But you can't separate Title IX from the economic equation. Title IX is the reason that Florida (and countless other schools) added women's soccer instead of men's soccer, even though the men's game is more popular in terms of both student participation and attendance. From my perspective, soccer should exist at Florida for both genders. The men's team should piggyback on the women's facilities and operate at very little cost. The reason that this hasn't happened is that Title IX requires "women only" budget items to balance out football. At many schools where both genders have soccer teams, this requires separate facilities. For a university to build two separate intercollegiate soccer facilities is like burning money.
Which schools have separate facilities, beineke? Here in the Northwest, I can't think of a single school that has separate intercollegiate facilities for men and women.
2.5 > 1 (last time I checked). TV ratings data also will demonstate this, though I have no desire to waste a few hours searching this. I'll also note that many women watch sports because their spouse/boyfriend is watching making the true figures even more unbalanced. It never ceases to amaze me how political ideology can warp reality. This is true for virtually any ideology. To suggest women are as interested in sports as men flies in the face of reality as much as the bible-thumping fundamentalists that want equal time for creationism. Are millions of women intersted in sports? Sure, but a far greater number of men and usually to a much greater extent. Would you care to examine the % of women posting here, or are women not able to use computers? I really am not all that interested in this stuff, though it's nice if people could be honest and realistic. Hopefully, most soccer players will eventually skip college. Meanwhile, feminists can ignore the plight of tens of millions of blue collar female workers so long as Yale has a women's badminton team.
http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/cgi-bin/iowa/issues/rights/article.html?record=116 Here's an article from that website on WHY WOMEN SHOULD PLAY SPORTS. Pretty scary stuff. We must stop this sort of thinking if we are ever going to return to the sort of world wide soccer dominance we had in the days before TITLE IX decimated the men's game.
You just think it's ironic because you are in a fantasy state. Please compute the % of women posters to Bigsoccer.
And the ratio of men who participate in sports is not 1:1 either Ben. All TV ratings will prove is that men prefer to watch other men play in professional and collegiate sports on television. It's probably an indicator, yes, but not the ultimate answer to life's ultimate question. Again, Ben, I don't think anybody here claimed that the ratio of women sports fanatics to men sports fanatics was 1:1.
There's a sports marketing group that publishes participation numbers. Soccer was one of a handful of boys' sports to grow during the 90's. All the rest shrank in participation. Sadly, the kids who aren't playing soccer are mostly sitting around getting fat.
Correct me if i'm wrong here ... for a few years after UDub's field opened, only the women were allowed to play there. However, the men were permitted to move in later. As for the other big schools in the Northwest, WSU and Oregon don't have men's teams, while I don't know about Oregon State.
From the article I posted above... Are Women Less Interested in Sport opportunities Than Men? "Many people think that girls are not as interested in sport as boys. Research shows that boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 9 and their parents are equally interested in sports participation. However, by the age of 14, girls drop out of sport at a significantly greater rate than men. Girls and women simply do not receive the same positive reinforcement about their sports participation. Little boys receive balls, gloves and sports equipment by the age of two. They see their images on television as sportsmen, they see their photos in the sports section and know from their parents and friends that they are expected to play sports. Even though our daughters are not as likely to be discouraged from playing sports as they were ten years ago, they simply are not encouraged to the same extent as little boys. As a result, they enter organized sport two years later than little boys and are therefore less likely to have the skills necessary for early successes. Typically, when girls play with boys, especially if they are in the minority, boys simply do not positively reinforce their participation"
I'll explain it: you're pretending to be free of ideology while accusing others of being blinded by ideology. That's what's ironic.
Actually he paid only one from what I know and Garcia turned out to be not nearly as good on the college level as everyone thought he would. If you're gonna take a gamble though, he was the guy I would have gambled on - he was tough as nuts in high school. Shame was, Frerraro was a good coach, taught me a lot at the camps I went to. Title IX put Bucknell in trouble. They chose to cut wrestling and not cut back on another sport or add a woman's sport. The blame is shared.
How do you know that? How do you know the money spent on women's soccer would go to men's soccer? That's just fantasy. If you had your way and women were treated as second-class citizens, it might have saved a couple of dozen wrestling teams or swimming teams or baseball teams or it might have added some soccer teams. Or it might have put football scholarships back up to 110 and given basketball a few more free rides. There are no absolutes here, something which you obviously fail to grasp.
Posting it twice doesn't make it any more accurate or relevant. Again, please compute the % of women posting to Bigsoccer, or is the tremendous dispartiy all caused by Jane getting a dollhouse for her 10th birthday? You know, there was an interesting study, at Penn I believe, that proved that men's greater interest in pornography was a result of boys receiving Hustler subscriptions as Christmas presents while their sisters usually were stuck with <i> Seventeen </i>.
So to paraphrase, it's just as likely that girls lose interest in sports because of external pressures than because of some chromosomal flaw that degrades their sports interest over time.
