Title IX continues to be in the spotlight when it comes to college sports. Recently, NCAA president Myles Brand said that he anticipated that colleges will have to cut athletic teams in the near future due to the state of the economy, and he urged schools not to scapegoat Title IX as the reason for the cuts.
“My expectation is that over the next year or two we are going to see more” cuts of men’s teams, Brand said Wednesday in a telephone interview, “and so I am trying, frankly, to pre-empt the argument against Title IX, an unfair argument, I believe, and dissuade universities from going public with this approach.”
It’s encouraging that Mr. Brand is preemptively striking any blame on Title IX for reductions in college sports programs.
And in other Title IX news, this New York Times article reports that, at many schools, players whose teams were cut by their institution are re-forming at the club level and finding that they enjoy it. One interesting remark came from Jim Giunta, executive director of the National Collegiate Wrestling Association. In discussing the teams’ direction after being cut by colleges and universities, he said, “[S]ome of us have come to realize that institutions have been using Title IX as a cop-out. The real reason they are cutting sports is to save money.”
As we said in an earlier post on this subject, Mr. Giunta’s statement simply reinforces what feminists and supporters of women’s sports have been saying for years: usually, it’s the cost of running athletics programs, particularly for larger and more expensive sports, that hurts the chances of other, smaller sports programs succeeding, not offering women equal opportunity to participate in athletics.
Both articles found via the Title IX blog, an excellent resource for anyone interested in Title IX issues.
