Macy Petty Charles, who now lives in Mesa, skipped prom in high school to chase a college volleyball scholarship. At a national club tournament packed with college scouts, she looked across the net.

“I realized that my opponent was a man,” she said, “and it wasn’t subtle.”

From that point, Macy said, her team’s only goal was to avoid getting hurt. The men’s net sits more than seven inches higher than the women’s for good reason. At her club, when the boys’ teams came over to serve, the girls ran off the court and covered their heads.

Macy assumed USA Volleyball, which sanctioned the event, would put a stop to it. No one did. She walked away believing her best shot at a college roster “had been stolen from me.”

In June, Macy announced the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding state protections for girls’ sports on the Court’s own steps.

Kaylie Ray grew up in Chandler, picked volleyball at eight after watching girls play at recess, and earned a Division I scholarship to Utah State.

During her sophomore season, her team watched film on San Jose State and saw a player whose leaping ability stood apart from every woman on the court. Kaylie said a man with “not even half the training I have” could “easily play over me, without so much as a second thought.”

Coaches eventually confirmed the player was biologically a man. Before San Jose State came to play, Kaylie said, her team was told that any player or fan who commented on it would be removed from the gym.

“For the first time in my life, I had truly felt that as a woman, it did not matter,” she said.

In 2024, her senior year, the Mountain West Conference added a rule turning any volleyball forfeit into an automatic loss. Kaylie says it was slipped into the handbook without proper procedure.

“They knew that the best way that we could make a statement was to forfeit, to refuse to compete,” she said. “And they decided that we had to be held accountable for that.”

Utah State forfeited anyway. For Kaylie and two fellow seniors, that meant surrendering one of the last matches of their careers. She joined a lawsuit against the conference and absorbed the online abuse that followed.

“The truth is that men and women are different,” she said. “And anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you.”

Here is their story in their own words

Why Prop 318 Matters

In 2022, Arizona passed the Save Women’s Sports Act to keep boys off girls’ teams. The next year, a 15-year-old boy who wanted to play girls’ volleyball sued to block it, along with an 11-year-old boy seeking spots on girls’ teams.

A federal judge in Tucson blocked the law for both boys in July 2023, and the Ninth Circuit agreed, leaving them free to play on girls’ teams. That order held for three years. The families dropped the case only this July, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld similar laws in Idaho and West Virginia.

For three years, the protection Arizona girls were promised depended on a courtroom. Prop 318 puts it in the hands of Arizona voters. Once voters approve it, the measure falls under Arizona’s Voter Protection Act, and no future Legislature can repeal it.

The measure also lets girls sue schools and associations that knowingly break the law. Laws like this, Macy said, are “only as strong as the legislators who will defend the women, who will enforce those laws.” Under Prop 318, a girl no longer has to wait for someone in power to act on her behalf.

Arizona’s current law covers teams only. Prop 318 extends protection to the restrooms, locker rooms, and showers that go with school athletics, and it applies to every school and athletic association, public or private, with sex defined by the original birth certificate.

Kaylie’s friend Brooke Slusser, a San Jose State player, was assigned to room with the male player at home and on the road, and he had no separate locker room.

Macy hears from girls who have quit sports entirely over that fear. “The fear of walking into a locker room with a boy is too much,” she said, “and is enough to push them out.”

Someone Fought for Them; So Can We

At a Women in Sport gala at Utah State, Kaylie met members of a national championship team from the early years of Title IX, women who once shared jerseys and paid their own way to compete.

“I wasn’t born yet, but you were fighting for me,” she told them.

Kaylie hopes a young girl will say the same to her someday. Arizona voters can make that possible by voting Yes on Prop 318 on November 3.