First RIT women’s track runner comes forward about sharing team and locker room with viral trans athlete
EXCLUSIVE: Caroline Hill turned down multiple Division I women’s track and field scholarships to compete for Division III Rochester Institute of Technology.
Her talents allowed her to break the program record in the 200-meter and 300-meter early in her collegiate career. But then she had to watch both records fall to transgender teammate Sadie Schreiner, all while feeling “uncomfortable” sharing a locker room with her trans teammate for the next two years.
Then, even after Schreiner was ruled ineligible to compete when the NCAA changed its transgender policy on Feb. 6, Hill alleges Schreiner continued to use the women’s locker room and train with the team for another month. RIT has declined to comment on Hill’s allegations.
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Now, Hill is the first of Schreiner’s former RIT teammates to speak out about the experience. Hill previously joined Riley Gaines’ lawsuit vs. the NCAA in 2023 – Schreiner’s first official year on her team – as an anonymous plaintiff. But now, she has come forward to put her name down.
Hill claims she and her teammates were introduced to Schreiner as their future teammate in 2022. Schreiner did not officially begin to compete until 2023.
“He was practicing with us a little bit during the preseason,” Hill said of the situation in 2022. Fox News Digital was unable to verify why Schreiner did not officially compete for RIT in 2022.
When Schreiner began competing the following year, Hill claims the two of them were paired up as “workout buddies” by their coaches.
“We were sort of expected to be training buddies because we’re both ‘women’ on the women’s team running the same events,” Hill said.
“Personally, I saw it as ‘This is not fair. This is definitively unfair’… the expectation was that we are equals, being perceived as equals by the coach. That was what I had a harder time with.”
Hill even made it a point to protest the situation to her coach and administrators, but to no avail. Hill even alleges that Jacqueline Nicholson, RIT executive director of intercollegiate athletics, told her and the other women on the team that Schreiner had “less testosterone” than some of them.
“I had a couple conversations with her. She was very firm in that ‘This is what the NCAA is enforcing. We’re supporting it,'” Hill said. “We even had a meeting with the women on the team where she addressed us and said, ‘We support this athlete competing on the team. Some of you women have more testosterone than he does,’ making it seem like it was totally fair and just as if we had a problem with it, that was not OK. It was very, very harsh.”
Hill said her conversation with her sprint coach was futile as well.
“I was very vulnerable expressing my feelings about the male athlete competing and training with us. And he was not very empathetic,” Hill said. “He sort of tried to diminish my thoughts, and it was a lot of deflection. It’s like, ‘Well, we shouldn’t be focusing on that.'”
Hill also claims that other women on the team were supportive of competing with Schreiner.
“A lot of my teammates, um, were very supportive of this athlete competing and training with us,” Hill said.
In Schreiner’s second year on the team in 2024, the trans athlete broke Hill’s program record in the 300-meter, clearing Hill’s previous record, which she set her sophomore year in 2022, by 1.42 seconds.
In early 2025, Schreiner broke the program record in the 200-meter with a 24.46, besting Hill’s best time of 25.82, which she set that same year. She ranks just behind Schreiner for second-best in program history.
While Hill had to watch Schreiner break her collegiate records on the track, an even more personal dilemma awaited her in the locker room.
“I remember one day, I think I was changing, and all of a sudden this athlete is just in the locker room, and being very just shocked and kind of mortified obviously because it’s uncomfortable to have a male in the locker room. And so actually his locker was right next to mine,” Hill said. “It’s kind of a social area, but he really didn’t talk to anyone.”
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Hill also said Schreiner never changed in the women’s locker room. Still, Hill said she actively tried to avoid changing in front of Schreiner, but that wasn’t always an option.
“If he was like standing there doing something or whatever, I would kind of wait for him to be somewhere else before I changed,” Hill said. “Or there were times where I did, but I would just change as quickly as I could and, you know, I was able to just like suck it up, I guess. Not that I should have had to do that.”
