WOMEN ATHLETES AT PROVIDENCE SAY
TITLE IX MUST CHANGE

Task Force Media Notes
November, 1998

An interesting reaction to the recent decision of Providence College to eliminate their men's baseball, golf and tennis programs was expressed by the women athletes on campus. Although the controversial decision was made with the intention of helping women athletes, many of PC's women athletes were upset by the elimination of men's teams in their name.

Sports Illustrated, the most respected sports magazine in the nation, addressed the negative aspects of the Providence decision in its Scorecard section. At a student sit-in protesting the cuts, more than 100 of the 275 protesters were women. According to Sports Illustrated, Mirandi Balag, a senior co-captain of the PC field hockey team, said:

"Somebody better do something soon to fix the law, because right now it hurts more athletes than it helps."

Balag also understood that the interpretation of the law was harmful. She said: "Women athletes want more opportunities, but Title IX wasn't designed to take away opportunities from others."

A number of other women athletes at PC came out in public against the decision of the athletic department. An article written by Elizabeth Rau of the Providence Journal, entitled "The price of equality," captured many of the student's feelings.

"I can't even imagine what these students feel like," said Carla Clemente, 21, co-captain of the women's swim team. "Being an athlete, you come to this school and hope to participate in the sport you love, and now they're telling you you can't."

"I feel so bad," said Jami Servidone, 20, a junior who plays first base on the women's softball team. "If I was in that predicament, where I came to play a sport, and all of a sudden it was cut, it's like, what do you do?"

Providence College's decision to cut three men's sports, without adding any new women's sports, is a perfect example of proportionality in practice. A law, which was originally written to provide opportunity, has been misinterpreted into a quota law, which actually eliminates much more opportunity than it creates.

According to the 1997 NCAA Gender Equity Study, during a five-year period (1992-97), a total of 17,009 male athletes were eliminated, while only 5,009 female athletes were added in NCAA institutions. This works out to an average of 3.4 men cut for every new female athlete. The ugly scene at Providence College has been going on at many campuses for many years, and will continue until the interpretation of Title IX is changed.

In Another Study

The Fact is That:
"WOMEN HAVE MORE COLLEGE SPORTS OPPORTUNITIES THAN MEN"

For many years, proponents of proportionality have demanded the use of gender quotas as the method to measure opportunity for athletes. The propaganda goes something like this: if the percentage of female athletes on a campus does not equal the number of female students on a campus, there must be discrimination and a lack of opportunity.

This reasoning does not take into account the other two prongs of the Title IX enforcement rules: interest and abilities, and a pattern of increased opportunities for women. When you take interest into account, and consider the amount of opportunities for high school athletes to participate in college, women athletes are getting many more chances to compete than men athletes. Simply said, your high school daughter student-athlete has a greater chance to compete in college than your high school son student-athlete.

The National Coalition for Athletics Equity (NCAE), a Washington D.C.-based organization that is dedicated to preserving athletic opportunities for all students, came up with some very important statistics.

The NCAE developed a statistic called "opportunity percentage," which compares the number of high school athletes in each sport with the number of college opportunities in the same sport. By dividing the number of high school athletes by the number of college athletes, a percentage of opportunities is developed. This is a very powerful statistic that gives a true picture of opportunities.

The NCAE researched 39 men's and women's sports that have high school and NCAA college programs, using the 1995-96 statistics. Topping the ranking with the most opportunity is women's crew, which had 966 high school athletes and 3,528 NCAA college athletes - an opportunity percentage of 365.52 percent. The lowest ranked sport was men's basketball, with 545,596 high school athletes and 15,160 college athletes, for an opportunity percentage of 2.77 percent.

Six of the top 10 sports for opportunity percentage are women's sports. They are, in order:
1. Women's Crew 365.52%
2. Women's Squash 216.66%
3. Men's Crew 163.25%
4. Women's Fencing 109.10%
5. Men's Fencing 105.63%
6. Men's Squash 74.75%
7. Women's Synchronized Swimming 46.42%
8. Women's Ice Hockey 28.28%
9. Women's Lacrosse 24.72%
10. Men's Lacrosse 23.07%

If you compare apples with apples, the statistics also show that women have more opportunities than men in the same sport. In the study, 16 sports that have both men and women teams are evaluated. In 10 of these sports, the women's team has a higher opportunity percentage than the men's team, while only 6 men's teams have the higher percentage. In the top five ranked sports for opportunity, the women's team has a higher percentage - crew, squash, fencing, lacrosse and ice hockey.