The Casualties of Title IX

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance..."

—United States Code Section 20, 

 

Since Title IX has been put into play, well over 400 men’s athletic teams have been cut, according to a 2005 article at TheIND.com⁵.  As Ann Coulter wrote in her USA today article in 2001¹

“Men's teams are being decimated in pursuit of an insane feminist dream that has morphed into federal policy: to make women's sports equal to men's.”  (A woman wrote that one people.)

According to one CBS News.com article, “Colleges have cut hundreds of wrestling teams, along with dozens of men's gymnastics, tennis and track and field teams. Men's swimming is also taking a bath. Remember Olympic gold medallist Greg Louganis? He polished his art on the University of Miami's championship swimming and diving team. That team no longer exists.^3”

Wrestling is a shadow of what it once was.  And in 2002 Dennis Dodd threw some of the blame at FOOTBALL².  As he pointed out, up until that year Division I universities had cut zero scholarships from football in order to comply with Title IX requirements.  Obviously Dennis is a wrestling fan and he has some valid points.  But he also touches on the real issue is that Title IX was poorly written and even more poorly enforced.  Dennis hits the nail on the head when he says “They count against Title IX requirements, and there is no comparable women's sport to balance them out,” talking about football.  Dennis is correct in pointing to the humungous coaching staffs, salaries, and budgets that football programs are known for.  But if you are a college athletic director are you going to cut the program that the boosters contribute the most to and which brings in the biggest bucks?  Heck no! 

Even Cheer Leading has been involved in Title IX, and it wasn’t what the customers wanted⁴. As Walter Olson points out in his 2007 article on Overlawyered.com, schools were making the cheerleaders go to girls athletic contests even though the girls didn’t want them there.  I can attest to this scenario.  I thought it would be cool one time to get the cheer squad to come out to one of our softball games because it was a big game and I was looking for any extra motivation I could dig up.  My girls quickly put an end to that thought.  THEY didn’t want the cheer leaders there.  You don’t have cheer leaders at a softball game.  What was I thinking?

So I’m going to try to put into a nutshell some of the Title IX fallacies.  And you can be assured I am not against woman’s sports.  I’m a woman’s sports coach.  Title IX was originally meant to get rid of discrimination but instead it has created new discrimination.  And for the most part it may be doing more damage than good.  Why can’t we increase woman’s sports without cutting male sports?  Why does someone think equality means spending exactly the same dollar amount or having exactly the same number of participants, etc.? 

Dodd pointed out in his article that among the craziness land-locked Kansas State University has a woman’s rowing team.  What?  Are they driving over to the Mississippi River for contests?  Talk about travel.  Yet many colleges have cut wrestling and baseball to comply with Title IX.

So here are some questions for you to answer.  Your comments are welcomed.  Perhaps if enough people respond, not just to my articles, but across the board, maybe somebody will look at Title IX as it applies to athletics and make the appropriate adjustments before it brings the downfall of all sports.  (Of course, I’m sure there are those who would support that outcome as well.)

1.       Equipment, uniforms, team sizes, etc. are different for different sports.  How can we measure the balance under such conditions?

2.      Just because there is a higher percentage of female enrollments at a given school doesn’t mean there are going to be more female athletes.  I think the type of school (what kinds of courses are taught there) should be considered. 

3.      Why should monies donated by boosters, parents groups, etc. be lumped into the consideration of budget size for a given sport?  A football team is going to have more participants by the nature of the beast.  This means more parents involved or contributing to the program.  That’s not the school spending the money. 

4.      One of the allowances towards Title IX compliance is by what the student body wants.  That may be hard to determine and of course could fluctuate.  (Read the story of the Scottsdale Community College Artichokes.)  Apparently that poll can now be taken by email. 

The bottom line here is instead of trying to make everything equal with a dose of political correctness and fear of lawsuits, why not just make it a standard that if there are enough women interested in a given sport that isn’t offered that steps are taken to add that sport.  Let’s make sure that we allocate a FAIR amount across the board for scholarships.  In this case FAIR doesn’t mean equal and it doesn’t necessarily amount to equal proportions because of different cost factors as I mentioned above.  And yes, whether or not a given sport, i.e. football, brings in revenue to the university should definitely be considered.  For some crazy reason, men and women both seem to be much more willing to shell out big bucks to go see their potential national championship winning football team as opposed to the women’s badminton competition.  Trust me ladies, if you could pack 50,000 people into a stadium to watch the woman’s (enter sport here) contest you would have no problem getting funding for that sport.

So, how would you solve the Title IX issues?

Works Cited

Coulter, Ann. USA Today - Title IX Defeats Male Athletes. 25th July 2001. 8th August 2011 .

Dodd, Dennis. CBS Sports - Football Needs to Start Making Title IX Sacrifices. 12th June 2002. 8th August 2011 .

Leung, Rebecca. CBS News - The Battle Over Title IX. 11th February 2009. 8th August 2011 .

Olson, Walter. Outlawyered - Title IX and Cheerleading. 16th January 2007. 8th August 2011 .

The WEb Site of the Independent Weekly. TheIND.com - Title Run. 2005. 8th August 2011 .

There are plenty of articles on these subjects.  Just do a Google search.  If I add every article I check out my Works Cited would take up another blog or two.