A gay basketball player in Kentucky suspects that his picture was intentionally left out of the team's yearbook page, but his high school says it was a simple error.
"I recently saw my senior yearbook, I flipped right to the sports basketball page only to find my senior basketball picture missing . . . which devastated me," Dalton Maldonado wrote on Facebook,
CBS affiliate WKYT-TV reported Wednesday.
Floyd County Superintendent Henry Webb said in a statement that, "Yes, the individual picture for the student athlete was omitted from the school’s basketball section through error," and added that Maldonado appeared in the yearbook 15 other times.
"We do acknowledge that none of these images may be as meaningful to the student athlete as his individual basketball picture and we apologize to him and his family for the error," said Webb, adding that when it came to any claims of "a deliberate attempt to harass the student athlete by omitting his photograph from the yearbook, that claim is totally false and without merit."
Webb said further that the file of Maldonado's picture was not returned by the student to the school photographer.
Maldonado, the starting senior point guard, wrote that the school has been continually "trying to cover up my experiences" after he and eye witnesses said he was targeted by anti-gay harassment from a rival team during a tournament in December.
The alleged harassment led to police being called, and the whole team being escorted from the hotel to the court for the remainder of the tournament,
SB Nation's Outsports blog reported.
Maldonado wrote that "I would hear things that teachers would say, and many media outlets would say I 'claimed' this happened in spite of the pictures and text messages I had from my coaches as proof. Then I had a person officiated with the school tell me what they had learned about the school attempting to cover up the whole [story]," he wrote.
Maldonado has graduated from Betsy Layne High School, and will attend the University of Louisville this fall.
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