Emily Scheck Has A New Family

Emily Scheck, who runs cross-country for Canisius College in Buffalo, was just going along, living her life, having fun last summer when she received a text message from her mother.

It seems her mother, while going through Emily’s things at home, had found a picture of Emily and a girl she was dating, and Mom was sickened; she told Emily that she was disgusting, and that she had a choice to make: enter gay conversion therapy or be cut out of her parents lives forever.

Well, good for her, Emily chose actual love over fake love, refused therapy; the next day, her father came to Canisius and removed the license plates from her car—Emily owned the car, but her parents paid the insurance, and when they stopped paying, her father came for the license plates. He also filled the car with all of Emily’s  things from home and left his own message: she was never to speak to them or her siblings again.

Emily Scheck was alone, no family, no support, with just $20 to her name, and a bill her parents had stuck her with for items the family had purchased on a recent vacation.

She was able to get a few meals through a campus program, and when she couldn’t afford books for the upcoming semester. Friends lent her their copies so she could study. But Emily wondered how she could afford to stay in school without the financial support of her parents—tuition per semester is about $18,000—and she told her coach, Nate Huckle, about her situation; he offered to help, perhaps with housing or financial options, but as time passed, Huckle couldn’t come up with a plan for Emily.

Then her friends stepped in, again, creating a GoFundMe page with a goal of about $5,000; within days the site had raised $25,000, mostly from strangers. It looked good, but with all she’d been through, Emily knew that when things looked good, there was another shoe about to drop.

She was contacted by an NCAA compliance officer at Canisius who told she had two options: return every penny from the donations and maintain her NCAA eligibility, or keep the money and leave the cross-country team.

Canisius offered to work with the NCAA to raise enough money for Emily, but there were no guarantees; and if she tried to sue, how could she pay for that, and would she even prevail. There might be a chance that she couldn’t stay in school and compete in track.

All Emily Scheck wanted was to buy some food, buy some books, pay her tuition and get some insurance for her car so she could work and pay her own way through school, and choosing that first option—returning all the money—made no sense.

So, Emily quit the team and stayed in school with the help and support from strangers and friends, just  because her parents couldn’t simply love their daughter and accept her for being gay.

Naturally, when the story broke, it turned into a public relations disaster for Canisius College—a Catholic school—and the NCAA who were portrayed as forcing a student off the team and, perhaps, out of school. And, because of the media coverage, things changed again; funny how that works.

The NCAA reversed their decision to ban Emily from the track team; she would be not only be allowed to keep the donations, pay for school and food and books, and get her car back, but the GoFundMe page could continue to raise money for her. Canisius College released a full statement to that effect, but the last line says all anyone needed to know, especially Emily Scheck’s parents:

“Hopefully going forward schools and the NCAA compliance office will be more understanding when athletes come to them with special needs created by unexpected life situations, like being abandoned by their parents.”

Luckily, though it took some time, and for a time seemed hopeless, Emily Scheck now has a much larger, more loving family, than the one that turned their backs on her. And, as of this week, Emily Scheck has stopped accepting donations; over the course of just a couple of months she was given $100,515 to stay in school and stay on the team. She said:

“I never expected this amount of support. I have chosen to stop accepting online donations because what has been given is more than anyone could have expected. I now know that family is not always something you have, but something you find."

OutSports