"Juashaunna's convinced she missed a chance to shine for college scouts. There 'was a lot of recruiters at this meet,' she says."
-- from this news article

The kind of favored dress worn by this student is unlikely to find favor with other students, with faculty and administrators, and above all with the alumni, and hence, will not find favor with recruiters or, later on, with those who sell their smile for endorsement money.

It appears that her head-covering was not the cause of her being told she could not participate. Clearly she is looking for trouble, looking to make this into an issue in which Islam can be dragged in. That, here, is not the case.

But what if the hijab had been banned, for all kinds of reasons, just as such headgear is banned for pilots? What about it? She is not in a Muslim country. The Free Exercise Clause does not provide an absolute rule. Regulation by the government may impinge on the "free exercise" of religion because of a compelling state interest. And it is unclear, from the article above, if there is sufficient "state action" to trigger a constitutional challenge. Clearly she is out to make trouble. But it is she who will in the end be sorry, she who will repel those "recruiters" whom she is so interested in attracting for what she fondly believes could be a "college" education.

In France, some Muslim girls were egged on by others, to challenge the long-established rules of the French laic state, and defying those rules, they wore hijabs to school, making a religio-political statement that the French recognized at once as a challenge to their legal and political institutions, and they were having none of it. The French state did not yield but won "la guerre des foulards" and that was the end of it.

Something of the sort is being attempted by this girl, and her backers, here, but what makes the matter a little more confusing is that what disqualified her from entry was not her head-covering but her violation of other dress rules having nothing to do with Islam. In her eagerness to make herself into a Muslim victim, she has decided to pretend that the reason was other than what it was.

She's looking for trouble. One hopes she gets it, not as the "victim" she purports to be, but as the aggressor she is.