Slippery Rock cuts swimming

It's official. Slippery Rock University which, several years ago tried to cut women's swimming and diving and water polo but was prevented by a lawsuit, has done so. SRU was prevented from cutting these viable women's teams because it had not achieved proportionality and the court ordered that SRU must remain within two percentage points. They currently are. Earlier in the year some of the original plaintiffs attempted to re-open the case when rumors of the cuts were swirling but the judge would not rule on how potential future proportionality would break down.

SRU administrators have said they plan on remaining compliant with the court's mandate through roster management though the article did not give further details about what teams might be expanding their rosters.

Lead plaintiff Beth Choike, a member of both the swim and water polo teams, noted one of the issues with roster management:

"It's not fair for teams because the ones not playing aren't getting the quality experience."

Case still closed at Slippery Rock

Federal District Court Judge Donetta Ambrose will not re-open the Title IX case against Slippery Rock University even if they do decide, at the end of this season, to cut women's swimming and water polo. The ruling by Ambrose states that because SRU has achieved substantial proportionality it can cut the two women's squads. SRU has not made a final decision about the teams which it attempted to cut several years ago but was forced to reinstate because of the initial lawsuit.

Though SRU is currently in compliance, I would imagine that cutting two women's teams, when your proportionality score is currently just under -2 percent, might throw the numbers a little out of whack. No word in the story about how SRU would remain in compliance should the cuts be enacted.

The aftermath

A picture is worth a thousand words. And if you look at this picture of Fresno State AD Thomas Boeh as he answers questions from the media about Title IX, gender equity, discrimination complaints, and adding more women's sports you can probably figure out what some of those words are.
The Fresno Bee reports that the university is considering adding new women's sports to equalize the amount of financial aid provided to female student-athletes. The school already offers the maximum amount of scholarships per sport mandated by NCAA so the only option is to add sports. Water polo, rowing, and bowling are all under consideration.
In other news that has come in the aftermath of the Lindy Vivas verdict: state Senator Dean Florez who has been leading the hearings on gender discrimination will visit Fresno State and talk to athletes and coaches; OCR officials have made some recent visits to campus though we don't know exactly why or what they were looking for as Boeh would not provide details of the visits.

Slippery Rock Settlement

Slippery Rock University has settled a lawsuit brought by female athletes challenging the university's decision to cut its women's swimming and women's water polo, among other teams, as part of an overall plan to reduce athletic department expenditures.

In July, a federal district court judge granted the athletes' request for a preliminary injunction against cutting the two teams. The reasoned that SRU's cuts did not result in substantial proportionality, the first alternative compliance prong, and that SRU neither satisfy the second prong, history and continuing practice of program expansion for women's varsity teams. Thus, it was left with prong three--accommodating the interests and abilities of female athletes--as its only option. Cutting two viable women's teams clearly violated this prong, and on this ground awarded a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs.

This week, a magistrate judge approved a settlement of the case. Plaintiffs' counsel at the Women's Law Project provide this summary of its terms, among them: SRU has agreed to invest $300,000 in its women’s athletic program by making improvements to sports facilities and to equalize access to uniforms, travel, equipment, publicity, trainers. It also agreed to "retain women’s swimming and water polo as varsity teams for one full academic year after SRU has achieved compliance with the proportionality requirement of Title IX within two percentage points." And it agreed to increase funding for women's athletics every year it is not within two percentage points of proportionality.

For the July order see: Choike v. Slippery Rock University, 2006 WL 2060576 (W.D. Pa. July 21, 2006).

UPDATE: The magistrate's order is available at 2007 WL 184778 (W.D. Pa. Jan. 22, 2007) and the federal district court judge's final approval of the settlement is at 2007 WL 2317323 (W.D. Pa. Aug. 8, 2007).

Getting the facts right

This is my somewhat belated follow-up to this post about the UA water polo team and the misrepresentation of Title IX in the media.

In a follow-up to his initial reporting of University of Arizona administrators deciding to add water polo to their list of varsity sports for women, Arizona Star columnist Greg Hansen wrote another column criticizing the decision. This one too was riddled with inaccuracies and something that was supposed to resemble support for Title IX but begins by Hansen noting that the decision to add water polo is an example of "Title IX run amok."
Why? Because high schools in Arizona don't have water polo. But lots of high schools in CA do and CA isn't that far away. Plus Hansen fails to research whether there are water polo club teams in the state. He also fails to acknowledge that adding water polo at UA could actually create more opportunities for high school girls. His earlier article complained that water polo could not be revenue-generating. Know what generates a lot of revenue (and publicity)? The only summer water polo camp in the state which is what UA will establish if they are savvy enough to see the opportunity here.

Hansen does get some things right, though: water polo was added to account for "football-bloated male participation numbers." But then he attempts to make an economic argument:

"No women's sport comes close to football's numbers in participation and, more importantly, in revenue. Indeed, football pays for women's sports on almost every college campus in America, yet, because of Title IX ratios, men's sports are inherently penalized because football is so big."

