A high school volleyball playoff game in Arizona has been forced to shut down, after the crowd reportedly began heckling the Native American visiting players with racist gestures and slurs.

The alleged incident took place north of Phoenix in Anthem, where crowd members reportedly began using a variety of racist taunts.

They called the female volleyball players — who had come from Salt River High School, in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community — “savages”, and they imitated traditional Native American dances and rituals.

They also did so-called tomahawk chops, a gesture that has been controversially adopted by sports teams in the United States.

“I think it’s really immature — it’s disappointing,” Keith Andreas, a Salt River High School alumnus who was at the match, told the Arizona Republic.

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Mr Andreas said that a major issue was that, when the gestures and taunts were brought to the referee by parents, they were dismissed.

“That’s what really bothered everybody,” Mr Andreas said. The referee “said, ‘Boys will be boys.’”

Wendy Davison, the assistant principal and athletic director for Caurus Academy, the charter school that was hosting the game, said that while “something” happened at the game last Tuesday, it was not caught on camera, and the taunts were not seen by administrators.

“Those are the facts and we apologise for the fact that there was a disruption or the fact that anybody felt that they could not move forward with the game,” she told the Washington Post.

Native Americans have been frequently targeted during sports in the United States, with more than 50 instances counted by High Country News between 2008 and 2018.

That included racial harassment against athletes, coaches and fans.

Harassment has come in various forms, including threatening graffiti that instructed teams to “Go back to the rez”, referring to the reservations where Native Americans were forced to move to by European-American colonialists.

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Other instances have included hockey fans pouring beer on Native American students on a field trip, and high school students being turned away from a basketball game because they were Indian.