Title IX and a flawed system

The camp that believes Title IX is flawed, and even broken, is provided with some strong ammunition in this week's lengthy article by The New York Times.

Here's the basic gist of Title IX, the federal gender-equity law Congress passed in 1972: Universities must comply by demonstrating that the number of their female athletes is proportional to the female enrollment in the general student body.

Might sound good in principle, and no doubt it's created a large number of wonderful opportunities for females over the years.

But when legislation spawns a virtual institution of number-fudging and creative bookkeeping that's exposed in this article, there are some serious cracks in the foundation.

A few eye-opening excerpts:

-- At the University of South Florida, more than half of the 71 women on the cross-country roster failed to run a race in 2009. Asked about it, a few laughed and said they did not know they were on the team.

-- At Marshall University, the women’s tennis coach recently invited three freshmen onto the team even though he knew they were not good enough to practice against his scholarship athletes, let alone compete. They could come to practice whenever they liked, he told them, and would not have to travel with the team.

-- At Cornell, only when the 34 fencers on the women’s team take off their protective masks at practice does it become clear that 15 of them are men. Texas A&M and Duke are among the elite women’s basketball teams that also take advantage of a federal loophole that allows them to report male practice players as female participants.

-- According to a review of public records from more than 20 colleges and universities by The New York Times, and an analysis of federal participation statistics from all 345 institutions in N.C.A.A. Division I — the highest level of college sports — many are padding women’s team rosters with underqualified, even unwitting, athletes. They are counting male practice players as women. And they are trimming the rosters of men’s teams.

Ugh.

Some folks say nothing good has come from Title IX, bemoaning the fact that football has to support all the minor sports that draw little to no interest and lose money. I'm not strongly on that side of the fence, because the existence of a broad and diverse number of sports strengthens the athletics program as a whole -- similar to the existence of a broad number of majors on a college campus (even those that aren't all that popular).

But the revelations in this article present a mockery of the law, and an administrator at the Women's Sports Foundation nailed it when she told the NYT that "when an athletic department engineers itself to produce only the appearance of fairness, they flout the law and cheat women."

I'd be interested to know the numbers here at Clemson. The women's rowing team has long been a vehicle in helping pad the percentage of women on athletics rosters.

My understanding of the rowing routine is this: Somewhere around 70 or 75 roster spots are open, and 20 scholarships are available.

Not sure if this holds true today, but a previous rowing coach would set up camp at the Hendrix Center and sign girls up for the rowing team as walk-ons. It's common for a coach to be contractually required to carry a minimum number of rowers on the roster to satisfy the Title IX numbers, and that explains the phoenomenon

Typically, rowing events are attended by family members and a handful of others -- we're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 people.

Not trying to pile on rowing here, but it just doesn't make sense when you introduce baseball and the limitation to 11.7 scholarships in that sport.

Last time I checked, Jack Leggett didn't have to shake the campus trees to produce students who are interested in joining the baseball team. Hundreds upon hundreds of high-schoolers, maybe thousands, dream of suiting up for the Tigers.

This uncomfortable juxtaposition is hard to justify, and harder to defend in the wake of the article's revelations.

LW