While I agree that the debate is mostly about budgets, your "arms race" argument doesn't work. If it were correct, men's basketball teams and Div I-A football teams wouldn't be raking in enormous profits every year. They'd be spending the money to promote themselves to recruits. The reason that lower-division schools haven't cut men's teams is that the lawyers haven't pressured them. Many of these schools are nowhere near Title IX compliance. However, their budgets simply aren't big enough to be worth the fight (yet). When the feminist legal associations get around to it, men's soccer is likely to come under the axe.
A friend of mine teaches at a junior college. When it opened, 45 per cent of the students were women. The percentage has grown every year and now stands at 66 per cent. His English lit class has 22 students, all female. The female students are complaining, saying that if they wanted to go to an all girls' school they would have applied. In microcosm, this is affirmative action overshooting its target. School officials view the situation as very grave, because overall enrollment started dropping. They figured the only thing they could do was add sports, so they started a men's soccer team and a men's basketball team. The response has been good and it seems to have kept the male student ratio at 34 per cent. Women have not complained about the absence of female sports. This school is probably violating Title IX but does it really hurt anybody? Women have 2/3 of the seats in class and even more than that in financial aid. Men love sports but most women are far more interested in other things. If feminist groups threaten to sue the school will drop the sports because there is not much money to go around. Then they will be back on the march to 70 per cent many school face, with dropping enrollment as some women apply elsewhere where there are more men on campus.
Since the early 80s, mens' soccer has exploded. During that time period, most other mens' sports have lost popularity. If a new athletic department were being designed today, soccer would be an automatic choice everywhere. It's a no-brainer. Yet soccer hasn't gained any ground at the big schools. And there are over 300 colleges that don't have men's soccer teams. Are there any other men's sports that would have over 300 more teams in the absence of Title IX?
Here is one of the feminist organizations calling for more "prorportionality" in athletics (not in academic financial aid). http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/cgi-bin/iowa/contrib.html?record=3 The heavily-funded Women's Sports Foundation recently sent target letters to 25 schools, including Notre Dame, threatening lawsuits. Now I know some people in Big Soccer will say that Notre Dame should just cut back its football program.
Oh crap, Thomas, here we go again. They're probably happier being barefoot and pregnant anyway. Please cite the research to back up this absurd statement. Sure fits my take on it. It's easy to cut a program and blame Title IX rather than taking the heat for the real reason. By the way. Scholarship figures are misleading. Div III doesn't offer athletic scholarships, but as we learned, somehow they turn into academic grants awarded to those incoming freshmen the coaches like. So it's very hard to tell what the story is at Div III schools.
Some things are so reliable, I set my watch by them. The forum may change but the Title IX thread will appear every 3 months. Good stuff. Can you beleive that a woman is coaching my son's soccer team?? I mean, not being interested in sports and she still goes to the effort of helping these kids!!
Thomas' assertion is that Title IX is killing men's soccer and hurting the MNT. There are more players than there were 10 years ago. Yes, there are more schools, but the fact that there are more players means ... those schoolls have or are adding soccer. They aren't trimming it. Scholarships are a different issue altogether for me. because the issue with scholarships is more tied to football not giving up its 85 than anything else. There needs to be equality and the institutions decide that 85 football rides are more important than fully-funding other sports. That's an institutional decision. Yea, I can't get the link to work for some reason. Search Google for Florida Title IX soccer. It's a Herald article where they are pretty candid about how they have dealit with it by adding women's sports as much as they can without cutting. then the UM AD basically says, "Hey, football pays for everything so we ain't cutting football." I think it's a good read on how they do as much as they can without hurting the cash cows. They don't blame Title IX. they blame simple economics. I could look, but I'm not sure what I would find. This whole exchange went back to Thomas insisting for 10-15 pages that michigan had no men's team when I had provided ample evidence that they had one for several years. Just like all the times I show him facts, he refuses to engage in a serious dialogue on the matter, instead hiding behind hyperbole to try and prove a point that just isn't true. Watch how whenever he is asked to prove facts, he dodges the issue. I'm trying to provide facts that show the issue is much more ocmplicated then "Women bad, men good." I'm well aware that things have stagnated. But Thomas' assertion is that soccer has lost tremendous ground. It hasn't. the numbers don't lie. Sixty percent of Division I schools offer soccer as opposed to 65 percent in 1982 while Divisions II and II have shown gains. Compare that to wrestling which has 20 to 30 percent drops at all levels in sponsorship; men's tennis which has dropped 10 percent at evey level; swimming which has dropped between 5 and 20 percent at each level; gymnastics, which has dropped 10 percent in Division I and has a total of three teams in Divisions II and III combined; or golf, which has a similar decline on the D-I level, but has also dropped at the other two levels. The women don't attack the sports. They attack the decision makers who attack the sports. And soccer - as the numbers bear out - is not even close to being in the firing line.
