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Title IX Impact on Athletics

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  • Title IX Impact on Athletics

    Interesting article from Friday in the Boston Globe about the impact of Title IX on the overall team offerings.

    http://www.boston.com/news/education...outs_increase/

    There now are more collegiate rifle teams for women than there are for men. More schools offer women’s equestrian teams than men’s water polo teams. Quinnipiac has seven sports for men and 14 for women. UCLA has a swimming team for women but not for men.

    Such is the college sports landscape as athletic departments try to comply with federal Title IX regulations while cutting budgets in daunting economic times.

    To achieve gender equity amid enrollment shifts and reduced revenue, colleges have been chopping men’s sports, with at least half a dozen on the endangered list and a couple facing extinction.

    “Every April, you hear about the spring slaughter,’’ said Minnesota men’s gymnastics coach Mike Burns, whose program is one of 17 remaining in a sport that numbered 124 in 1972.

    Wrestling, which boasted nearly 400 teams in 1972, was down to 224 last year, only 86 of them at the Division 1 level. Rifle dropped from 97 to 30, fencing from 86 to 34, skiing from 69 to 38, water polo from 52 to 42. While more men (244,267) than women (182,503) played college sports last year because of football, there were more teams for women (9,560) than for men (8,465). In 1982, the average number of teams per institution was 9.1 for men and 6.4 for wom en. Last year, it was 8.9 for women and 7.9 for men.

    The change reflects the numbers game that schools play in order to meet the proportionality requirement that has become the favored method to comply with Title IX, the 1972 law forbidding sex discrimination by institutions receiving federal funds, and to avoid legal challenges.

    “The only safe way is to be proportional,’’ said Eric Pearson, chairman of the College Sports Council, an advocacy group for men’s sports.

    Under the 1979 guidelines, colleges can meet gender equity requirements in any of three ways: By having substantially the same proportion of female athletes as they do female undergraduates. By having a history and continuing practice of expanding athletic programs for women. Or by fully and effectively accommodating the interests of current and prospective female students.

    But in the wake of lawsuits and changing enforcement policies over the past 15 years and awash in red ink, most athletic departments have avoided the second and third options. At a time when two-thirds of the 120 major football-playing schools are cutting athletic budgets, they’re reluctant to expand programs.

    “The reality is, there are not a lot of institutions looking to add sports for men or women because of the financial climate that we’re in,’’ said Janet Judge, a former Harvard athlete and assistant athletic director who co-authored the NCAA’s Title IX manual and advises colleges on compliance. “In fact, the opposite is true.’’

    Determining interest levels, which most schools did by using complicated and imprecise electronic surveys that recently were disallowed by the Obama administration, can be challenging, especially at institutions with large enrollments.
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    So the most reliable way to stay in compliance, especially at Division 1 colleges with football teams and majority-female enrollments such as Texas, Alabama, Florida, and Southern Cal, is to reduce men’s sports to the minimum required by the NCAA, which for Bowl Subdivision schools is six, plus eight for women.

    “That’s the only option available if you’re taking opportunities away,’’ said Judge.

    While many small schools such as Williams and MIT still offer 30 or more sports, most of the large colleges that compete in major bowls or are perennial March Madness contenders in basketball — with the notable exception of the Big 10 — have barely half that number.

    Most big schools offer the same core group for men: football, basketball, baseball, cross-country, track, golf, and tennis. What they drop most often are small-roster sports that bring in little or no cash.

    “Unfortunately, a lot of the Olympic sports are non-revenue,’’ said Burns, who estimates that the budget for a men’s gymnastics program runs $300,000-$500,000. “They become cost centers as opposed to profit centers.’’

    The US Olympic Committee and the NCAA have been working together to find ways to keep men’s sports like gymnastics and wrestling from vanishing.

    “Almost 100 percent of our athletes have participated in a Division 1 program,’’ said USA Wrestling executive director Rich Bender. “As those diminish, our pipeline diminishes. We don’t have some magical pipeline we can put in place.’’

