Duke adding women's sports

The women's athletic program is having a good run. Women's basketball is currently ranked second in the nation (though that was a disappointing result against UConn the other day).
But the university has decided to put more money and support into women's athletics. The result: the addition of a softball team and scholarships in swimming and diving, fencing, rowing, and track and field. All of these sports will now be offering the maximum number of scholarships.
This move was championed by the Women's Sports Foundation which was strongly encouraging  Duke to come into Title IX compliance.
Inequities in scholarship dollars have been in the Title IX news of late. Colorado State was recently cited for its scholarship disparities. Part of the settlement at Quinnipiac College, approved this past summer, also included stipulations for an increase in scholarships.
Interestingly, the addition of softball in 2018 will bring Duke to 27 varsity sports. That puts them close to the top of the ACC in terms of sports offered. (Numbers vary when considering non-conference sports such as fencing and gymnastics.)
We have seen a lot of schools with such high numbers falter, unable to effectively sustain the quality of the experience across so many teams, especially when the emphasis is on a few revenue-generating sports. But Duke maintains that these revenue dollars are what has enabled them to increase spending on women's sports. Whether that is a sustainable model remains to be seen.

Ottawa College to add wrestling

Two of the many things we at the Title IX Blog are interested in are: 1) the reasons behind why schools choose to add specific sports; and 2) wrestling programs.
The news that Ottawa College in Kansas is planning on adding both women's and men's wrestling to its roster of intercollegiate athletics, then, caught our attention.
Wrestling, of course, has been central in many of the debates about Title IX with some supporters arguing that the decline in wrestling programs at the intercollegiate level has been caused by the legislation, despite evidence to the contrary.
We have seen, though, that non-Division I schools are considering wrestling a viable option when adding sports and that women's wrestling can help preserve Title IX compliance and, at times, men's wrestling. This is not the case at Ottawa which will begin both programs from scratch.
The school, which will introduce the sport in the 2014-15 academic year, has begun looking for a head coach and student-athletes.
One of the reasons why the school chose wrestling is because administrators are committed to maintaining a high level of student-athlete academic achievement and wrestling. They found that elite high school wrestlers at the national championships maintain an average 3.0 GPA. Additionally they see the promise in women's wrestling, which continues to grow.

Madison Area Technical College Agrees to Enhance Women's Athletics

Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin has agreed to add opportunities and resources for women's sports, as part of a voluntary resolution agreement with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights to ensure compliance with Title IX. We noted last December that the school was under investigation by OCR after receiving a complaint about inequities in MATC athletics. The college, with a 53 male student body, presently offers 62 athletic opportunities (and a near identical percentage) for men in a total of four sports, with the support of 16 coaches.  Female students, who make up 47% of the student body, have 37 opportunities in three sports, with 3 coaches.  No female students receive athletic scholarships, while members of the men's baseball team do.

To remedy these imbalances, the college has committed to adding women's soccer, a step it had already announced while the OCR investigation was underway.  The college is planning to hire a coach later this year and field a team in 2014.  In addition, it will elevate its softball team to Division II of the National Junior College Athletic Association, so that it may provide scholarships to its members.  OCR will monitor MATC's compliance with this agreement for the next three years.

Court Denies Quinnipiac's Motion to Lift Injunction

Over two years ago, a federal district court in Connecticut concluded that Quinnipiac University's decision to cut its women's volleyball team violated Title IX by leaving too few opportunities for women in its student body.  As a remedy, the court issued an injunction requiring Quinnipiac to retain the team until it could show that it could cut the team in a manner that complied with Title IX.  Yesterday, that same court ruled that Quinnipiac had not yet demonstrated such compliance, and denied the university's motion to lift the injunction.

Quinnipiac had asked the court to evaluate its compliance in light of several changes to its athletics program since the 2010 case.  The university added a women's golf team and a women's rugby team.  It also continued to support its fledgling acrobatics and tumbling ("acro") team, which the court had earlier determined should not be counted, since the sport was too new to provide athletic opportunities comparable to those afforded by other varsity sports. Finally, Quinnipiac instituted a policy prohibiting coaches from requiring student athletes to join additional teams.  This change addressed the court's finding that indoor and outdoor track opportunities should not count separately for certain cross-country athletes who were forced to practice with those teams as "simply an alternative form of off season training" but who did not compete with those teams due to injury or red-shirt status. 

