Just say it. Don’t be a wimp. If you’re going to rip Title IX, go ahead and say why. Say that women’s sports are not as important as men’s. Say that women don’t like sports enough to deserve anything even close to an equal opportunity. Say that sports are for men and that women should just be happy with what’s left over. Yep, Title IX is back in the news again. This week, a committee met in Washington, and these folks seem just about ready to recommend significantly weakening Title IX. You know, not one school has ever—ever—been sanctioned over Title IX. Not one. Still, politicians want to weaken it. There simply is nothing in American sports as misunderstood, misconstrued, misinterpreted and just plain missed as Title IX. Give you an example. You are a wrestling coach who just saw your program cut. Naturally, you are pretty ticked off, because it only costs about a few hundred thousand or so to run a solid wrestling program. And wrestling builds character in young men. So, you start screaming about, well, what? A. The football program, which has a $5 million budget that includes money spent on staying at a hotel for home games. B. The fact that football gets a fairly astonishing 85 scholarships, not bad considering NFL teams somehow make do with 45 players. C. The football and basketball coaches, who make a combined $1.7 million. D. The women’s swimming team. Answer: D. Of course. It’s all Title IX’s fault. This is the world where we live. Blame Title IX. It’s always been that way. You know, Title IX came to be in bizarre fashion. A few conservatives actually slipped it in because they figured that would kill the civil rights bill. Who would vote for women getting equality? Instead, remarkably, Title IX passed. Isn’t it amazing how great things get done in America? Today, more than 55 percent of college students are women. The doors are open for women at law schools and medical schools and engineering schools. Hardly anybody even talks about such things anymore. It’s been bumpier in sports. Gender is such a touchy issue in sports. Throw like a girl. Fight like a girl. If you’re going to play like that, why don’t you put on a dress? All that. Even now, after 30 years of fighting and complaining, barely a quarter of the schools are in compliance with Title IX. This is the law they want to weaken. Despite it all, nobody can deny the incredible impact Title IX has had. In 1971, there were barely 300,000 high school girls involved in sports. Now, there are more than 2.8 million. There’s no need to go into the many ways athletics change girls’ lives, but let’s just say when girls play sports, they don’t do drugs, they don’t have unwanted pregnancies, they graduate from school. They feel better about themselves, too. These are good things, right? Well, it depends whom you ask. Wrestling coaches, for instance, aren’t sure Title IX is such a good thing. See, before Title IX, there were almost 400 college wrestling programs in the United States. Now, there are fewer than half that. They could blame bloated football budgets (which at 80 percent of schools are larger than all women’s sports combined) or they could blame high coaches salaries or they could blame the fact that there are many, many more soccer programs now, a reflection of the times. They don’t. They blame Title IX. Only, they won’t just say it. And that’s what drives you nuts. If you’re going to blame Title IX, just say what you mean. What they want to say is that wrestling (and other men’s sports) are more important than women’s sports. They want to say—as a Connecticut judge wrote in 1971 — that “athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls.” They want to say that if you have to cut sports, women’s sports should be cut because women don’t really care about sports. You virtually have to beg them to play. They would rather be doing all sorts of other stuff, like, well, you know, girls’ stuff. They won’t say what they really want, which is this: things to be like they used to be. And it’s pretty gutless. The critics could take on football, with all those scholarships (would it hurt college football in any way to cut back 15 scholarships—more than enough to fund a wrestling program?). They could take on the direction of college athletics, which long ago veered away from education and headed straight toward greed. But that would be too hard. So instead, they bash Title IX. Instead, they try to drain the few gains women have made in college sports. Instead, they try to pull up by pushing women down. It’s the same old story. Years ago—this is a good story—a college started a women’s basketball program. Well, the men’s coach didn’t like it one bit, so he started locking up the basketballs after practice to make sure the women didn’t use them. All that year, the women practiced with a couple of old, stitched-up basketballs. “That must have made you feel terrible,” the women’s coach was told many years later. “Not really,” she said. “We were just happy to have any basketballs.” She smiled and spoke some of the truest words yet spoken. “Some people,” she said, “just don’t know how to share.” ——— © 2003, The Kansas City Star. Visit The Star Web edition on the World Wide Web at http://www.kcstar.com/ Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
Plymouth State University
Thursday, June 26, 2025