I am writing this post in order to address a problem that I believe is occurring in high school and collegiate athletics. This problem is the misinterpretation of Title IX. Instituted in 1972, Title IX states: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance".
Before I go any further, I must stress that I find no problem with this law and that I believe that it is essential to have athletics for women to participate in at all levels. The benefits of athletics, and especially for young female athletes are essential and the opportunities for participation must be provided. The most logical method to provide more opportunities would be to simply add more female teams, but this route is sadly neglected far too many times. The problem I find is the misinterpretation of the law that leads to the elimination of many male athletic programs at both the high school and college level. The name of the problem is proportionality, which means that the number of people that can be in a sport is found by the total number of males and females at the school. Because most schools have more females then males, therefore, they should have more athletic women teams and more women in sports then men. I consider this unfair.
The entire thought of proportionality is wrong. In proportionality, it is assumed that both males and females have the same interest in sports, but this isn’t true. When looking at the voluntary intramural sports at colleges, an average of three males participate for every one female. I see this as a clear statement that the female population has less interest in participating in sport then males. I believe that the opportunities in sports should be based on those who are interested and not added or subtracted to fill a meaningless quota. I also find it very contradictory that the government does not mandate that fine arts or other programs adhere to the same proportions. It would be crazy to tell a collegiate dance team that they must give 50% of their funding to the male participates! The interest isn’t there so why should the funding be equal?
At the college level, there are many examples of the harm that the misinterpretation of Title IX has caused. Just one year after The University of Oregon had its first NCAA wrestling champion, they decided to cut the program because they wanted to make room for baseball and under the Title IX restrictions they were unable fund both a baseball and wrestling team. As for the women’s teams added, one sport really irritates me. This sport is women’s crew. A great part of my anger towards crew is that the addition of crew teams at many schools has often come at the expense of the wrestling team. Colleges have been cutting the scholarships given to wrestling programs and many times, the programs are cut all together. As a college wrestler, in high school I experienced firsthand the difficulty of finding a schools that had a wrestling team. In California especially almost no colleges had wrestling as a sport and luckily I chose a school located in the Midwest, where there was still a large number of wrestling teams. This problem has been going on for a while. In the '90s, the NCAA began sponsoring women's rowing teams, not in response to interest, but to artificially inflate the numbers for Title IX. To reach their quotas, colleges gave scholarships to female students who had never rowed. This seems ludicrous to me because it does not seem fair to deny a scholarship to a wrestler who as worked hard his whole life only to give one to a girl who has never rowed in her life. In recent news, the NCAA has just made sand volleyball an official collegiate sport but only for women. As a resident of California I can tell you that if I go to the beach on any given day I will see far more male volleyball players then women, but the NCAA has made the sport for women only to balance their proportionality. Over the past decade, division I athletics have lost hundreds of men’s wrestling, swimming, and gymnastics teams because of the misinterpretation of Title IX. The sad thing is that the cuts have not even helped one bit. Since 1991, four male athletes have been cut for every one female added.
At this point, there is a serious problem with Title IX that need to be fixed. By the very definition of discrimination, the cutting of male programs is reverse discrimination against males and therefore the modern application of Title IX is legalized discrimination, sponsored by the federal government and the NCAA. I hope that the NCAA, every college, and every high school in America seriously re-evaluates what they view as morally correct in regards to their interpretation of Title IX.
--Justin Luthey
KIN 577
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