Good Story On College Athletics From NYT -- The Tiger's Den

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Date Posted: 09:41:28 05/13/02 Mon
Author: mcgeorge
Subject: Good Story On College Athletics From NYT

30 years later, Title IX still wrestles with issues of equality

May 13, 2002 Posted: 06:25:08 AM PDT

By BILL PENNINGTON
NEW YORK TIMES

Over the next few days, the men's track and field teams at Vermont, Tulane and Bowling
Green will be running their final races, completing both their seasons and the history of their
programs.

Like the men's indoor track team at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the teams
will vanish as budget-trimming administrators bend to the pressure of keeping participation
levels of male and female athletes nearly equal, as mandated by federal law. The women's
track teams at each university will continue.

This year, men's track and field, like wrestling and gymnastics before it, has been caught in
the vortex of a decades-long trend that has diminished the pool of certain participatory
men's collegiate sports.

Since the passage 30 years ago of the law commonly known as Title IX, more than 170
wrestling programs, 80 men's tennis teams, 70 men's gymnastics teams and 45 men's track
teams have been eliminated, according to the General Accounting Office.

The effort to achieve athletic equality for women is often perceived as a survival struggle
between low-profile men's sports and their women's counterparts. Supporters of Title IX
contend, however, that the real struggle is not between men's and women's teams, but
between men's sports like wrestling and track and the real powerhouse of collegiate sports,
football.

Colleges generally try to comply with Title IX by ensuring that the ratio of male and female
athletes is roughly equivalent to the overall proportion of male and female students.

A sport like football, with rosters of as many as 110 players, nearly four times the size of a
wrestling team, distorts the ledger on the men's side. Football and, to a lesser extent, men's
basketball, have been unscathed in the infighting over Title IX.

They are blossoming with outsized budgets and rosters, huge television and sponsorship
contracts, and coaches with million-dollar salaries that dwarf the pay of college presidents.

As men's wrestling, gymnastics, track and tennis have begun to disappear, 39 colleges have
added football in the past 10 years.

"It's not Title IX's fault, it's chicken college presidents and athletic directors who won't bite
the bullet on the irresponsible spending of their football programs," said Donna Lopiano, the
executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation and the former women's athletic
director at the University of Texas. "Their football programs are better funded than most
professional sports. Football is pitting the victims against the victims. Until they wise up,
men's minor sports will be crying the blues as football keeps laughing to the bank."

The role of college athletics

The most recent spate of cuts to men's intercollegiate sports has put the law, known
formally as Title IX of the Education Act Amendments of 1972, under intense new scrutiny.

The National Wrestling Coaches Association filed a federal suit against the Department of
Education last January, contending that the guidelines for compliance with Title IX
discriminate against low-profile men's sports. The national coaching associations for
gymnastics and track and field have joined the suit.

The infighting over Title IX has led some to wonder whether the fundamental role of
college athletic departments is changing.

Given the current standing of football and basketball on many campuses, are athletics
primarily a marketing and promotional arm of the institution, existing to loosen alumni
wallets, publicize the and boost campus morale? Or are intercollegiate sports an
extracurricular activity for the student body? What does it mean that Bowling Green, a state
university in Ohio with 15,500 undergraduates, will offer only seven men's sports in the next
academic year?

The language of the law is simple: No person should be excluded, on the basis of their sex,
from participating in educational programs or activities receiving federal financial
assistance.

Not long after, lawyers for the NCAA informed its members that Title IX applied to
opportunities in intercollegiate sports. At the time, according to a General Accounting
Office report, 30,000 female undergraduates at American universities and colleges
participated in athletics, compared with 248,000 men.

Three options were devised to enable a college to show that it was in compliance with Title
IX. A court case in 1995 established one test, proportionality, as the pivotal standard. The
ratio of male and female athletes should be about equal to the ratio of all male and female
undergraduates.

It is a simple test at its core. If a school's undergraduate population is 54 percent female --
and that is close to the national average this academic year -- then 54 percent of the athletes
(scholarship and nonscholarship) who participate in intercollegiate teams should be female.

"But in the 1970s, most schools were about 65 percent male," Lopiano said, "and I think the
coaches thought it would stay that way, so they would protect their huge football rosters.
And I believe they were also convinced no women would come out anyway. We figured that
participation was so minuscule then, going from 5 percent to 35 percent was enormous."

Even with Title IX, spending on men's sports at most colleges with big-time Division I-A
football teams still outpaces spending on women's athletics by nearly 2 to 1.