The court easily concluded that the opportunities Quinnipiac added in women's golf, an NCAA recognized sport, should court towards its proportionality qualification.  However, it determined that acro and rugby, which both lack NCAA recognition at this point, should not count:

True, recognition by the NCAA is not, in itself, a requirement of Title IX. But where, as here, a school chooses to sponsor an athletics program at the highest level of competition (NCAA Division I), and offers all of its male athletes the opportunity to participate in NCAA-championship sports, the lack of NCAA recognition for a single women’s sport within that program raises a significant gender equity issue if the school hopes to count that unrecognized sport toward compliance with Title IX. So long as Quinnipiac chooses to hold itself out as a Division I institution, providing a full slate of NCAA-recognized sports for men, equity demands that it do the same for women.

Acro, the court pointed out, hasn't even made it onto the NCAA's list of emerging sports for women, the usual pathway toward becoming a championship sport.  And the court seemed skeptical of this recognition occurring in the near future, in light of the competing proposal from USA Cheer for a different version of competitive cheer called STUNT.  Only a handful of universities sponsor acro teams, which limits the opportunities for competition and denies participants the opportunity for a progressive play-off, which is a hallmark characteristic of varsity programs.

Rugby, on the other hand, is recognized as an emerging sport for women by the NCAA.  That status usually means that the sport will have an NCAA championship if a sufficient number of schools add teams within a ten year period. Rugby became an emerging sport in 2002, and has been added by only five universities (including Quinnipiac) within that time.  The court's concern, therefore, is that rugby's status on the emerging sports list is on borrowed time.  Quinnipiac's rugby team has limited opportunities for varsity-level competition, and as a result played most of its competitive schedule against other club-level teams.  It also had no opportunity for post-season competition.

Based on the court's decision not to count acro and rugby (as well as its decision not to count three injured cross-country runners who quit the indoor track team part-way through the season, but prior to any competition), the court removed 67 athletic opportunities from Quinnipiac's proffered tally, bringing the total number of athletic opportunities for women down to 254. There are 168 athletic opportunities for men, so the opportunities for women amount to 60.2%. By comparison, Quinnipiac's student body is 62.4% female, so Quinnipiac's disparity is 2.2%.  As tiny as this is expressed as a percent, 2.2 percent corresponds to an additional 25 athletic opportunities that would have to be added in order to hit 62.4. Since that is more than enough to sustain a new varsity team, Quinnipiac's proportionality is not just not close enough -- and would be even farther off if, without the injunction, Quinnipiac went ahead with plans to reduce women's opportunities by an additional 14 -- the number of participants in women's volleyball.

For these reasons, the court denied Quinnipiac's motion to lift the injunction.  Acknowledging the university's progress, the court nevertheless expressed some skepticism of the university's choices:  "Rather than simply recommit to women’s volleyball or bring other NCAA-championship sports to campus, the University doubled down on its plan to eliminate volleyball, and staked its compliance with Title IX on an as-yet unrecognized sport as well as an emerging sport in imminent danger of losing that recognition."  In sum, "by relying today on sports that do not yet provide genuine varsity participation opportunities, Quinnipiac has taken a prong-two approach to solving a prong-one problem."

College, HS League Take Steps Toward Compliance

Two stories about how Title IX is still improving athletic opportunities for female students were in the news this weekend:

Madison Area Technical  College will reportedly add a women's soccer team to help balance out athletic opportunities, which presently favor men despite women making up more than half of the student body.  The college is under investigation by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, in response to anonymous complaint filed last year.

And here in Massachusetts, the high school athletics conference in Middlesex County has rescheduled its basketball games to ensure equity in the number of prime times girls and boys receive.  The Middlesex League was reportedly motivated by a Lexington supporter, who explained that the League's former system of scheduling girls' games first in all double-headers constituted sex discrimination under Title IX.  Under the new schedule, girls and boys will play on different nights, with JV leading off, followed by the varsity.

