Gender Equity Creating New Battle Of The Sexes In Collegiate Sports
In the midst of budget cuts two years ago, Princeton University eliminated its men’s varsity wrestling program, reassigned the coach, and closed its wrestling room.
When an alumni group, Friends of Princeton Wrestling, offered to come to the rescue, it wasn’t talking about chipping in a few thousand dollars. It promised $2.3 million. The offer was refused.
Princeton decided that restarting the program would upset the proportion of men to women playing sports at the university and might bring the hammer of federal Title IX gender-equity laws down on its head.
That concern has grown in recent years as the Clinton administration has been more aggressive than its Republican predecessors in enforcing the law and as courts have begun to view the legal position of female athletes more favorably.
The situation has made for the terrific growth of program’s like women’s soccer and the slashing of men’s problems such as wrestling.
Since 1982, according to NCAA figures, 366 schools have started women’s soccer teams and 99 have discontinued wrestling teams, including Washington.
A bitter Kevin Bellis, the departing wrestling coach at Illinois State where the sport was dropped to open up scholarships for women’s sports, does not think this is fair: “I would like to see a rule that schools couldn’t drop a men’s sport to achieve gender equity.”
Some men are seeing women not as equal partners in athletics, but as special interests with sudden new clout. Women often blame football and its huge budgets and rosters for making balance between the sexes even harder to achieve. And those in the men’s sports that don’t draw crowds - wrestling, swimming and gymnastics - feel squeezed between football and women’s sports.
Title IX, which bars sex discrimination by institutions that receive federal aid, became law in 1972. A survey last year by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that while 50.8 percent of college students were women, 33.6 percent of athletes were women and 35.7 percent of scholarship aid went to women.
“What’s happened out there, everyone’s dragged their feet,” said Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation. “They don’t want to tell their football coach to tighten their belts. They’re taking it out on the men’s minor sports and they’re trying to blame it on gender equity.”
At lower levels, football is being affected. In the Division III New Jersey Athletic Conference, football teams are limiting the number of players. The conference’s schools used to cap their rosters at 100. Last fall, the number was 85 by the first game. Next fall, it will be 80. In 1996, the limit will be 75.
“Let’s call it what it is, an affirmative action quota,” said Thomas LaFrance, an attorney representing Boston College and two other New England schools on equity issues.
No one overtly tells schools to cut men’s sports, but that seems to be the alternative many schools are choosing. Two schools that attended an NCAA gender-equity seminar in Baltimore recently - Central Connecticut State and San Jose State - said that even after working directly with the Office for Civil Rights on achieving gender equity, the plans they had developed call for dropping men’s sports.
Responding to complaints by men’s coaching associations that men’s opportunities are being cut back, Congress is holding hearings. Rep. Dennis Haster, R.-Ill., a former high school wrestling coach, organized the hearings.
Charlotte West, associate director of athletics at Southern Illinois University, said at the Baltimore conference that she could not understand the reaction. “Why do people consider it so much worse to cut men’s opportunities than never provide opportunities for women?” she said.
Creative solutions are being sought. T.J. Kerr, the wrestling coach at Cal State-Bakersfield, has nine female wrestlers on his squad.