According to Dean Vergillo, the head girls’ track and field coach at Cedarcrest High School, 2024 should have been the year his team took first place at the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA) state track and field meet. But because of policies that allow boys to compete in girls’ sports, Cedarcrest lost the first-place finish to Spokane’s East Valley High School by just eight points.
The eight-point difference came down to the performance of an East Valley junior named Veronica Garcia, who has also used the names Davina Brown and Donovan Brown in the past. Garcia, a 17-year-old male who identifies as transgender, originally competed in cross country and track events as a boy but began identifying as a girl and switched to girls’ events later in his high school career.
Athletic records show that Garcia was a middle-of-the-pack runner before his apparent “transition.” At the state track and field meet in May 2024, however, Garcia took first place in the girls’ 400-meter sprint, setting a season record with a time of 55.59 seconds. That first-place finish earned his high school 10 points overall.
Vergillo said that Garcia’s presence at the meet caught him and his student-athletes off guard.
“We had no idea that this was coming. As a coach, I found out about it just through talking to other coaches from around the state,” he told Independent Women’s Forum. “Then, in the [girls’] 400-meter open race, the individual from our school that qualified only found out about an hour before.”
When it became clear that Garcia would compete in the event, Vergillo said he immediately rushed to the team tent to try and reassure the female athlete he was coaching.
“We still had goals, and we still had some things that we could control,” he said. “That was my focus for her, to control her own destiny and not let the situation affect her performance.”
Although she, like the other female athletes in the preliminary 400-meter sprint, was no match for Garcia’s biological advantage, Vergillo saw the race as a success: “She did end up running well enough to qualify for finals, and then in finals, she actually ran a school record,” he said.
Watching from the sidelines, Vergillo said “it was obvious” Garcia was a male.
“As a cross country and track coach, everybody has a running style,” he said. “It’s kind of like your fingerprint—everybody runs a little bit differently. In this case, it was obviously a male running.”
He added, “The male [runner] is going to be stronger and more powerful, so you use that to your advantage to get yourself around the track. As a woman, the level of strength and power is different, so you end up having to do it with more grace and finesse.”
According to Vergillo, Garcia completely lacked the grace and finesse that characterizes female runners. Although the average spectator might not notice the difference, Vergillo said he hopes more people will become aware of this issue if Garcia participates in the state championship meet again next year.
“It’s definitely going to be a bigger issue given that we’ll know what’s happening going into it. My biggest disappointment in this situation is how our state association [the WIAA] didn’t prepare us for what was coming,” he said. “We’ve had many coaches, through text, emails, or just verbally, state their displeasure with the situation.”
As for his own team, Vergillo said they were “ecstatic” about their second-place overall finish at state and only learned later that they should have placed first.
“This would’ve been much easier if we had lost by 30 points instead of by just eight,” he said. “We can’t control what happened, so let’s make the most of it for us. Let’s enjoy this experience that we had.”
