A solution to Title IX

And I think this statement is wrong. This seems to be the most prevalent comment I hear about Title IX. Not surprisingly, it's often made by men. No offense, of course. Maybe I don't know everything there is to know about title nine but I do know this...the difference between having all the women's sports and a mens swim team and still having all the womens sports after cutting the mens swim team is a whole lot of bs. How can you say that is not wrong?

Rutgers was fully compliant with Title IX in spite of what the AD has said. Title IX is used as a convenient excuse by those Athletic Departments who want to get rid of "non-revenue" sports. (Note: most revenue sports are also no-profit sports which is not what they would have you believe.) Now the fact that most football teams loose more than the budgets of the Olympic sport teams combined is lost in the noise. The Rutgers AD has been wanting to drop these teams for several years because he has too many sports for him to handle. the alternative of finding and AD with enough brain power was not apparently considered. Leo If its all about money then why don't they cut all the sports and put that money into helping football and basketball. Add more seats, put money into reqruiting...

I had thought that the ratio of scholarships were suppose to equal the ratio of the student body. Also, ISU was better than U of I in football this year. U of I is more of a basketball school. Edited to add, I don't think it is the number of sports, but the number of scholarships. Football has a large number of participants, and a large number or scholarships. To get the equity, the college has to add more women's sports, because no women's sports has the numbers that football has.

Suppose there were NO swim teams in the NCAA. Suppose that ALL college teams were clubs. What is to prevent a benevolent organization with very deep pockets from giving the students who swam for these clubs an academic scholarship? How would that involve the NCAA? In other words, is there a way to remove swimming from the governance of the NCAA and still fund the students who swim? I see a parallel here to the problem in the USA with the national cross country skiing team. All the money for skiing goes to USSA and gets divided out from the top. Management always seems to find that the bag is pretty empty when the funding for cross country skiing comes to the table. A number of years ago, biathlon (that's cross country skiing and shooting) broke away from USSA for just this reason. They now raise their own money and, this season, have had the most successful set of races in a long time (maybe ever). Why not explore ways to get the NCAA out of the picture altogether. By the way, I worked at the University of Wyoming during the time when its ski program was canceled in order to help with title nine. What actually happened (an old story) is that the football coaches and staff got raises. This was at a time when the football team lost more than $1M per year. Skiing was the only sport at Wyoming that garnered a legitimate NCAA championship team. I have difficulty in making any financial contribution to any university because of the sorry nature of college sports. This is largely due to the numbers of ADs who have footballs wedged firmly in an unmentionable place. -- mel

Title nine has a purpose and it works the way it is supposed to. But if you're on that swim team that gets dropped becuase of some technicality wouldn't you be angry or would you say...yeah, they did the right thing. Tilte nine should at least be tweaked in some way to make it better.

Leo,the beauty of my proposal is that it has no direct effect on college swimming or title IX. If a person gets a swimming scholarship under my plan they go to the college of their choice. They can swim for a club there. If the college wants them to swim for them and vis versa and it fits with Title IX restrictions then fine,if not the swimmer can still go to college,swim,and compete which is the important thing. Again,I think Title IX has been over all positive,but colleges and the NCAA worship football(not that there is anything wrong with worshiping football,I have done so myself) and swimming will always get short shrift unless we change how we fund swimmers.

I think that is a great idea. It will take a lot of work and time to implement. I've often wondered aloud to my wife, the coach of our club team, if Title IX could be used to convince our school board th approve high school swimming since the majority of our club swimmers of high school age are girls. But then the boys would probably get left out. Our past attempts to get this sport added as a varsity sport have been met with an "absolutely not". I think we are the only 4A school in the state that doesn't have swimming.

I like Allen's idea and all....but its so hard to agree with a....gulp...breaststroker. So lets just keep this between us o.k. Allen LOL! But seriously....It sounds like a doable enough kind of solution to the problem IMO. Too bad I'm practically broke or I could donate to the scholarship fund too. In respons to Mel's comments: Mens soccer at the collegiate level has also suffered....There has been some success with non-NCAA funded Club soccer teams at some colleges...I don't know if this same kind of thing can be done for Mens swimming or not? Newmastersswimmer

I had thought that the ratio of scholarships were suppose to equal the ratio of the student body. Also, ISU was better than U of I in football this year. U of I is more of a basketball school. Edited to add, I don't think it is the number of sports, but the number of scholarships. Football has a large number of participants, and a large number or scholarships. To get the equity, the college has to add more women's sports, because no women's sports has the numbers that football has. Dorothy - While ISU has had better football seasons lately, they don't play the same level of football as UofI. UofI is Big Ten. I also understand the scholarship/money thing, I was one of the last ISU mens swimmers (cut two years after I left). Even though the mens football program wasn't very good then, they took back the three mens swimming scholarships and canned the swim team. In my opinion, the real inequities are not between mens and womens programs, they occur in the AD's office within the mens programs as others have said. Title IX only ensured women got access to some of the funding, the AD's decided from where. I only offered the state school info as a way of looking at the overall picture, to add some example to it and show there really isn't a clear pattern to the issue.

I have written this idea to Swimming World and USA Swimmer and now I want to share it with my Forum Friends to see if I can garner any support. I just read the report in the ASCA magazine on how the implementation of Title IX has hurt men's swimming. As a supporter of womens sports I think Title IX has done much more good than harm. As a fan of college swimming I think the NCAA has done more harm than good. I was searching for a solution that would get swimming out of being at the mercy of the NCAA.The solution seems to be to start a scholarship fund for swimmers to be administered by USA Swimming. Hey Allen, do you have a cite to that ASCA article? My alma mater does not have athletic scholarships per se. When it tried to cut the women's and men's swim team in 2003, there was a huge outcry and the team even auctioned itself on ebay and launched a website. The program was ultimately re-established and re-endowed through alumni donations in 2004. They were lucky. The endowment is much less than football for one season, for sure. I have actually had my daughter ask me why there isn't much in the way of women's sports on TV. I'm hoping she can at least see her swimming heros at the World Championships, even if they are breaststrokers. I hope it's not on at 12:30 PM on a weekday like the women's NCAAs were. With respect to JMU, for those of you with USS kids, I just read in Splash Magazine that the USOC sent a letter to JMU administrators saying: "We have seen universities across the country inappropriately use Title IX as an exuse to justify the elimination of sport programs, and far too often the programs dropped are Olympic sports." JMU has no plans to change its decision at this point.