But swept along by many social factors, the number of women participating in college
sports has jumped fivefold over the past three decades. The explosion in high school sports
is even more pronounced. When Title IX was approved by Congress, 1 in 27 women in high
school played a sport. By 2000, the ratio was 1 in 3.

Increasing the percentage of female athletes on campuses has involved many passionate
skirmishes. It has led sometimes to tortured roster management, with the number of players
on some men's teams capped, while some women's rosters doubled in size. And it
occasionally produced tangled new guidelines for coaches and the unsettling elimination of
some of the country's most prominent men's teams.

In the mid-1990s, UCLA suddenly did away with its men's swimming team, which had
produced 16 Olympic gold medal winners. Iowa State dropped its three-time national
champion gymnastics program. Providence College ended an 80-year tradition in baseball.
After 91 years of football, Boston University gave up the sport in 1997.

The national gymnastics championships are now not much more than a large invitational,
with only 22 colleges still competing in the sport. After Nebraska dropped men's swimming
last year, the Big 12 Conference meet involved only three member schools.

Marilyn McNeil, the athletic director at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J.,
is the chair of the NCAA's committee on women's athletics. She endorses the capping of
rosters and lays the blame for the loss of some non-revenue-producing men's sports at the
feet of administrators.

"Schools making cuts are saying that player No. 70 through 100 on the football team is more
valuable than the entire wrestling or gymnastics team," McNeil said. "We cannot afford the
excess created by players who virtually never get their uniform dirty in a game. And I'd love
to see a study on the unbelievable, exorbitant amounts of money big-time sports waste on
things that have nothing to do with the student athletes."

Football pays the bills

Most Title IX discussions usually come back to the major sports, football and basketball,
because they are frequently held blameless by athletic directors, even in tough budget
times. Defenders of the sports say that is because they provide the colleges with invaluable
national exposure, contribute to the morale on campus and among alumni, but, most of all,
because they raise the revenue that finances the rest of the sports, including women's teams.

"I find it interesting that no one ever says the stadium is too full," said Glen Mason, football
coach at the University of Minnesota and president of the American Football Coaches
Association. "If anyone wants to run a comprehensive athletic department today, they have
to have a highly successful football program to pay the bills."

But the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the college football world is growing,
even as more institutions rush to chase the football holy grail. Division I-A football
programs that are not members of the top conferences, like Tulane and Bowling Green, tend
to have fewer female athletes and are more likely to have recently eliminated men's sports.

For a Division I-AA football team, the chances of making a profit are rarer still. On average,
I-AA football programs lose more than $1 million annually. UMass football lost $2.5
million last year.

"Football is a visible sport and one of the few vehicles capable of bringing 10,000 people to
campus," said Bob Marcum, the UMass athletic director. "You have to fund it at a certain
level to be competitive."

But could not the top NCAA football programs do with 60 scholarship athletes instead of
nearly 100? After all, National Football League teams play with a 53-man roster.

"It could be reduced and not impact the sport," Rick Dickson, the Tulane athletic director,
said. "If football went down 10 or 20 scholarships, I'm sure the sport would still prosper. And
it would lessen the hardship in other ways."

Such a measure would take NCAA intervention, and big-time college sports are generally
heading in the other direction. The average football roster, across the three divisions of
NCAA play, has jumped to 94 players in 2001 from 81.6 players in 1981.

To the UMass gymnast Brett Nelligan, seated recently amid the pommel horses, rings and
balance beams destined for campus storage, such numbers are disquieting.

"I'm a sports management major and I study the NCAA manual," he said. "It says the
association's purpose is to invite a learning experience. How are you going to do that if only
two sports matter? We should be providing as many opportunities as possible for everyone."

TITLE IX TIMELINE

1972 -- Congress passed legislation prohibiting institutions that receive federal funds from
discriminating based on gender.

1984 -- Supreme Court ruling said Title IX did not apply to athletics.

1987 -- The Civil Rights Restoration Act made Title IX applicable to athletics again.

1996 -- A "clarification" specifies Title IX's application to athletics.

2002 -- 30th anniversary; the National Wrestling Coaches Association filed suit in U.S.
District Court against the Education Department, claiming the department is not properly
interpreting Title IX.

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Replies:

Re: Good Story On College Athletics From NYT -- Tiger Casey, 10:19:30 05/13/02 Mon
- Good point -- GauchoFreg, 15:30:01 05/14/02 Tue
  - Yes, a football team at UOP would be great... -- Tiger Casey, 11:08:47 05/16/02 Thu