I'm a bit confused by the question here. The National Women's Legal Center has been at the forefront of countless lawsuits and threatened lawsuits regarding collegiate sports. As for whether they've "actively attacked men's sports," that's a matter of semantics. Their lawyers have commandeered a lot of money for themselves and for athletes in women's sports with relatively very low participation rates. Without their aggressive approach, a fair portion of this money would have gone to men's soccer, which has relatively very high participation. As someone who is politically liberal, I am dismayed by the way a well-meaning piece of legislation has resulted in such an extreme imbalance.
Yeah, or my wife who has been coaching for 20 years, laid off a year after my daughter left for college, couldn't stand it and went back to coaching travel and high school teams. These women must not be normal. Nor is my daughter, apparently...playing at college now (yeah, she's one of those sucking scholarship money away from the guys) and can't see herself not being involved with soccer after graduation. Part of her self identification is as a soccer player.
if we're playing fantasy AD, why not go whole hog? Football? more than 400 colleges and universities don't sponsor it. Golf? There are more than 300 colleges and universities without it and it's not very expensive. More schools playing means less travel. Swimming? Almost 700 schools don't sponsor. I bet half might be willing to get back in the pool. Volleyball? Easy, peasy and there are only 73 teams among 1K+ colleges and universities. When you take Title IX out of the equation (and equality I guess) there's no not much of a limit to what people can do. But let's deal with the reality, which clearly is that men's soccer is holding steady, not being stripped away. It's an insult to the sports truly crippled by Tittle IX to cry wolf like this over a pretty healthy sport at the NCAA level.
Great link for facts Sorry - but that's crap. In 1971 1 in 25 girls participated in HS sports. Now it's 1 in 2.5 (women's sports foundation). Below is a link to a quick facts sheet about women in sports. It gives numbers of dollars that goes to programs, coaching salaries, everything that is being debated here on this board. Mr. Flannagin, I propose that you look through it. As I stated, I agree that Title IX needs to be revamped, please check out the link so you can see that Title IX has done some amazingly good things and in fact, there are still some more things that need to be done. (That and that some of your points are wrong . http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/binary-data/WSF_ARTICLE/pdf_file/28.pdf
Bucknell used Title IX as an excuse for eliminating men's wrestling because they figured the PR for that would have been worse than the ultimate truth - that the wrestling coach violated about a billion NCAA regulations by paying his wrestlers etc. Bucknell likes its image squeaky clean. The new AD decided it would look better in the papers to blame Title IX (which to be fair was also a factor) than to have to dredge up the fact that their wrestling coach of 20+ years was a crook. That managed not to make it into most of the reports.
Interest in soccer is exploding in this country. Division I Men's programs are stuck at about the same level as in 1992. Women's Division I programs have increased dramatically since 1992? Do you think Title IX has something to do with this? Does it hurt men's soccer? Of course it does!
It has killed the development of our National Team since the 70s. We won the World Cup every time until then, know out in the Quarterfinals to a team such as Germany. Outrage.
'Ray Bucknell, where the 11 am home games draw about 150 spectators at Christy Mathewson Stadium, and the Penn State game draws about 500 at the University Center.
(sigh) Oh, those good old days when bigsoccer was filled with cries of "Fire Walt Chyzowych!" and "David Brcic is so pissed that Arnie Mausser is starting in goal, he's considering walking out!" I miss those days. Damn women.
You really think women are as interested in sports as men? That is worse than absurd, it's bordering on insanity.
I've noticed that when multiple factors affect an outcome (as in the case of 99.99% of human events), this is a cause for severe mental confusion for most Big Soccer posters. Mindless sarcasm aside.
But the expectations for men's soccer should be different. As my original post said, these other sports have been declining in popularity, while men's soccer has exploded.
Prove it Ben. It's been cited that women's participation in sports has increase from 1 in 25 to 1 in 2.5 since the 1970s. Either they're more interested in playing sports, they're getting more opportunities that weren't previously available, or their parents got tired of making them learn the tuba and decided to make them participate in sports instead.
How did you go about determining that these sports have declined in popularity? Otherwise you're basing your entire argument on your own opinion of the sports in question.