Eye on College Sports

Author: David Lindholm

Since Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law in 1972, the number of girls playing high school sports has increased from 294,000 to 2.7 million. The number of women's sports at colleges had drastically increased, and most people credit Title IX with the creation of leagues like the WNBA and the WUSA. But recently, the law has, once again, come under fire for creating and expanding women's programs at the expense of boys' and mens' teams.
This controversy resulted in a federal commission formed to examine the law, and the commission's report came under heavy criticism. This started when two of the commission members, Olympic gold medalists Julie Foudy and Donna de Varona, issued a minority report that stated that the commission's hearings were geared toward changing Title IX instead of giving the law a fair review. The report did actually recommend changes to the law, stating that it should expand the use of surveys to gauge women's interest in sports programs, and decided not to recommend some of the more controversial ideas for colleges and universities, such as disregarding nontraditional students and athletes not on scholarship when determining if the men's and women's funding were equal.
The complaints fired against Title IX almost always relate back to football. With between three and five times as many players as most other sports and huge equipment needs, football funding and the total number of athletes throws a wrench in the balance of men's and women's sports. As a result, over the last 30 years many smaller men's sports have been cut, such as wrestling, swimming and gymnastics. It is interesting to note that at the Division I level, there are almost 80 more women's soccer programs than men's, which means almost 2,000 more opportunities for women than men. Having between 75-100 players on a football team leaves other men's sports likely candidates to be dropped and almost impossible to be added. As a recent New York Times article stated, college football is the "SUV of the college campus: aggressively big, resource-guzzling, lots and lots of fun and potentially destructive of everything around it." And at smaller schools, having roughly one in 12 male students on the football team forces admissions to worry about accepting enough players to field an entire team. In the end, both commissions like this one and colleges and universities themselves must analyze the role of the sport and the constraints that football programs place on gender equity on a campus sporting scene.