Colleges Add Men's Sports, Despite Serious Gender Gap in Athletic Opportunity

A reader shared with me three separate stories about colleges that are adding lacrosse for men and women -- Brevard College in North Carolina, Capital University in Ohio, and Rockhurst University in Missouri. Seems reasonable, you might think, that when adding a program, colleges would afford equal opportunities to men and women.  The problem is, at all three of these institutions, women are seriously underrepresented in the proportion of athletic opportunities made available by the institution: 

• At Brevard, women constitute 39.9% of the student body, yet receive only 30.5% of athletic opportunities -- a gap of 9.4 percentage points.
• At Rockhurst, women constitute 59.4% of the student body, yet receive 47.1% of athletic opportunities -- a gap of 12.3 percentage points.
• At Capital, women constitute 56.9% of the student body, yet receive only 38% of athletic opportunities -- a gap of  18.9 percentage points!!

Adding a sport for both men and women, however fair it may seem through the shallow lens of just lacrosse, does nothing* to close these overall gender gap in athletic opportunities, which are some of the most egregious I've seen!   For a school with such a serious gender gap to still add a men's sports -- even in the context of simultaneously adding a women's sport -- represents a missed opportunity to take a step in the right direction toward equality.  The even-handed addition of lacrosse at Capital, for example, won't change the fact that 22% of its male students have an athletic opportunity, compared to 10% of its female students.  I don't know how a school with numbers this bad, when it can clearly afford to add two sports, doesn't decide to add two women's sport (and then go back to figure out how they can add even more).

Title IX, for its part, does not require equal opportunities within a single sport like lacrosse, but equity in the overall distribution of athletic opportunities.  Thus, not only is there a serious fairness question about adding men's sports when women are so seriously underrepresented, it's also terrible risk management.  Title IX compliance requires either (1) proportionality, (2) continuous women's program expansion, or (3) no unmet interest among female students.   In the short term, these schools have at most** bought time under prong two.  But unless these schools are prepared to continue to add new opportunities in the future every few years, they will quickly fall out of compliance.  What about prong three?  My guess is that with such lopsided numbers, latent unmet interest is a ticking time bomb. It's only a matter of time before a club team asks to elevate, or other evidence of unmet interest emerges -- perhaps under the spotlight of an OCR investigation.  When either the prong two or prong three chickens come home to roost, what will these schools do?  Will they complain then that they don't have the resources to add women's teams?  Will they be forced by their own bad planning to downsize a men's team or two in order to satisfy the only prong that doesn't require an investment of resources?  

The Department of Education promulgated the three prong test in 1979.  In an ideal world, colleges and universities would have from that point forward held their men's programs steady while gradually adding opportunities for women (easily satisfying prong two) until opportunities were proportionally distributed.   Then they could have moved forward, adding -- or cutting -- opportunities for men and women as resources allow or as changing enrollment requires.  I don't understand why this is so hard! College athletic administrators seem to labor in blissful ignorance of either the law, the changing demographics of college enrollment, or the economy -- or maybe all three.  I'm not rooting for these institutions to run into Title IX compliance problems -- that's not good for students.  But if it happens, it will be hard not to say I told you so. 

*To be fair, Rockhurst is also adding women's cross country, but this hardly changes my point, since that single team would have to have over 90 athletic opportunities in order to even out the opportunities between men and women at that school. 

** And even this is a generous assumption.  The article about Rockhurst helpfully notes that 2005 was the last time a women's sport was added.  There's no question: Rockhurst clearly doesn't comply with prong two either. 

