What Title IX Really Means (Every Coach Should Read This)

[PV2020]

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL31709.pdf

Summary:

An institution may be compliant by meeting one of three criteria.

1) Equal proportions of men and women athletes in comparison to the institution they are at. This means if an institution is 50% female and 50% male, the athletic department should look somewhat like that with slight variations to allow for yearly change.

2) An Institution may meet Title IX compliance by showing a history of effort towards trying to increase athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex. So if an institution adds a women's team or builds new facilities for their women every few years to show they are working towards making them equal to the men, they will be compliant.

3) If an institution meets all the athletic interest of its student bodies underrepresented sex they will be in compliant. So if an institution can somehow prove that no more women at their institution (or in their geographic area) want to participate in athletics, then they will be complaint.

What does this actually mean?

Equal proportions are the easiest way to be compliant and usually why people see men's sports go. It is the cheapest way to be compliant and is pretty much a safety net. However many law makers have stressed that just cutting men's programs should not be the approach taken by athletic departments.

Number 3 is very hard to prove and takes a lot of work on the institutions part to show that no more women want to play sports than they have. I have seen a few institutions argue and get away with it that say because all of their women's sports are fully funded they are in compliance because they are doing all that they can do for the sports they have.

Number 2 is the most common but sometimes still comes back and bites men's programs in the butt. This is not because the women's programs are to blame but the mindset of the institutions. Schools just need to constantly show progress towards expanding their female athletics. This can be achieved in a wide range of ways from showing increased participation, new teams, bigger budgets, etc. But how this negatively affects men's sports are two ways. The first is if a school is in a financial crisis and can not afford to make progress towards their women's athletics, the only thing they can do is cut men's programs to generate money to add women's teams. The other way that negatively affects men's teams is when an athletic department is constantly expanding their 'revenue' sports over expanding their women's athletic programs. AN example of this is an institution that needs to show better progress towards expanding their women's opportunities, but instead uses their excess funds to build a $20 Million dollar football facility. Now they realize they are out of money to add a women's team, so they will cut a large budgeted men's team like track in order to add a women's lacrosse team. This is less the women's sports fault and more poor planning on the side of the athletic program. They did not choose women's lacrosse over track, they chose a new football facility over track.

What College track coaches should keep in mind:

If your school has a football team it is nearly impossible for you to be compliant through equal proportions (#1). That means when your compliance department tells you you need more women than men to stay Title IX compliant, they are not being 100% honest. What it typically means is we need to show an increase in the women's budget and playing opportunities. They could do this without limiting the number of men as long as they do not cost the school much money. A suggestion I have seen in the past that appears unfair but is better than not being on the team at all is not giving walk-ons the same amount of equipment as everyone else. This allows the men's team to have more members but shows your compliance office you are working to keep the cost of men's track down.