DANBURY, Connecticut (AP) – A newspaper apologized and fired a copy editor for posting an online photo of a girls’ soccer team that suggested one of the players was a lesbian.

The Immaculate High School team was celebrating a goal scored in a championship game Nov. 5. But the caption on the Web site of The News-Times said the team was celebrating a teammate’s decision to “come out of the closet as a lesbian.”

“It was a flagrant, awful violation of every journalistic principle,” said Paul Steinmetz, the paper’s editor. “It’s just embarrassing to us and untenable.”

The copy editor, who was not identified, was “goofing around” and did not realize the caption had gone online, Steinmetz said. The bogus caption stayed on the Web page for a few hours and received a few hundred hits, he said.

The newspaper, which has a circulation of about 33,000 in western Connecticut, is training more employees to administer its Web site so future errors can be fixed promptly, Steinmetz said.