A case study of roster management and prong two

The University of Georgia's student newspaper has an article on how the school approached compliance with Title IX and what this means for the athletic department, student-athletes, and club sports. Regarding the latter, it seems that many club sports are waiting for their call up, to use a baseball metaphor, to "the show." In other words, because UGA chooses prong two compliance (expanding opportunities) and has added teams in the past to meet this version of compliance, some women's club teams are wondering when it might be their chance. Women's rowing has been especially hopeful. Rowing has been used--with mixed results and mixed motivations--as a sort of panacea for football problem that most schools that field a football team have: an imbalance of opportunities.
But rowing--along with other UGA club sports--is losing hope. There has not been a new women's team added since 2002 and no talk of adding another team for 5-6 years according the rowing coach. UGA has opted to add spots to existing women's teams instead. This practice, referred to as roster management, has come under scrutiny, not because it is not a viable way to comply, but because it is often not done correctly. The NYT ran an investigative piece in 2011 about the roster management scams happening at some schools--adding athletes without them ever knowing, adding athletes and then dropping them once the season starts (and rosters are in), using male practice players to pad women's numbers. And it received a great deal of attention. We hoped this national coverage would put schools who were engaging in these practices on notice. And it may have.
It does not appear that UGA is doing anything wrong. But we have to wonder just how many spots they can add to existing teams without overburdening the teams and taking power over roster size out of a coach's hands. And we should ask how equitable this practice is. Are we asking the coaches of men's team to increase their roster sizes, to deal with additional players? How big can one make the softball team and still provide student-athletes with a comparable experience? Equal opportunities is only one area of compliance. A school cannot simply add spots while not guaranteeing equal treatment.
Of course there is no guarantee of equal treatment when a whole team is added. This has actually been a problem, especially for women's rowing teams. They get elevated to varsity status but wait years for facilities, for better equipment, for equitable travel situations. Some even have to file complaints with OCR or lawsuits against the school in order to get what they were promised.
Again, this has not happened at UGA, maybe in part because UGA has been careful about when and which sports to add. The question is, how many spots do they have to add a year, every two years, every three years, in order to remain prong two compliant? At what point does the rowing team--or any other club team--have a viable argument that the school is not providing equitable opportunities?

Minute-by-minute compliance?

There has not been much news around the addition of teams at the collegiate level of late. A few here and there, a mention of Title IX compliance.
The forthcoming additions of two women's teams at Central Michigan University is the same. Women's golf and lacrosse in two and three years, respectively.* The university has not added a women's team since 1998. Though nothing in the article explicitly states that CMU is adhering to compliance via prong two, history of expanding opportunities for women, that is the impression one gets from reading based on statements such as the following:
"As long as we are working toward equality, we are in compliance"--Judy Chandler, chair of Gender Equality Committee
“This is step one. We aren’t done yet.” --University President George Ross
What struck me about this story was the comment Chandler made after the above remark: "No one can stay in compliance every minute, because things are always changing."
This might be true if an institution is opting for prong one or prong three compliance. If following the latter, interests do change and student populations change. Of course it is the school's responsibility to be diligent in its monitoring of these changing interests. And things change in terms of proportionality as well. Undergraduate populations fluctuate in terms of size and gender breakdown and are not always predictable. But again, the university has an obligation to remedy discrepancies in a timely manner.
But prong two is another story. If CMU has not added a sport since 1998 but still contend that they are expanding opportunities for women's participation, well--they aren't. Or they weren't. That situation was not changing--unless they were systematically adding roster spots to existing women's teams. There was no mention of that practice.
It seems to me that there were a lot of minutes of non-compliance. It doesn't appear that the university was scrambling to add opportunities for ten years or so and just couldn't because of some constantly changing circumstances.



* Apparently eight sports were up for consideration and golf and lacrosse were chosen because they are "Michigan sports." Unfortunately, women's golf is not a recognized part of the MAC, the conference to which CMU belongs. It will have to find a difference conference affiliation for this sport, along with making contacts and contracts with local golf courses to use for practice and competition. 

Merrimack College adding women's sports

We won't lie. We're pretty excited to see another women's hockey team at the DI level. What's also nice is that the team is being added along with five other women's sports at Merrimack College, for a total of 80 new opportunities. The additions are part of the college's resolution agreement with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which settles a complaint about inequitable athletic opportunities for women.

