Sports: Women's groups fear Title IX shift

Colleges

Women's groups fear Title IX shift

Worries spring from proposals that could decrease participation in women's sports.

By BRIAN LANDMAN, Times Staff Writer

Donna Lopiano, the executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation, bristles at the suggestion she is an alarmist.

But make no mistake. She sounds like a commercial for a home security system.

The presidential commission studying Title IX, the landmark law that prohibits gender discrimination in schools that receive federal funding, has until Feb. 28 to provide Secretary of Education Rod Paige with its recommendations for reform. But Lopiano insists that any change in how one measures compliance -- even those characterized as "modest" -- is nothing short of alarming.

"The whole notion of what he wants to do strikes at the heart of the definition of equal opportunity," Lopiano said. "It is not a whittling away. It's more like cutting down the tree."

Since Title IX's passage in 1972, athletic opportunities for women have increased dramatically. At the high school level, participation has risen from fewer than 300,000 to nearly 3-million. The numbers have jumped from about 30,000 to more than 150,000 in NCAA member institutions.

There are three prongs to measure compliance, but the one that is quantitative is the most debated. That is, a school's ratio of male-to-female athletes be "substantially proportionate" to the ratio of the male-to-female student body.

Commission member Debbie Yow, the Maryland athletic director, proposed decreasing the threshold to a 50-50 split, plus or minus 2-3 percent, regardless of the makeup of the student body. It did not pass -- the commissioners deadlocked at 7-7 -- but it could be part of the report.

Lopiano said that if one assumes the general enrollment is 53 percent women, a compliance standard of 48 percent would translate into losses of $103-million a year in scholarships and 43,000 participation slots; 163,000 at the high school level. A standard of 47 percent would mean a loss of $122-million and 50,000 participation slots; 305,000 in high schools.

"The thing everybody's concerned about is that the Secretary of Education can use the commission's report to justify gutting Title IX," she said.

Proponents of change see it as a way to regain the hundreds of men's sports that have been dropped in the last decade. The National Wrestling Coaches Association, for one, has filed a lawsuit in which it alleges the proportionality prong of Title IX is to blame for the endangered status of its sport.

That suit was a catalyst for the Bush administration to appoint a commission to, in the words of Paige, "examine ways to strengthen enforcement and expand opportunities to ensure fairness" for male and female collegiate athletes.

The 15-member Commission on Opportunity in Athletics finished a sometimes contentious, always spirited discussion of two dozen recommendations over a two-day period last week in Washington.

"The caveat for me was, whatever we did needed to be done in a way to create opportunities for everyone but in no way would diminish the progress we've made to allow women to compete in intercollegiate athletics," said Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive, one of the 15 members.

He and the commission approved a measure, for example, that would not count all nonrecruited walkons. The commission also will suggest schools establish a fixed number of roster spots for each sport and count them, rather than the actual number of male and female athletes, to measure proportionality compliance.

Paige can implement any, all or none of the suggestions.

"We think it's a step in the right direction," said Jamie Moffatt, the executive director of the College Sports Council.

"In 1972 the pendulum was way the wrong way. Women were being discriminated against. We are for Title IX, and we think it's done wonders for women and it's done wonders for society. But now the pendulum has gone too far, and we need to bring it back. Certainly not back to 1972, that would be horrendous, but to bring it back to where the male athletes aren't being discriminated as they are today."

Florida State softball coach JoAnne Graf, in her 25th season and the National Fastpitch Coaches Association wins leader, said it is disingenuous for anyone to blame Title IX for that.

"The problem with the whole issue is that nobody wants to look at the real issue," Graf said. "What you're finding is that there are budgetary problems in the university athletic programs as they're trying to continue to fund football and men's basketball to really exorbitant levels, and nobody wants to address that issue. It's far easier for women to be the fall guy."

Many schools at the Division I-A level are vying for a cut of the football pie, a costly venture when teams give out 85 full scholarships (the limit in Division I-A), crisscross the country on chartered flights five or six times a season, stay at a Marriott Marquis rather than a Holiday Inn and, to hire a big-name coach, shell out an NFL-like compensation package.

The size of a football roster, which surpasses 100 athletes counting walkons, has been the most problematic for administrators trying to meet the proportionality test. Unlike other sports, there is no women's counterpart approaching that number of participants. Several of the commission's recommendations were football driven.

"What's happening is all these schools are in an arm's race, and they're struggling," Lopiano said. "They're constantly gathering more money, more money, more money to compete with each other in football. They don't want to spend it on men's minor sports, and guess what? They don't want to expand their women's program either. (They say) 'We don't like the civil rights standards because ... it's not convenient for big-time football.' ... It's not a good time."

"It's something we have to watch very closely," said South Florida senior associate athletic director Barbara Sparks-McGlinchy, who has seen her department run into substantial debt after it added football and gained membership as a football-playing member of Conference USA. "Growing up, I'm from the Miami area, there weren't a lot of opportunities (in sports). The fact that now there are so many opportunities because of Title IX, we have to make sure it's protected."

Whatever the changes and whether or not they hold up to the legal challenges sure to come, Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley said his school's commitment to women's athletics will remain unaltered.

"We're going to do what's right, not because it's the law but because it's the morally right thing to do," he said.

Florida State senior associate athletic director Kim Record, who with athletic director Dave Hart has infused millions of dollars into building a more competitive program, echoed those sentiments.

"Intercollegiate athletics is an educational enterprise, and I do truly believe that, but we're also in the entertainment business (with football and men's basketball)," she said. "It's an age-old question of how do you combine those two. ... Sometimes there's competing values there, but the bottom line is we're about students and we're about opportunities. We'll continue to do what we've done, take each program and make it the best that it can be."

-- Times staff writers Antonya English and Pete Young contributed to this report.