COLLEGE SPORTS COUNCIL

New Study of Gender Symmetric Teams Reveals Significant Disparity in Athletic Opportunities at Division I Level

37 Years After Passage of Title IX, the College Sports Council Calls on NCAA to Equalize Scholarship Limits

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The preliminary findings of a study of NCAA participation and scholarship data conducted by the College Sports Council (CSC) shows that in gender symmetrical sports, which have teams for both male and female athletes, women are accorded far more opportunities to compete and earn scholarships at NCAA Division 1 schools, the highest level of intercollegiate athletics.

“After nearly four decades after the passage of Title IX, it’s time to erase all institutional gender discrimination, and that includes bias against boys,” said CSC Chairman Eric Pearson.

“Current NCAA policies cultivate the disparity between male and female scholarship opportunities. In sports where there are symmetric teams the scholarship limits should be the same. The CSC calls on the NCAA to equalize scholarship limits in all sports which have teams for both male and female athletes.”

Later this Summer, the CSC will release a comprehensive study on athletic opportunity in NCAA Division I in “gender symmetric” sports where both men and women compete. Preliminary findings of this study include:

As a number of athletic departments prepare to cut some men’s teams to trim budgets, NCAA president Myles Brand has put out a call for schools to leave Title IX out of it. He has pre-emptively asked schools with shrinking athletic programs to blame the economic downturn for their problems—and not the federal law that bans sex discrimination at schools and requires institutions to maintain a commitment to women’s sports, USA Today reports.

“My expectation is that over the next year or two we are going to see more” cuts of men’s teams, Brand said this week 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.”

Brand mentioned James Madison and Rutgers , schools that cut teams in 2006-07, and Delaware , where cuts have been discussed, as examples.

“I think they need to be honest about it. Any cuts at this point in sports are certainly going to be tied to financial pressures,” said Brand, who urged schools not to drop any teams, men’s or women’s.

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James Naismith was born in Canada and graduated from McGill University and the Presbyterian seminary in Toronto. In 1890 he entered the YMCA college in Springfield, Massachusetts, and it was there that James Naismith invented basketball, using peach baskets as the goal.

Designed as something different that could be played indoors with a limited number of players, basketball was an immediate success with the Springfield students. By the turn of the century several schools in the east had begun intercollegiate competition. From Springfield, Naismith went to Denver where he acquired a medical degree which qualified him to join the University of Kansas faculty as a physical education professor and chaplain. He remained in Lawrence until his death in 1939.

Dr. Naismith regarded his invention of the game as just an episode in a long career devoted to the improvement of the physical condition of succeeding generations. He thought wrestling was better exercise than basketball and one reporter said he drew as much pleasure from watching gymnasts as he did from K.U. basketball. When one of his former students, Forrest “Phog” Allen, told him he was going to Baker University to coach basketball Naismith said, “Why, basketball is just a game to play. It doesn’t need a coach.”