Duluth Coaches and Students File Title IX Complaint

A group of four former student athletes, one current student athlete, and three former coaches have filed a complaint with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights challenging widespread sex discrimination within the athletic department at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. The former coaches -- Shannon Miller, Jen Banford, and Annette Wiles -- are also plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the university challenging sex- and sexual orientation- discrimination that resulted in the termination or forced resignation of their jobs.  But the OCR complaint alleges even more widespread sex discrimination that affects students and coaches alike.

Allegations in the complaint include the following:

• women's ice hockey team has a smaller operating budget (by over $270K) than its male counterpart
• women's softball team was forced to have tryouts in order to pad the number of female athletes reported for gender equity purposes, then the department made the coach cut those extra players for budgetary reasons 
• some female athletes were fraudulently reported as participants in multiple sports
• men's basketball team is allowed to carry redshirt players, while the women's team is not
• the department has terminated female coaches, depriving female athletes the opportunity to receive coaching of high quality
• the department provides men's teams coach with resources like vehicles, a restaurant expense account, and support staff, that are not provided to the women's coaches on equal terms. 
• the men's basketball team has a locker room five times larger and of superior quality than the locker room for women's team
• the men's hockey team is provided with resources like snacks, meals, travel funds to tournaments that were not provided in equal measure to the women's team. 
• the women's basketball team had fewer games and travel opportunities than the men's team; the women's team had to fundraise for travel and the men were not
• men's teams had bigger budgets for recruiting, more equipment and uniforms, and medical equipment denied to women's teams
• female athletes have fewer opportunities for scholarships, such as funding to enroll in special May term, J-term, and summer semesters that male athletes receive
• the department does less promotion for female teams than its male counterparts, among other examples, it tweeted about men's hockey 309 times compared to 69 tweets about women's hockey

OCR will now consider whether to open an investigation (it likely will).  If the allegations are validated, it is very hard to imagine how they could not constitute violations of Title IX. While it is not necessarily a violation to have a disparity in treatment between men's and women's teams in the same sport, it is a violation when the athletic department's pattern is to select the women's team for inferior treatment all or most of the time.

Diving coach lawsuit moves to federal court

We blogged about the lawsuit filed by former Texas A&M diving coach Kevin Wright when he filed for wrongful termination in state court under a whistleblower protection statute in Texas. At that time we wondered whether there would also be a Title IX retaliation claim.
There is now--because Wright has moved his case to federal court. As a brief reminder, Wright, who had served 17 seasons as the diving coach, was terminated last September. He alleges that it was because he complained about Title IX violations.
Wright said that a diver was asked to lie about travel accommodations to an investigator examining gender equity within the department. Said diver heard a female swimmer actually lie in the interview. Wright complained about the inequitable travel arrangements. He also expressed concerns over potential recruiting violations.
The university, should this go to court, is likely to accuse Wright of anger management issues and potential sexual harassment of a fellow coach. The validity of these counter accusations is, of course, unknown.
No word on trial dates or negotiations.

Tuesday Title IX tidbits

In Indiana it appears that not too much has changed since the state's high school athletics association got a letter over a decade ago from the Department of Education about scheduling boys' basketball games. Girls' basketball, at that time, had 10.5 percent of their games scheduled on Friday nights. Today it is at 19.2 percent. Boys who play b-ball in Indiana have 41 percent of their games scheduled for Friday nights. Fridays are considered an optimal day and the preferential scheduling in favor of boys' teams is an issue. In addition to opportunity for ticket sales and other revenue-generating ventures, games scheduled on Fridays are good for players who do not have to worry about getting homework done that night and going to school the next day. No formal complaints, legal or otherwise, have been filed, but the availability of the above statistics suggests it wouldn't be hard to prove inequitable treatment.

Niagra University is adding women's golf to their list of varsity sports. No word on why--especially given the economic realities most insitutions of higher education are facing. A quick look at the insitutional data shows women comprise 61 percent of the undergraduate student body and have 51 percent of the athletic opportunities. There is already a men's golf team. Not sure if that was a factor as well. But good opportunity for female golfers in the region.

And speaking of tough economic times, some schools--especially DIII schools--are using athletics to boost enrollment, and thus bring in some tuition dollars, according to an article in Inside Higher Ed. Of course, it's not as easy as bringing in athletes. Some schools are adding football. Over 100 new student-athletes equals a nice boost to tuition revenues. But it also adds a lot more participation opportunities for men. There's also the issue of where recruiting dollars are coming from--for men and women. Athletic administrators attest to the success of bringing students to campus after they have had some contact with athletic department people--but recruitment costs money.

Wall Street Journal Article Tells a Different Story than the Headline

If you only read the headline in this Sunday's Wall Street Journal -- "Wanted: Female Players: Thirty-five years after Title IX, colleges struggle to fill women's teams" -- you'd think that there are no qualified and interested female athletes out there.

But then you read the article, and you realize that, in fact, there are. The point of the article, viewed separately from the headline, seems to be that parents of female athletes wishing to pursue scholarship opportunities for their daughters have to spend thousands of dollars to hire agents to bring them to the attention of coaches in their sport. This trend would seem to underscore the point made by women sports advocates, who suggest (as the WSJ acknowledges) "that the real problem [why there are fewer female college athletes than male] is paltry recruiting budgets and coaches who don't make enough effort to find athletes."

Why the disconnect? Does WSJ believe that to get a mainstream audience to read an article about women's sports, it must be framed with a headline that calls Title IX into doubt?