According to the latest figures from the NCAA, they have just under 8,000 men’s college athletic teams in the country. Since we are constantly being told that women are victims of discrimination in sports and require the help of the federal government, surely the number of women’s teams must be only a fraction of that figure. Think again – the number of women’s teams is 8,968.

About 5 percent of those men's teams are getting eliminated each year and the situation is dire, which is why the NCAA and USOC are in meetings right now to try to stop the bleeding. But don’t count on Myles Brand for leadership – he insists that Title IX not even be mentioned at that conference..

The only group fighting for Title IX reform – that is to say, sticking up for the kids – is the College Sports Council. Here’s an interview I had yesterday with the Executive Director of that group, Eric Pearson:

Eric Pearson is the Executive Director of the College Sports Council (CSC), a national coalition of coaches, parents, athletes, and former athletes.

OFFWING OPINION-Q. What is Title IX?

Eric Pearson - A. Title IX is a federal law enacted in 1972 largely in response to discrimination against women in admissions to law and medical schools. It states that no person shall be subjected to discrimination on the basis of gender in any educational program receiving federal assistance. It later evolved to focus more on sports.

Q. Do you support Title IX?

A. The CSC fully supports Title IX. We take issue only with the way it is regulated.

Q. Are you referring to the proportionality prong of the three part test?

A. Yes, this is the standard method of compliance that schools are now all held to. It mandates that the male -female ratio of all athletes match the school’s undergraduate student body gender ratio. In other words, if 55% of your students are female then 55% of your athletes must be female. Otherwise you are considered out of compliance. The CSC maintains that this is illegal.

Q. But I thought there are two other ways to comply?

A. In theory yes. If you’ve added a women’s team in the previous five years you get a pass during that time. The other purported way is that if you demonstrate that you’ve met “interest” of any and all women, but that has never held up in court and there is no established method to “measure” this interest. So that method is a sham, and proportionality remains the law of the land as far as athletic directors are concerned.

Q. So what is the problem with that?

A. You can’t say that you support Title IX and also that you support proportionality. Title IX states unequivocally that you can’t discriminate on the basis of gender, but on the other hand, proportionality requires you to discriminate on the basis of gender. .

If a school can’t afford to add a women’s team, proportionality requires that you discriminate against boys. This discrimination manifests itself in two ways: one is that men’s programs are eliminated, and the other is an artificial limit placed on the size of their team rosters (this roster cap is never applied to women’s teams.) The NCAA calls this morally reprehensible practice “roster management.”

Q. But do they only count athletes on scholarship?

A. Everyone counts. Scholarships have nothing to do with it. They count walk-on athletes, JV athletes, part time players - everyone. That is what we mean when we say it has created a gender quota system- a strict numerical limit.

Q. OK, so moving on from the regulatory discussion, we hear a lot about men’s programs being dropped, isn’t it mostly just wrestling teams though?

A. That’s exactly what the gender quota supporters want you to believe, but in actuality other men’s sports like track and swimming have been devastated. If you just add up the total men’s track and cross country teams dropped just in the four years since the 2000 Olympic games its over 130 programs of a grand total of 435 men’s teams eliminated – that is a crisis that the track community needs to quickly come to terms with before it’s too late.

Q. You didn’t mention the numbers for wrestling or swimming.

A. Wrestling lost 21 teams in the time period since 2000 and swimming lost 23 teams. The wrestling community is very well organized when it comes to saving threatened teams. An athletic director who tries to drop a wrestling team is really putting his hand in a hornet’s nest. They really have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. The swimmers are also catching on and beginning fighting back too.

Q. So how does that number of 435 dropped men’s teams stack up to the total teams remaining.

A. According to the NCAA, in 2003 their member schools sponsored 7,968 teams for men and 8,968 for women. So the total men’s teams dropped during the last Olympic cycle was 5% of the total. Another thing to consider is that there are over 3.9 million boys playing sports in high schools compared to 2.8 million girls.

So that means that there are fewer opportunities for each boy in high school who wants to play a sport in college. Combine the loss of teams with roster management and you get a double whammy that really hammers boys. It’s a disaster.

Q. But isn’t the harm done to boys offset by the gains for girls.

A. Remember that we only take issue with proportionality, not with the law Title IX. I always have to emphasize that we have women coaches in our coalition who say that proportionality doesn’t work. And I always have to emphasize that we want more opportunities for girls to play sports, we have fathers and mothers in our coalition who have daughters too. With that in mind you need to evaluate whether or not proportionality has helped female athletes, and the evidence of that is scant at best.

For example, last year the WNBA was promoting a ‘Save Title IX’ (anti-reform) petition claiming that without it their players would not have had the opportunity to play basketball in college. Well, proportionality was instituted in 1979 and also not enforced during a few years in the 80s. So we evaluated whether the teams where WNBA players played in college were added when proportionality was in force and every one of their teams existed outside the enforcement of proportionality. So it didn’t help them.

Q. You don’t address the gains in participation for girls playing on high school teams. Didn’t it go from something like 200,000 in 1972 to as you said 2.8 million girls playing today? Wouldn’t that say something?

A. Again, greater participation in sports for kids is a great thing, but if you look at 1979 as a starting point for enforcing proportionality there were over 2 million girls partipating in 1980. So the increase is not as marked as it seems at first look. Also, the emphasis on Title IX enforcement in High Schools is more on facilities than proportionality, which we think makes more sense and is much more in the spirit of the law.

Q. You said that proportionality isn’t emphasized in High Schools- is that correct?

A. Yes, but we are very concerned about that changing; in some states like California they have made the three-part test law. If this spreads nationwide it is going to have absolutely catastrophic consequences- you’ll have to eliminate over 1 million boys from high school teams to get them fully in compliance with proportionality. In this day of latch key kids and single parent households we need to be adding more after school activities for our children not taking them away.

That is precisely why we are fighting to eliminate proportionality as the method of compliance with Title IX, and that is what we mean when we say that Title IX is a good law-poorly regulated.

Q. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

A. Yes, if you care about preserving opportunities for student athletes to play sports, join the College Sports Council. Sign up at our website www.collegesportscouncil.org , membership is free.


OFFWING OPINION
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