    With female students now outnumbering males at most schools and the number of big-roster football programs rising from 497 in 1981 to 633, colleges are finding it more difficult to keep their programs in balance. In 2006, James Madison, which has a 60-40 female-male ratio, dropped 10 sports, including women’s gymnastics, fencing, and archery.

    Quinnipiac, which has a similar female-male ratio, will add women’s rugby and golf and keep volleyball for two more years after a federal judge ruled recently that the school could not replace the volleyball team, which it had cut for budgetary reasons, with a competitive cheerleading squad.

    The balancing act is particularly challenging for historically black institutions, where women now outnumber men by a 2-1 ratio. Howard, which dropped baseball and wrestling and added women’s bowling in 2002, still would have to cut more than 40 percent of its male athletes to be in proportional compliance since nearly half of them play football.


    Initial opposition
    Even though only a handful of colleges make money on football, almost all of them want to keep it since the sport provides visibility, serves as a social magnet for students, and attracts alumni interest and donations.

    So most schools have stayed in compliance by adding numbers-rich women’s sports such as rowing (with its average squad size of 50), soccer (25) and lacrosse (23) to help balance football (103) and by focusing on roster management, capping the size of men’s teams while increasing women’s.

    “That’s what they’ve been doing for 15-20 years to avoid cutting sports,’’ said Pearson. “They put quotas on the men’s teams and inflate the women’s rosters.’’

    Those numbers games weren’t envisioned when Title IX became law 38 years ago. There were nearly 170 fewer football teams to skew the numbers, fewer female than male students, and more cash in athletic department coffers. Yet from the beginning there was significant opposition to gender equity, particularly from big-time schools.

    “We thought that there’d be some pushing and shoving but that people would want to comply,’’ said Jeff Orleans, the former Ivy League executive director who helped draft the original Title IX regulations when he worked for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. “But there were battle lines instead of dialogue and they were established early.

    “What we had expected was a transition period that would have its ups and downs but that there would be progress. We got derailed in every way you can imagine.’’

    Some leagues quickly embraced gender equity in both theory and practice and still do. Almost all of the Big 10 schools offer at least 22 sports, including men’s gymnastics and wrestling, and Ohio State supports 36. The Ivy League’s eight members all sponsor at least 30 sports, and Harvard offers the most in the country with 41.

    Every member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference — which has only one school (Tufts) with more than 2,800 students — has maintained at least 25 sports, as well as multiple club teams. Colby has a coed woodsmen’s team for old-time sports like log rolling, pole climbing, and ax throwing.

    “Participation and opportunity is a central tenet,’’ said Erin Quinn, athletic director at Middlebury, whose teams have won national championships in sports ranging from ice hockey to tennis to cross-country. “We’ve been able to have depth and breadth.’’

    Most big-time programs no longer have either, as proportionality and budget cuts have made for a minimalist approach.

    “Schools are making huge reassessments of their sports programs,’’ said Pearson. “Generally speaking, men’s programs feel the burden of budget cuts but women’s sports suffer as well.’’

    When MIT, which still has more than twice as many sports (33) as Texas, dropped eight of them last year as part of a $485,000 budget reduction, women’s ice hockey and gymnastics were among the casualties.

    “Title IX does play a role,’’ said USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny, “but right now it’s the economy that’s the driving factor in most of these circumstances.’’

    The challenge for college administrators is to remain solvent while fulfilling both the letter and spirit of Title IX.

    “I’m not hearing, we need to cut men’s sports,’’ said Judge. “It’s, ‘We need to cut sports and how can we do it and maintain gender equity?’ There are very few presidents and athletic directors I’ve talked to who don’t believe that treating men and women equally is a good goal.’’
    Middlebury Hockey....The Greatest DIII Show on Skates

  • #2
    Re: Title IX Impact on Athletics

    So?

    Unfortunately, nothing is going to change.
    CCT '77 & '78
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