Well, your original post was wrong. Sorry. Natonal High School Federation stats dating back to 1970 and ending in the 2000-2001 school year -Baseball only 5,000 off its high, which was set three years ago. The loss is almost statistically insignificant. (450K as opposed to 455K) - Cross country up - Golf almost double what it was 30 years ago and just a few K off its high from three years ago. Almost 40K more boys playing golf than 10 years ago. - Swimming is up about 10K from 10 years ago, but down about 10K from four years ago. That number for boys widely fluctuates. Scary jumps to be honest, which would scare me if I were involved at the collegiate level. - Tennis just shy of its all time high, which was set in 1992. It dropped a bunch, but gained it back. - Outdoor track is down, way down. I chalk that up to more diverse sports than anything else. Spring used to be just for track and baseball. Now you have a greater variety of sports for the kid who just went out for track for the hell of it. - Volleyball is off its historical highs, but has shown remarkable progress since it hit rock bottom in 85-86 with just 7K boys playing. Now they have gotten to just shy of 40K. - Wrestling is off its historical highs, but is better than 10 years ago and slowly growing back toward its peak. In fact, that is a key part of the NWCA suit. - In contrast, basketball participation for boys is way down. Soccer is at its highest, but other sports are near their peak or making progress. So why are those sports doing worse at the college level than soccer? Maybe it's because it's a myth that college soccer is in the sights when it comes to cutting programs at that level.
I make no such claims. Most things in life are a matter of degree. There is a difference between having a tad of bias and being entirely delusional. But please, don't waste your time here when you can give all the little girls on your block military toys, catcher's mitts, and pornographic pictures in the hopes that they'll grow up to be just like their brothers.
"The blame is shared..." Which pretty much sums up the situation. Look, Title IX itself isn't the problem (while some people disbelieve women's participation in sports). Title IX doesn't mandate quotas or proportionality (which is why it has withstood constitutionality tests), but most schools took that route because it was the easiest. I can point to three things that have caused the problem: l1) lawsuits by woman's groups, 2) the Clinton administration (sometimes overzealous) enforcement of the regulations, and 3) athletic department decisions in response to 1 and 2. And that response was to meet the proportionality test. At the time, the student population numbers meant that throwing in a woman's crew team and others = instant compliance. As the percentage of women increased, schools still stuck with proportionality. And it's often much easier to discontinue or demote a men's program then add a women's program. Especially if it's sports program that has a low profile (like wrestling). As the article noted, the Bush administration is studying the issue. But besides the quota issue, there isn't any other issue on the table.
The University can have clubs. For example, before Michigan's program gained "varsity" status, they played as a club.. but not against many varsity teams from other schools. There is even a national club-level tournament at the end of each year (which Michigan won in their final year before becoming a varsity-level program -- largely because many recruits transfered to Michigan knowing they would be varsity-level in a year's time).
My original post was not talking about high school sports, where participation is governed primarily by the number of schools that sponsor teams. Your data says very little about how many kids try out, or how many would be playing if their school provided the opportunity. Try looking at SGMA for better information.
I don't see where the Clinton administration figures into this. IIRC, proportionality and the Brown U. decision were both pre-Clinton. Were many subsequent verdicts the result of Clinton appointees?
You do a good job of using "injustice".. but there is certainly a difference between club and varsity soccer. $$. You pay to play club, and you have to play other club teams. Sometimes you're not even allowed to play on the varsity field, which is only for the girls varsity team. At GVSU, where I went, we could play our games on the varsity field, but only because the men's club coach was the woman's varsity coach, and even then, it would not be chalked up for our games.. we'd have to hope the chalk from the girl's game stayed.
Now this is getting silly. You have to spin it so that the number of kids playing sports isn't an accurate test of how popular sports are. College participation is one of the issues here. To say that the number of kids playing in high school isn't an accurate barometer is just inane. And you ignore the fact that soccer wasn't even among the top three sponsorship gainers this past year (the report was released Monday). Boy's sports keep rising. It's not just all soccer. Sorry, but I'm not paying SMGA to find out there are fewer 9-year-olds playing a sport. The high school numbers are out there and mythical "but if my school had it I'd play" isn't enough to change the facts I provided - most sports are at or near their historical highs of scholastic participants for boys.
Remember about 20 years ago when the tobacco companies would say things like "research shows that there is no causal link between smoking cigarettes and cancer." I'm reminded of these comments when hearing that "research shows that boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 9 and their parents are equally interested in sports participation." Perhaps it is true, perhaps it is not. The cause of these (now agreed, so it seems) differences in teenagers may be of academic, and especially, political interest, but your sacrastic "flaw" comment and the general tone of your position is quite revealing. One might wonder if reading a good book or studying music is actually a more worthwhile activity, especially for college students. I'll exit this conversation with one last point. Imagine if an ordinary high school boy had to face the reality that the vast majority of high school girls were substantially faster and stronger than him. That no matter how strong he got and no matter how much he trained, he could never compete with the top females. Just maybe his interest in sports would be a tad less. Sure, you could create boys teams for him to play on where he could be competitive, but it just possibly might not be the same.