Hill spent the two years of her collegiate career sharing those spaces and competitions with Schreiner. After President Donald Trump signed the “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order on Feb. 5, which aimed to put an end to situations like the one at RIT, the NCAA complied the next day, changing its policy to only allow biological females to compete as women.
Hill said the coaches never officially informed the female athletes that Schreiner wouldn’t be competing with them anymore.
RIT provided a statement to Fox News Digital on Feb. 12 that read, “We continue to follow the NCAA participation policy for transgender student-athletes following the Trump administration’s executive order. Sadie is not participating in the next meet.”
However, Hill alleged that this didn’t mean the end of seeing Schreiner in the locker room or at practice.
“He was still changing with us and all that. I was sort of confused,” Hill said. “Utilizing our coaches, our facilities, our resources during a practice times even though the rules had been changed. So it didn’t end with the rule change. He kept training with us. Not that we were training buddies, but he was always there at the same time as I was… I would say a month after [the rule change].”
Schreiner’s attorney, Susie Cirilli of Cirilli LLC, told Fox News Digital, “We are not responding at this time,” in response to a request for comment on Hill’s statements.
Eventually, Schreiner made an effort to compete in non-NCAA sanctioned events.
Schreiner competed at the USA Track & Field Open Masters Championships on March 1 in New York.
There, Schreiner took first place in the women’s 400-meter dash and 200-meter dash.
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Weeks after that, Schreiner posted an Instagram video claiming to have likely competed in Schreiner’s last organized track meet in the U.S. after a USATF event in Maine.
“I very likely just ran what will be my last meet in the United States,” Schreiner said, later adding, “I will find a way to keep competing, but I doubt that will be in the United States.”
Schreiner said USATF changed its policy on transgender eligibility from the one used by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which allows biological males to compete in the women’s category, to the one used by World Athletics, which bans any athlete who has undergone male puberty from competing as a woman. The USATF’s official transgender eligibility policy does now reference the World Athletics guidelines on its official webpage. It previously referenced the IOC’s policy, as seen in an archive via Wayback Machine.
Then in July, Schreiner filed a lawsuit against Princeton University after the school allegedly excluded the athlete from a May 3 women’s race.
Schreiner’s lawsuit claimed the athlete attempted to participate in the women’s 200-meter sprint at the Larry Ellis Invitational as one of the 141 participants unattached to a university or club. The suit alleges officials told Schreiner the athlete could not participate 15 minutes before the race began.
“The actions of the two Princeton officials were in blatant and willful disregard of Sadie’s rights based on Sadie’s rights as a transgender woman under controlling New Jersey law, thereby causing Sadie Schreiner to foreseeable emotional and physical harm,” the lawsuit argued.
Cirilli provided an exclusive statement to Fox News Digital about Schreiner’s lawsuit against Princeton.
“The action of the two Princeton officials were in blatant and willful disregard of Sadie’s rights as a transgender woman under controlling New Jersey Law,” the statement read. “The actions of the defendants were utterly intolerable in a civilized community and go beyond the possible bounds of decency.”
Meanwhile, Hill, having graduated from RIT with a degree in graphic design, is pressing ahead as a now-public member of the Gaines vs. NCAA lawsuit.
Hill said fear of retaliation from fellow students at the school and elsewhere prevented her from speaking out against the situation earlier. But now, as the culture in America has shifted, Hill is proudly putting her name out there as an advocate to protect women’s sports.
“I was definitely a little worried being on campus, being on my team, um, with administration that felt strongly, I get that they were against the lawsuit… I was a little worried about my own safety and that things might escalate in a way that I couldn’t foresee,” Hill said.
“I feel like it’s worthwhile to come forward [now] just because I have the ability to use what has happened to me as a way to show that harm is being done to women, to female athletes… it is scary to put yourself out there because I’m sure there’s a lot of girls out there that feel like they can’t and don’t have a voice.
“The NCAA has definitely made it so that they, a lot of women and girls don’t feel like they can speak out, so I want to do it.”
Hill is calling for RIT to apologize to her and reinstate her as the program record-holder for the 200- and 300-meter.
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