(Images via Facebook)

Ten-year-old basketball player and Virginia resident, Kymora Johnson, is at the center of a controversy, but her teammates, her coach, and her community are standing behind her.

This past weekend, Johnson was supposed to travel to Myrtle Beach, Florida with her team, The Charlottesville Cavaliers, to compete in the National Travel Basketball Association Championship Tournament. But the team hit a major snag along the way. The boys’ team was disqualified for having a girl, Johnson, on their roster.

The ruling comes as a major surprise to the team and to Kymora’s mother.

“She’s played in hundreds of tournaments and two prior NTBA national championship tournaments on this team,” Kymora’s mother, Jessica Thomas-Johnson, told Yahoo Parenting.

The Cavaliers were actually doing very well in the tournament and only found out about the disqualification after winning 5 games.

Thomas-Johnson says that the disqualification ruling came in after someone sent NTBA President John Whitley a picture of Kymora, along with a complaint.

According to NBC29, Whitley stated “that the team was told from the start that girls were not permitted to play on the boy’s team. Because the Cavs broke this rule, the NTBA says it had no choice but to disqualify them.”

(Images via Facebook)

And while it appears that the NTBA won’t budge, the team, alongside Kymora’s mother, and other parents are fighting back.

Kymora, a skilled basketball player, who shows a lot of promise, joined the Cavaliers at the age of 5 because there were no travel basketball team options for girls her age. She’s played in three tournaments with the team so far, and had to present documentation to prove her identity each time.

Cavalier coach Joe Mallory maintains that the NTBA was made aware of a female player on the Cavaliers during check-in, but the NTBA denies this.