Prompting this resolution agreement was OCR's finding that Merrimack was in violation of Title IX's requirement to maintain an equitable number of athletic opportunities, as measured by one of three prongs.  First, Merrimack's male students make up 52% of the population, yet receive 64% of athletic opportunities, so it could not claim compliance under the proportionality prong.  Second, prior to OCR's commencing its investigation, the last time Merrimack added a women's sport was in 1998, so it could not demonstrate a"history and continuing practice" of expanding opportunities for the underrepresented sex.  Third, Merrimack could not demonstrate that it was satisfying the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex, especially in light of women's growing interest in club and intramural sports at Merrimack.  The 80 new opportunities that will result from the new teams, some of which were added while OCR's investigation was pending, will bring Merrimack into compliance under the proportionality prong.  The resolution agreement also details Merrimack's obligation to provide equal treatment in terms of scholarship dollars, facilities, and other resources.  

Specifically Merrimack will add five women's teams to compete in Division II: swimming and diving, water polo, track and field (actually added in 2010-11, during OCR's period of review), crew, and golf. It will also add women's ice hockey, to which Merrimack will commit the resources for a team to be ready to join the premier, Division I Hockey East conference in five years.  Merrimack otherwise competes in Division II, but has a men's hockey team that competes in Hockey East, so this will bring parity within Merrimack's top tier sports.

As fans of another Hockey East team, the Title IX Bloggers say: Welcome Merrimack. Bring it! 

Richmond Drops Men's Soccer and Track In Order To Add Men's Lacrosse

The University of Richmond recently announced plans to eliminate men's soccer and track, in order that it may elevate men's lacrosse to varsity status.  This article reports on a "contentious" forum last weekend, at which the University explained the decision and confirmed it as "final." 

While the University of Richmond seems to deserve much of the criticism it has received for this move -- in particularly, the fact that it had earlier announced that men's soccer and track were safe and later reneged on this -- it does appear, at least from the above-mentioned article, that the role Title IX played in the decision has been accurately conveyed.  This is refreshing, as universities frequently use Title IX as a scapegoat to take the blame for unpopular decisions to eliminate teams, even though noting in the law requires it and the agency that enforces Title IX calls it a "disfavored practice."

In Richmond's case, the message seems to be that Title IX requires that the university  maintain equitable number of opportunities for men and women, but that it was Richmond's choice to elevate lacrosse (a sport with some generous donors, apparently) at the expense of other men's sports.   Richmond considered the possibility of adding lacrosse and another women's sports, but ruled this out based not only on financial considerations, but a desire to keep the varsity student-athlete population at its current level -- which, the President noted, is high for schools with student demographics similar to Richmond's.  The President was also open about its decision to elevate lacrosse in the first place, noting that the relatively number of Division I teams who compete in lacrosse gives Richmond a good chance to be a competitive. 

In 2006 James Madison University sacrificed 10 athletic teams in order to devote more resources to football.  It didn't say this, however.  Instead, it said it was eliminating 10 teams in order to comply with Title IX.  This engendered anger, protests, and even litigation -- not directed at the university for playing favorites with one sport at the expense of so many others, but at Title IX, and women's sports.  Say what you want about Richmond -- as I said, it certainly seems to deserve some of the criticism its getting for how it rolled out this decision -- but to the extent it's avoiding the Title IX blame-game and taking responsibility for its own role in deciding what and how many sports to field, this is a refreshing change. 

Ithaca College adding sports

Ithaca College is in the (ongoing) process of adding sports for women. Sculling was recently added to the varsity roster but administrators are looking ahead and discussing what sports will be added in future years as the college works comply with prong two.
Despite the inaccuracies in this article (there are actually three ways--not two--to comply with the opportunities part of Title IX), it was a good example of the process (or at least one version of the process) that schools go through as they make decisions about adding teams.
In the case of IC, they are looking at costs of teams, potential athletes already on campus (largely found in existing club sports), and the potential successes of future teams.