It takes a smidge of research (which Hansen--or his editors--apparently did not have the time to do) to find out that football programs on most college campuses DO NOT PAY for women's sports. 78% of them cannot even pay for themselves!

And unfortunately the people who commented on the article also took up the "but football pays for everything; without football where would athletic departments be?" type arguments. I don't know, maybe we should ask Boston University who cut their football team years ago. Hasn't seemed to affect their perennially strong men's hockey team or the school's reputation as an excellent educational institution.

It is certainly possible that UA is one of the schools with a football program that actually makes more money than it spends. On the one hand, the university reports football revenue outpaces expenses by $6 million. But on the other hand, expense figures such as these could exclude capital costs including the bond debt on the football stadium. (It is also worth pointing out that while UA may, coincidentally spend $6 million on women's sports, it is not exactly a convincing argument from an equity standpoint to say that "football pays for women's sports" given that the $6 million spent on women's sports amounts to less than 16% of all athletic department spending overall. Nor it is an accurate one, given that women's teams themselves offset $2 million in costs with the revenue they bring in from ticket sales and camps.)

But what is truly disappointing about the article is the praise Hansen seems to heap on Title IX because, for example, it has sent Arizona softball players across the country to coveted coaching positions or made college soccer more mainstream. He even says "Thank you, Title IX" which rings a little hollow when just paragraphs before he instructed us "Title IX activists" to "accept that it works, has worked, and stop digging for more."

I cannot bear to end on such a sour note so in an attempt to make some lemonade I have to say that the blatant inaccuracies and false praise for Title IX only make this activist want to dig all the harder.

Media misunderstandings and Title IX

I have written about the issue of Title IX's misrepresentation in the media previously--though briefly--here. But I bring it up again now because of a recent little blip in a paper in Arizona about the addition of a women's water polo team at the University of Arizona.
Despite the fairly simple premise of Title IX that calls for equitable treatment of the underrepresented sex in publicly-funded educational institutions, the statute itself, as this blog has hopefully demonstrated, is quite complex.
The complexity that has arisen due to various and changing legal interpretations is further compounded by the multiple components that constitute compliance--and I am speaking only in its application to athletics here--with the law.
Unfortunately many who report on or speak to Title IX issues in the media lack an understanding of this complexity. (Note that I am not citing all journalists. Welch Suggs, when he covered Title IX issues for The Chronicle of Higher Education, did an excellent job covering the mulitfaceted issues the law engendered.)
This lack of understanding around equity, sport, and Title IX is exhibited by Greg Hansen in the above mentioned blip that appears in a sports opinion column in the Arizona Daily Star. UA is adding women's water polo to its roster of intercollegiate sports. I haven't scrutinized UA's numbers regarding opportunity levels but I going to assume that Hansen is right that the university is adding water polo to try to achieve compliance.
But there are a few things wrong with Hansen's assessment of the situation. In comparing how (non)compliant UA is with other Pac-10 teams Hansen lists the number of male athletes and the number of female athletes at the schools. But such numbers are meaningless if we don't know the breakdown of male and female students in the entire undergraduate population. Because Title IX is not about strict equality of numbers but about equity which, if an intitution is trying to achieve proportionality, is about making athletic opportunity numbers more in line with the percentage of male and female undergraduates. If UA has more female undergrads than male, as is the situation in many colleges and universities, even equal numbers of male and female athletes will not result in compliance.
Hansen also seems to cite Title IX as the reason why budget-strapped UA (who isn't budget-strapped these days though??) is adding water polo (whose popularity is pretty much centered in the Pac-10) rather than a revenue-generating sport. Basically he implies that women's water polo will be a drain on the budget and it's all because of "the federal government's gender equity laws."
But a quick look at UA's list of varsity sports shows that all the (potential) revenue-generating sports for women (and men too!) already exist. Women's (Div. I) basketball is pretty much the only sport that can automatically be placed in the revenue-generating column. Depending on the school and the region other sports such as women's volleyball and gymnastics have the potential to be revenue generating. Both of these are already offered by UA, though I don't know if they do indeed generate revenue.
Hansen does not see that sports--especially women's sports--are not inherently revenue generating. Revenue-generating sports are created. Our default is to believe they are created by fan interest which is also believed to be innate when it is, in fact, taught.
Take for example University of Iowa's volleyball team. Though the popularity of women's volleyball is growing it is not necessarily a revenue-generating sport. But Athletic Department administrators at UI want it to become one. So they are making it into one through a variety of methods including hiring an established coach, throwing more money into recruiting and promoting the heck out of it through ticket promotions (your football ticket gets you into that night's v-ball match) and lots of publicity.
UA could turn women's water polo into a revenue-generating sport if it made the effort. But that requires either a bigger budget or shifting money away from men's sports to do so.