The following comes from a November Lifezette article by Jonathan Gantz:

Two student athletes kicked off a team because of low grades. We’ve heard that story a million times.

The only difference in a new case is that the student athletes are 8 years old and JUST in the third grade.

That’s right. Two 8-year-old girls, enrolled at St. Martin of Tours in Los Angeles, California, a private Catholic school, found themselves unceremoniously dumped from their volleyball squad with just two games to go in the season.

Since the team had seven girls, and six are needed to play, the team ceased to exist from an official standpoint.

Which led to oceans of tears from the little girls, and outrage from parents.

“It’s just nuts,” said a mother of one of the little girls whose team had been taken away.

“When we went to the principal, he told us that basically the rules were the rules. He said that he had coached a team of older kids earlier in his career, and that academically ineligible kids had to be kicked off the team. His position was that everybody had to play by the same rules.”

Kevin Baxter, spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said the reason the school and others in the system were so effective at educating young people and sending them on to college was the fact that academics always take precedence over nonacademic matters.