Kansas in compliance

But there is still no men's swimming and diving team, much to the disappointment of Ron Neugent, an alum who filed a Title IX complaint in 2009 stating that male student-athletes were underrepresented based on the percentages of male and female undergraduates at the school.
Neugent argued that men were being discriminated against because they had proportionally fewer opportunities in athletics.
His goal was to get the university to add sports for men. But the university--agreeing that it would work on the situation but not admitting non-compliance--opted to achieve proportionality by looking more closely at team rosters and adding and subtracting roster spots.
And having done so, administrators recently filed paperwork stating that the school was in compliance.
Neugent, though, wanted Kansas to add, as mentioned, men's swimming and diving as well as men's tennis. But that seems like a lot of roster spots and KU was not grossly out of proportion. In 2007, two years before the complaint was filed, the university was told it had achieved substantial proportionality when it had a 1.8 percent gap. It seems that adding two men's teams would have required the addition of at least one women's team, which is always great--but expensive.
It also seems that Neugent was concerned not just with equity, but with his alma mater's position in a competition called the Director's Cup. The competition rewards a school for its success across 10 different men's and women's sports. Adding those two men's sports would help KU's standing in that competition.
But, as of now, KU has opted to closely monitor the numbers.

Alma College wrestling reborn

We've largely gotten away from correcting all the little mistakes, misinterpretations, and misrepresentations of Title IX that occur in the media.
But sometimes one of them just strikes that nerve and...
A story about the rebirth of intercollegiate wrestling at Alma College in Michigan says that the program was cut in 1984 "in large part because of Title IX." This bothers me for two--related--reasons. One, a majority of the wrestling community blames the enforcement of Title IX for its demise in the 80s. And two, Title IX was not being applied to athletic departments in 1984. The Grove City decision came down in 1984. No school is going to cut a program for Title IX reasons while a Supreme Court decision over whether it will have to or not is pending.
Wrestling advocates argue that wrestling is growing in popularity. And the numbers support this. But that does not mean it has retained a consistent level of popularity or support over the past 40 years. That some wrestling programs are being (re)introduced is indicative of the ways in which athletic programs change with the times. And this is a good thing.
The president and trustees of Alma College say that the time was right to reintroduce wrestling because of the benefits it will bring to the athletic department and the school as a whole.
They did a feasibility study. Which means they must have run the numbers I just did.
So Alma has a 105-member football team. (These are the latest numbers reported to the Department of Education.) This presents a certain amount of challenges especially when the student body is 58 percent female. They added 26 opportunities for men with wrestling. Fortunately they added 28 for women when bowling and lacrosse got put in place this year as well. So these new numbers added to the old numbers (in other words, this is approximate) look like this:
Fifty-nine percent of athletic opportunities at Alma go to male students. Prior to the addition of wrestling and women's lax and bowling this year men had 60 percent of the opportunities.
In other words, not much changed.
Alma remains in compliance under prong two. Still the implication that the wrong/discrimination men experienced when wrestling was cut in the 80s seems a little misplaced given that women then and now have fewer opportunities at Alma College.

Resolution Agreement Reached at Adrian College

An anonymous reader mailed me a copy of a Resolution Agreement between the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, and Adrian College in Michigan. In 2008, we blogged about ongoing investigation into a complaint against the college stemming from among other things the college's failure to include a women's locker room in its newly constructed "Multi-Purpose Stadium." (see here and here). Apparently, the inequities between men and women's sports at Adrian College were significant, as the college has agreed to remedies in every area covered by Title IX's athletic regulations. Specifically, the college has agree to:

• Evaluate its intercollegiate athletics program "to identify one or ore women's sport team to add in the 2012-2013 academic year."
• Develop a written replacement schedule for equipment and supplies, including uniforms, which will ensure equity by gender.
• Increase the number of competitive events for softball and women's tennis.
• Ensure that women's softball is not the only team stuck with 6 am indoor practices, but that that burden is shared by men's teams as well.
• Ensure that the head coach for men's and women's track splits his time equally between the teams, and to hire an assistant coach for women's track.
• Improve hiring practices to attract more qualified coaches to the women's program, including by increasing compensation and other conditions of employment to make the job more attractive to qualified applicants.
• Construct a new locker room for women in the Multi-Purpose Stadium.
• Renovate existing women's locker rooms in other facilities.
  
• Renovate the women's softball facility to allow for night play, concessions, changing areas, and spectator viewing.
  
