Women and sports: 30 years of Title IX

What they're saying about Title IX...

When Jolene Nagel attended college in the early 1980s, she didn't just play on the school's volleyball team. She was a three-year starter, a two-year captain, and she led Edinboro University to three regional championships. She was also, in fact, the team's athletic trainer. Years later, at Cornell University with her first head coaching spot, the volleyball team traveled to games around the Northeast in a van that Nagel drove herself, all while teaching five classes.

Looking back on the experience, Duke's volleyball coach says it was neither unusual nor often questioned. Women's athletics received little funding for travel and equipment, let alone recruiting and scholarships. Committed female athletes like Nagel, acting essentially as volunteers, built programs around young women who likely played few sports in high school and who made up a small minority of female college students.

Women's athletics were seen, quite simply, as not very athletic, or even competitive.

"That was the way it was at the time," Nagel said. "That's what you did."

What has changed, of course, has been greater enforcement and attention to Title IX of the federal Education Amendments of 1972. Designed to bring gender parity to athletics in education, the law has been followed by a mushrooming of college women participating in athletics. At Duke and elsewhere, more women's teams, more scholarships and greater resources exist today than did 30 years ago. Nationwide, female participation in collegiate athletics has grown 400 percent, and at Duke, administrators say female athletes now have parity with their male counterparts. Clearly, supporters of the law have much to celebrate on this anniversary.

At the same time, however, Title IX has continued to be a point of major controversy. Many universities are cutting non-revenue male sports, female sports lag in attendance, and even some who generally support the law point to what they see as major flaws. Even Washington has taken notice. President George W. Bush appointed a Commission on Opportunity in Athletics in June to review the law, and his administration has supported lawsuits against Title IX.

Back at Duke, athletes and athletic officials are considering Title IX in the context that it was passed.

Then, in 1997, the National Women's Law Center drew widespread attention by filing a complaint against Duke and 24 other universities for not providing enough athletic scholarships to women. The complaint led the University to agree to a 1999 settlement with the OCR, including a promise to add 34 scholarships. Duke also agreed to submit twice-yearly reports to the education department on progress in gender equity.

"It's interesting how positive the administration of the University was back in the mid-70s, at least in what they said," Kennedy said. "But despite that language, not much changed through most of the 1980s.... Women's sports were like glorified clubs, and not very glorified."

Alleva notes that Duke has added 42 women's scholarships in the last five years, bringing the total to about 106. By comparison, men receive about 129. Women have the same number of sports as men, and 43 percent of athletes are female, just short of the 47 percent female make-up of the student body. And perhaps most significantly, female sports receive equal or higher funding compared to male sports--outside of basketball and football. The women's tennis team, for example, received $96,164 in 2000-2001, the latest year available, while Duke allocated the men's team $73,406.

Such gaps in favor of women exist in other sports as well--men's track, for example, receives two-thirds the funding of women's track--and are caused by the need to balance out money given to football and men's basketball. Those revenue-generating sports soak up much of the budget for men's sports, $1.6 million in 2000-2001, while the $786,677 budget for women's sports is spread more evenly. The solution, say some, is to change Title IX by excluding football or other wealthy men's sports from the picture, allowing more funding for things like wrestling or men's crew.

Jan Ogilvie, coach of the women's track team, said she strongly supports the spirit of Title IX, but that the law has hurt the men's track program, which is coach by her husband Norm.

"I am not a complete proponent of what Title IX has done. I see the opportunity that Title IX has given women, but I also see what it has done for men's sports that are non-revenue," she said. "I live in the same house with someone who runs a team of men in the same sport as I do, and despite the fact that there are more events in the men's sport, there are more scholarship opportunities for women in track."

Others say that the University should sacrifice more from football and men's basketball if it wants to create equality across other sports.

"The response that a lot of people use is that instead of trying to cut the pie in a different way, expand the pie," said women's basketball coach Gail Goestenkors. "Have everybody tighten up just a little bit more. With football maybe you don't stay in a hotel every night before a home game."

Perhaps no women's sport at Duke has benefited as much from Title IX as women's rowing. Duke added the program in 1999 to create greater parity, and the sport now ranks fourth in funds received, behind football and men's and women's basketball.

Some have criticized the choice of upgrading rowing over, for example, softball, noting that the sport is traditionally one of the least ethnically diverse. The sport also draws complaints because the men's team remains a club sport. While the athletic department provides the women's team with multiple scholarships and expensive boating equipment--totaling $124,519 in 2000-2001--the men's team seeks funding from alumni and student activity fees.

Robyn Horner, women's rowing coach, said she would like to see the men's team gain prominence, but not at the expense of the goal of Title IX. "No major change is gong to be easy. There's going to be some bumps along the way, but at the core Title IX is a good thing," Horner said.

Despite the tilting of the playing field in favor of women in some cases, female athletics still face inequities on several levels. Coaching pay for men's teams, for example, is nearing double what it is for women's teams, although Alleva said the average is distorted by the two highest-paid coaches, football coach Carl Franks and men's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski.

Women also tend to draw smaller crowds than men, even to the point where the women's basketball team departed for last year's Final Four with only a handful of well-wishers. Athletic officials note that many fans find women's sports simply less interesting, but some athletes think it just takes time.

"Our crowds aren't all that big, but I think they're growing," said junior Meghan Brown, a member of the volleyball team. "People tell me all the time that they didn't think volleyball could be so exciting."

Whether current criticisms of Title IX meet with reform will likely have to wait until January 2003, when Bush's commission is scheduled to issue its report. Its recommendations will almost certainly stir more controversy, but to coaches like Nagel and Goestenkors, who once had to drive their teams around in vans, Title IX will always evoke memories of struggling women's programs.

"We had to constantly prove ourselves and prove ourselves, and now these young girls are really reaping the benefits," Goestenkors said. "They don't understand what it took to get to this point. We still have a long way to go, but I want to help them appreciate what's come before them."

Paul Doran contributed to this story.