Boy wins girls HS track events in Maine; parents are both college professors
By Dave Huber, Associate Editor, The College Fix
Originally posted on The College Fix website, May 10, 2025. Reprinted by permission.
That thing that “never happens” happened yet again last week: A biological male competing against females won first place in two track events.
It happened in (surprise!) Maine, which so far has held firm against President Trump’s executive order banning biological men from competing against women in interscholastic athletics.
In what appears to have been a tri-meet, North Yarmouth Academy junior Soren Stark-Chessa won the girls 800 meter and 1600 meter (mile) runs, the latter by almost 20 seconds.
As noted by Outkick, the 800 event was a closer race with Yarmouth High’s Lilah Connor finishing second by one-and-a-half seconds. In a video you can see Connor shaking her head in dismay after crossing the finish line.
The hilarious thing about Stark-Chessa’s victories is that his winning times suck. He won his events with a 2:43.31 and a 5:57.27 respectively.
Given that the meet appeared to have been a local one among three schools, I had a sneaky suspicion he did “just enough” to win ... without making it look too lopsided.
Lo and behold it appears I was right: Last year as a sophomore, Stark-Chessa won the state “Class C” girls 800 championship with a time of 2:19.72 (ten seconds ahead of the second place girl, which is rather substantial for that distance), and finished 3rd in the 1600 with a 5:10.08, both substantially faster.
But even those (girls’) championship times are at best mediocre for high school boys. Had he run in those boys’ championship competitions, Stark-Chessa would have finished 19th in the 800 meters and 22nd in the 1600.
(Disclosure: Yours truly was a track guy who ran the 400 and 800 meters in high school — best times 49.8 and 2:03.00 respectively — but I ran a 5:03.5 mile in 8th grade. My younger sister would go on to heights of much greater magnitude.)
Stark-Chessa apparently began identifying as female sometime between his freshman and sophomore years as he competed on the boys’ track team in 9th grade, according to Outkick.
Stark-Chessa also has been an all-state “girls” cross country runner and an all-conference “girls” Nordic skier. In the fall of 2023, a parent of two girls who raced against Stark-Chessa in cross country said her kids were in a “lose-lose situation.”
“They don’t want to pretend Stark-Chessa is a girl and congratulate him on beating females,” the parent said according to The Lion. “But they fear they will be seen as ‘hateful’ or bad sports otherwise.”
Oddly enough Stark-Chessa’s parents are both college professors. Soren’s dad, Frank Chessa, is a professor of medicine and associate course director of ethics and professionalism at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Soren’s mom, Susan Stark, teaches philosophy at Bates College where she’s at work on a pair of projects, according to her faculty page. The first is “a defense of the moral and social imperative of making reparations, not only for institutionalized slavery, colonialism, and genocide, but also for ongoing racist policies and white supremacy.”
In a 2022 paper, Stark notes one reparative approach is returning “stolen” land to descendants of original indigenous inhabitants (“historical injustices must be acknowledged, addressed, and repaired—that their significance overrides any harm caused by returning the stolen land”).
The second project deals with “reproductive ethics” for which Stark argues that “reproductive justice [...] requires that midwifery and obstetric care address structural racisms and other forms of oppression in their practices and in the education of their practitioners.”
Dave Huber has been writing about education, politics, and entertainment for over 20 years, including a stint at the popular media bias site Newsbusters. He holds degrees from the University of Delaware and taught in the First State’s public schools for over 25 years.
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