• Assign the same number of "equivalently qualified" medical and training staff to men's and women's games.
• Provide equivalent publicity ("e.g., media coverage, statistics maintenance, attendance at games, and other services") to men's and women's teams.
• Provide recruitment funds to men's and women's teams "in proportion to each gender's participation rate in the athletics program" and, as needed, to the women's program at a greater rate in order to make up for the "significant" underrepresentation of women in the athletics program.
• Adhere to various reporting and monitoring requirements with respect to these promises.

OCR will continue to monitor the agreement until it determines that the College has fulfilled its terms.

Franklin Pierce adds sports

Knowing the state of the economy, the fiscal state of higher education, and--having attended school in New Hampshire--the fiscal issues faced by NH schools, we were a little surprised to read that Franklin Pierce University has announced it is adding several sports.
No word on how these sports will be financed but it appears that the university has every intention of adding women's ice hockey (it already has a men's ice hockey team), men's and women's track and field, sprint football. It will also reinstate men's cross country (previously cut in 2003 for unstated reasons).
Interesting. Especially interesting is sprint football--which I had never heard of. Turns out it's the same as regular intercollegiate football. But all players have to weigh less than 172 pounds.
Reading further though it appears that the differences go beyond body weight. There is no pre-season. There will be no athletic scholarships. And the roster will be kept at 65 players. Also, FPU will not be investing right away in a stadium. Administrators are making arrangements with local schools over use of their facilities. In its inaugural season--scheduled for 2012--they will play a reduced schedule.
I really can't think of a more responsible plan to add football (regardless of how much the players weigh!).
Again, no word on where the funds for these additions will come from. FPU is a private school, but still...

Michigan adding lacrosse

Lest we think that all schools are in financial crises and being forced to cut sports...
University of Michigan has announced that it will be adding men's and women's lacrosse to its list of intercollegiate sports. Both teams are currently club sports at the school. Interestingly the men will be upgraded next year and the women will achieve varsity status in 2012. Not sure what the reasons are behind this timetable. Perhaps it has something to do with facilities. Still, I have not seen any explanation of why the men before the women. (And I would expect, if the plan were reversed, to be informed as to why.)
Michigan is planning on adding, but does not currently have, a dedicated lacrosse facility.
The school is banking on data that reveal lacrosse is one of the fastest growing sports in the country.
Michigan is currently complying with the accommodations of interest and abilities by adhering to prong one. Women comprise just under half of the undergraduate student body (49 percent) and receive roughly 47 percent of the athletic opportunities. I assume the size of the respective teams will be about equal and thus the numbers will not change much.

Competitive Cheer Efforts Profiled in NYT

Today's New York Times includes an article on the competing proposals to the NCAA to recognize some version of competitive cheer as an emerging sport for women. One was submitted by a consortium of six universities already sponsoring varsity-level cheer, which they call "Acrobatics and Tumbling," while the other, called "Stunt" has been put forth by USA Cheer, an organization that has affiliation and common leadership with Varsity Brands Inc., the company that runs well-known competitions primarily for sideline cheer squads. According to the article,

The two proposals being considered by the N.C.A.A. share many similarities: the competitions themselves are longer and more standardized than in the past, athletes now wear uniforms more akin to those of volleyball players, and they no longer rally the crowd for another team.

However, they differ in other ways, like how to score the events and how many competitions to stage in any given season. The proposal being advanced by the handful of universities calls the new sport acrobatics and tumbling and uses a scoring system similar to that of gymnastics, with points based on degree of difficulty. The format backed by USA Cheer is called stunt and has a head-to-head format, with the competition divided into quarters.

One important distinction is the size of the teams. The proposal for acrobatics and tumbling, which was submitted to the N.C.A.A. late last year, imagines that an average squad size will number from 32 to 36 athletes, with a maximum of 12 scholarships. The proposal for stunt, which was sent in on Wednesday, envisions a squad of 20 to 30, with a maximum of 24 scholarships.

The article also addressed the potential Title IX implications of the NCAA's potential decision to award one or the other versions of competitive cheer emerging sport status. Athletic department administrators will now have another possibility to choose from in adding sports for women and to promote their institution's Title IX compliance by either satiating unmet interests and abilities or closing the disparity between athletic opportunities for men and women.

