same athlete Mid Vermont forfeited against later concussed a girl on another team. As the father of one of the players, Goodwin said he wasn’t willing to put his own daughter in that position.
Those concerns didn’t go away just because Vermont’s school-sports authorities punished them. Goodwin told Dakich that Mid Vermont ultimately had to decide whether it was willing to compromise on its beliefs.
“We had the decision to make, and again, it all comes back to your principles,” Goodwin said. “Are you going to compromise on what you believe in or are you not going to compromise?”
He said he would have regretted it for years if the school had made the opposite decision.
“I couldn’t really live with myself looking back on it if I had to look back on this in 10 years and if we didn’t make this decision,” Goodwin said. “I would regret that we did not make that decision.”
The settlement is a win. There’s no question about that. But it doesn’t give the players back the state tournaments they missed. Goodwin told Dakich that Mid Vermont missed out on three years of postseason competition. He said his players understood why the school made the decision, but that didn’t make the consequences painless.
“There was sadness,” Goodwin said. “You know what it’s like when you’ve got kids on your team and you’ve got some favorites and you’ve got players who are there for the social aspect of it, but there’s the players who put their all into practice and they leave it all on the court.”
Goodwin specifically mentioned a senior captain who never got the chance to play in the state tournament, despite Mid Vermont having teams he believed could have competed for a championship.
“That’s heartbreaking and just difficult as a coach,” Goodwin said.
That’s the human cost in this story. The school got money. The lawyers got paid. The state got embarrassed. But the girls who missed out on playoff basketball don’t get those games back.
Dakich asked Cortman whether cases like this are headed toward the Supreme Court. Cortman said they’re exactly the kind of issues that may eventually need to get there.
“These are those issues that have to make their way up to the Supreme Court,” Cortman said.
The Supreme Court has already heard arguments this term in two major transgender athlete cases out of Idaho and West Virginia, both involving state laws that restrict transgender girls and women from competing on girls and women’s school sports teams.
For Mid Vermont, the key legal victory came when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in September 2025 that the school had to be allowed back into the state’s athletic association while the case continued. The appeals court said the school was likely to succeed in showing that the VPA’s expulsion was not neutral because it displayed hostility toward the school’s religious beliefs.
Cortman also explained where the $566,000 settlement goes. Part of it covers damages to the school, including costs related to traveling out of state to compete. The rest goes toward attorneys’ fees, since ADF represented the school for free and can recover fees under civil rights laws when it wins.
“It just goes back in the pot to help fund these type of lawsuits with schools all over the country, just like Chris’s,” Cortman said.
Mid Vermont Christian stood up, took the punishment and eventually won a major victory in the participation dispute. But as Goodwin has said from the beginning, this was never really about a basketball game. It was about whether a small Christian school in Vermont could be forced to compromise its faith so its girls could compete.
For over two years, the state’s answer was yes.
But a federal appeals court said no.
Now, the Vermont Principals’ Association has to write a half-million-dollar check.
