Days after Boise State University forfeited a third volleyball match with San José State University, two Boise State players explained their decision.

In an interview with OutKick, a sports website owned by Fox Corp., Kiersten and Katelyn Van Kirk discussed the final forfeit. Boise State refused to take the court Friday for a Mountain West Conference tournament match with San José State, which ended Boise State’s season.

“I feel like it was kind of a lose-lose situation,” Katelyn Van Kirk told OutKick, in an article published Saturday. “And in the end, I guess we all had to come to terms with the idea that this is bigger than ourselves and a championship has to be given up for this fight (to protect women’s sports) to actually keep going.”

Boise State was one of four Mountain West schools that forfeited matches with San José State, which reportedly has a transgender player on its roster.

“It’s just disheartening and heartbreaking that it had to come to this,” Kiersten Van Kirk told OutKick. “But I know that we are all working towards future generations being able to have a safe place for female athletes to compete and putting that above ourselves, which is a really hard thing to do because obviously our goal was to win a championship. And I think that it’s extremely unfair and really terrible that it had to come to that.”

Kiersten and Katelyn Van Kirk, sisters from Bozeman, Mont., were among 12 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against San José State and the Mountain West. Federal courts rejected the lawsuit, which sought to have the San José State player in question declared ineligible for the Mountain West tournament. The lawsuit also targeted a Mountain West “transgender participation policy” that awarded six forfeit wins to San José State.