On the issue of competitive cheer's relationship to Title IX, reporter Katie Thomas admirably conveyed the position of mainstream women's sports advocates, which is that as long as competitive cheer is truly operating as a sport, with the same level of support, the same opportunities for varsity-level competition as any other sport, it ought to be considered a sport. This position is too nuanced for many reporters who seem to delight in setting up women's sports advocates the nemeses of competitive cheer, so I was pleased that this article conveyed a difference between being against competitive cheer, and being against/concerned about athletic departments using competitive cheer to avoid having to address existing disparities in traditional sports.

Montana Adds Softball

A while ago, we mentioned University of Montana's plans to add women's softball. By way of update, here it's reported that the Regents have approved a plan to raise the student athletic fee (by $12.50 per year) thereby confirming the funding source for Montana's softball initiative. Student government also approved the fee increase, though leaders expressed reservation that the money be earmarked for Title IX compliance.

Adding softball was the right thing to do. Women make up 51.7% of the undergraduate population at Montana, but receive only 42.7% of the athletic opportunities, in a total of 6 sports. By my calculation, Montana would have to add 76 athletic opportunities for women to achieve proportionality. Softball is a start. It certainly improving their chances of demonstrating compliance with prong 3 in the meanwhile, as the decision satisfies to demonstrated unmet interested and ability.

West of the Mississippi...

Teams are being added and dropped, and schools are conference hopping.
Not sure if it's the conference hopping that is encouraging institutions to the get their houses in order in terms of Title IX compliance, but it is certainly having that effect.
The University of Montana has slightly-more-than tentative plans to add women's softball to their roster of intercollegiate sports. The state of Montana has no DI softball, which isn't especially surprising given the limitations the weather puts on spring sports, but recent survey data show that softball is the sport undergraduate women would like to see added. Though Montana administrators maintain that they didn't think they "were close to being out of compliance" they knew that they couldn't keep administering the annual interest survey and not do anything. (Not sure why they held that belief in the first place. Simply collecting data does not make one compliant.) Not sure if the NCAA held similar beliefs about Montana's compliance. In the university's last reaccreditation administrators were apparently told that adding another women's sport would be "the right thing to do." Montana is able, it seems, to read between the lines. And its plans to move to the Big Sky Conference likely pushed forward the plan for softball. The Big Sky needs one more softball-playing school in order to hold a conference tournament. But softball is still a ways off, at least three years according to the athletic director. The program is estimated to cost about half a million dollars annually so funds need to be raised, a coach hired, and players recruited.
A different conference hop is forcing another school to do the drop/add shuffle. University of Nebraska-Omaha, a DII school (except for men's hockey), is making the move to DI. It has been invited to the Summit League and given the NCAA's lifting of the ban on division hopping that will happen in June, and that conferences hold the power to invite, UNO has decided to make the leap, something they apparently have been considering for a while now. Not knowing when another such opportunity will come along, the university is making sure everything is in order for the 2012 move.
But unfortunately football and wrestling will not be coming along. The university cited the immense costs of football and the inability to bring wrestling up to DI levels without a large amount of cash as the reason for the cuts. Good news though for a couple of the so-called men's minor sports: UNO will be adding men's golf and soccer.

No sand v-ball in San Diego

Bucking national trends that show further increases in the number of women attending college, San Diego State University has seen its numbers of enrolled female undergraduates drop in the past few years. The decrease (to just under 57 percent of the total enrolled undergraduates) means SDSU's plans to add two women's sports have changed. The university planned to add women's lacrosse and sand volleyball in order to decrease the gap in scholarship dollars between male and female athletes (based on the percentage of undergraduate enrollment). Like all CSU institutions, SDSU must remain in compliance with the 1993 Cal-NOW settlement that requires equitable distribution of scholarship dollars (or grants-in-aid) within 5 percentage points.
But with the decrease in women attending the university*, plans for the addition of sand volleyball have been shelved. The athletic department believes it can close the gap by adding only women's lacrosse. A coach has already been hired.


* Might be a good time to remember the investigation into the allegations that some colleges are discriminating against female applicants in an attempt to keep their undergraduate population even(ish).