What do most parents do when their daughter doesn't make the cheerleading squad?  Cheer them up, right?

Samantha "Sami" Sanches' parents went a few steps further and sued.  When the former Creekview (Texas) High School cheerleader was left off the varsity squad roster, her parents sued the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District seeking Title IX relief for alleged retaliation and sex discrimination.  They lost in district court, and in a recent decision, judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit tossed the family's appeal.

"It's a petty squabble, masquerading as a civil rights matter, that has no place in federal court or any other court," the 5th Circuit opinion begins.

Allegedly, troubles for Sami began during her junior year and could be traced back to a boy who was the ex-boyfriend of a varsity cheerleader.  After a series of incidents between the two cheerleaders, including Facebook posts, classroom threats, cheerleading tryout pranks and more, Sami's lawyer fired off a six-page missive detailing a laundry list of perceived injustices.  Despite the legalese, Sami didn't make the squad and the family responded with a lawsuit.

In the formal complaint, the family claimed that a hostile school environment caused Sami not to make the varsity squad, resulting in her being diagnosed with depression.  Yet, Federal Magistrate Judge Paul D. Stickney was unmoved by the lawsuit's description of Sami's junior year as a "nightmare of gender-based bullying and harassment" and ruled for the school district.

According to news reports, Sami's attorneys lambasted Stickney with a semi-coherent rant filed before the 5th Circuit, disregarding the most elemental tenets of professionalism, spelling and subject-verb agreement.

"Usually we do not comment on technical and grammatical errors, because anyone can make a technical mistake, but here the miscues are so egregious and obvious that an average fourth grader would have avoided most of them," the opinion says in a hilarious footnote at the end.

—Source:  DallasObserver.com (Texas)