Editor's note: The audio feature for this story was reported and produced by KLCC freelance reporter Ida Hardin. As part of the project, Hardin invited student athlete Helen Burruss to contribute a first-person essay about what it means to them to play on the South Eugene Gender Diverse team. Burruss, age 16, lives in Mapleton where they attend Mapleton High School.
I grew up and live in a small rural town near the Oregon coast, called Mapleton. It sits in a small valley on the Siuslaw River surrounded by forest and hills. My high school has around 40 kids in it, and we have a total of one general store, a gas station, and a couple other small shops along the river. I have gone to school there my whole life, and my family has always been very involved in the community.
When my parents were younger, they played Ultimate Frisbee in Seattle, and when I was a kid, my dad was a coach at the University of Oregon, so I have been around Ultimate my whole life. I started playing for South Eugene Gender Diverse Ultimate team as an eighth grader. It took me a little while to feel comfortable there, but since then it has become a place where I feel really safe and at home, and like I can be myself. But living in and going to school in rural Oregon while playing frisbee in South Eugene has given me an opportunity to exist in two really different worlds and the ability to look at both worlds as an outsider.
When I wrote this article, I struggled to write it in a way that shared my experience and did Mapleton and other rural communities justice. The Mapleton community is not comparable to the community of South Eugene or any urban or suburban community. I know most people who will read this article are from urban areas, and I wanted to find a way to tell the truth without reinforcing previously held stereotypes about rural people and communities. I felt like any specific examples I give will erase the complexity of the people in Mapleton.
When I was a freshman, I had a hard time feeling at home in Mapleton in school and in sports. My values and beliefs often didn’t align with other people at my school, and this created friction for me. Because it is such a small community, I couldn’t distance myself from those people, and for a while, I resented many of them because their belief system was different from mine. It was a really hard experience for me. It made me think a lot about how I viewed people. I realized that I was only basing my ideas of them off of their political beliefs, and not taking into account anything else.
People are really complicated, and Mapleton is a really special place because political beliefs here are really diverse. While I may never be friends with all of the people in my community, I can acknowledge that some of them are really amazing people. One of the students who graduated this year has been without consistent housing since his sophomore year. During the pandemic, he chose to leave home because his parents wouldn’t let him attend school because of the mask mandate. Instead of not attending school anymore, he chose to leave home and continued going to school, played three sports, and managed a job to support himself. He was also student body president, and an active figure in the community who was constantly working to improve the school and community of Mapleton in many ways.
This is an exceptional feat and just one example of some of the remarkable people in my community who I may not agree with politically, but who have done really extraordinary things. My belief system will never align with theirs, but I can recognize that theirs isn’t necessarily wrong, just different. We are part of different worlds and cultures, and their belief system fits the world they exist in. So we generally respect each other and each other’s belief systems without agreeing with each other.
When I first joined the South Eugene Gender Diverse Ultimate team, I struggled because it wasn’t anything like Mapleton. I wasn’t happy at Mapleton. I felt trapped. But for different reasons, I struggled just as much at South. I was younger than everyone else on the team, and felt like an outsider.
But during my freshman year, I started feeling like I fit there more. The longer I played, the more at home I felt. I got better at the sport and felt more comfortable on the team. It became a place where I felt supported and that I could be myself in a way that I couldn’t necessarily at Mapleton.
When I joined, having a team be “Gender Diverse” was a completely foreign concept to me and definitely continues to be in the other sports worlds I play in - basketball, volleyball, track. In the past, all of the sports I had played were very centered around a cisgender concept of gender. What Rachelle Depner and Jared Weybright and the leaders who made the change to South being a Gender Diverse team accomplished is something really special and unique that doesn’t really exist elsewhere. It’s not only new in Ultimate, but a concept that's pretty much new everywhere. It created a place where a lot of kids can feel safe to be themselves where they couldn’t anywhere else.
No other sport that I have played has ever come anywhere close to having a Gender Diverse team. Most people in my community and others like mine, if asked, probably wouldn’t even know what it means. A childhood friend of mine who I hadn’t spoken to in years had heard about our team, and messaged me telling me how cool it was to see a team that not only accepted kids for who they are, but celebrated them. It is something that can make all trans kids feel seen, not just those who play Ultimate. What Rachelle, Jared, and the leaders on the team at the time did is incredibly remarkable and can make trans athletes feel heard and appreciated, not just in Ultimate, but all sports.
