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Kendall Kotzmacher will never forget the day she stepped into the batter’s box against Marissa Rothenberger.
It was a Minnesota state tournament semifinal. Kotzmacher and her White Bear Lake High School teammates were looking to go on a run to the state championship game. Kotzmacher had just transferred to White Bear Lake for her final year with the goal of winning a championship, alongside her little sister and teammate.
But Rothenberger, a trans athlete, was on the mound that day for their opponent, Champlin Park High School.
“They’re moving ten times more,” Kotzmacher told Fox News Digital of Rothenberger’s pitches.
“I have seen movement pitches, so when your hands are bigger than a biological female at that age, in Minnesota especially, you’re spinning the ball ten times more. And I would actually say that this athlete wasn’t on their best game that day, but even at half their best, they’re still blowing it past us, spinning the ball more, making it so we can’t hit.”
Kotzmacher locked in enough to make some contact off Rothenberger that day. But Rothenberger held White Bear Lake to just two runs on seven hits. It was the most number of runs scored off Rothenberger in the entire postseason. But it wasn’t enough, because in the last inning, Rothenberger came up to hit too.
After hitting a double to spark a two-run rally earlier that day, Rothenberger hit a double to lead-off the final inning, and set up a pinch-runner to win the game for Champlin Park.
“It was a half-swing. This athlete was not swinging to their full potential, and the ball was still hit extremely hard,” Kotzmacher, who played catcher behind Rothenberger that day, said. “It was hard to call pitches, because it seemed like every pitch I called, this athlete could hit.”
Kotzmacher’s high school career ended right there. She will never get another chance to fulfill her childhood dream of winning a high school state championship. She fell into the arms of her little sister and began to sob.
“I honestly just wanted to leave right away. I didn’t want to do anything else,” Kotzmacher said. “I couldn’t even process what just happened.
“How do you acknowledge that you lost to a biological male? How do you process those events that happened? And that was something that entire night, I still couldn’t do it… we lost to a biological male in a female state tournament.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has processed the incident, and determined that the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and the Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) violated Title IX by allowing it to happen. The institution has until Oct. 10 to change its policies to only permit females in girls’ sports, or risk referral to the Department of Justice.
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A Department of Education press release announcing cited the pitcher’s performance in the 2025 season for the recent crackdown, stating “the male pitcher overpowered female athletes during five consecutive matches, only giving up one earned run over the course of 35 innings and striking out 27 female batters.”
Kotzmacher is in her freshman year of college now, playing softball for Western Michigan University. But she hopes, for the sake of her younger sister, that Minnesota’s agencies will comply with the president’s executive order to keep biological males out of girls’ and women’s sports. Rothenberger still has one high school season left.
Minnesota became one of the first states in the country to announce it won’t comply with the executive order back in February. Minnesota’s Democrat leadership, led by Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and a Democrat-majority state legislature, has taken some of the hardest stances on committing to enabling biological males to compete in girls’ sports during Trump’s tenure.
Ellison filed a lawsuit against Trump and the DOJ, and bragged about “suing them first” over the issue. Ellison is also on the defendant side of a lawsuit by three other Minnesota girls’ softball pitchers, who have remained anonymous, alleging their Title IX rights were violated this past season too.
And still, Ellison’s office has defended the concept of letting males play in girls’ sports.
“In addition to getting exercise and the fun of competition, playing sports comes with so many benefits for young people. You build friendships that can last a lifetime, you learn how to work as part of a team, and you get to feel like you belong,” Ellison said in response to the girls’ lawsuit, in May. “I believe it is wrong to single out one group of students, who already face higher levels of bullying and harassment, and tell these kids they cannot be on the team because of who they are. I will continue to defend the rights of all students to play sports with their friends and peers.”
The state legislature failed to pass a bill that would have banned trans athletes from girls’ sports, the “Preserving Girls’ Sports Act,” back in March. It fell one vote shy of advancing to Walz’s desk. Meanwhile, state lawmaker Rep. Liish Kozlowski, who identifies as “non-binary,” called the bill “another version of state-sanctioned bullying and genocide.”
Kotzmacher was at the state capital that day. She was at a rally outside the capital building, watching Riley Gaines and former Minnesota Vikings captain Jack Brewer lead a protest in support of the bill.
“That’s kind of what sparked, like ‘I’m not going to back down from this issue and I will speak up for other girls just as [Gaines] has spoken up for me,'” Kotzmacher said.
In addition to admiring Gaines, Kotmzacher has also become close with XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey throughout the recent rise in activism over the issue of “saving women’s sports.”
But for Kotzmacher, that is only one of the many issues that has turned her and her Minnesota teen peers against the state’s long-time Democratic authorities.
“Right now, Minnesota is going through a lot of turmoil. And there is a lot that is wrong with what’s going on. It is not the same state that I grew up in,” she said. “It’s not safe to be there anymore, if we’re going to be honest, I’m not even allowed to go to St. Paul or Minneapolis anymore, my parents won’t let me, because it’s too dangerous.”
In the meantime, Kotzmacher hopes that the Trump administration will take action to at least address the girls’ sports issue, as she hopes her younger sister will have a fair and safe softball season in 2026.
“Knowing that it’s recognized at a higher level is huge… Seeing that people are finally doing something about it and recognizing that they did something wrong and they took this away from us, it means a lot and I’m excited to see what happens and what plays out.”
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