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NCAA sets tough new standards for athletes

By Ted Hutton
Staff Writer
Posted January 12 2003

Before college coaches headed out on recent recruiting trips, they were briefed by their school's athletic academic advisors regarding academic standards adopted by the NCAA in October.

What they heard left many in shock.

"This is as big as Title IX," Florida Atlantic women's basketball coach Chancellor Dugan said, referring to the landmark legislation that mandated equal opportunities for female athletes. "This affects everyone."

The stringent new standards are aimed at increasing graduation rates among student-athletes. Although they will make more high school seniors eligible for scholarships, they will also make it tougher to keep scholarships once the student-athletes start college.

"This could be a real humdinger," Florida State Associate Athletic Director Bob Minnix said. "I think a lot of people have been caught by surprise."

"The transition of this is going to be very bumpy," said Mike Allen, the FAU athletic department's academic advisor. "This isn't a small change."

The key changes mandated by the NCAA are an increase from 13 to 14 in the core courses required for high school athletes and a drop in the minimum test-score requirements.

Athletes already in college face a host of increased requirements designed to keep them on track to graduate, including passing at least six hours per semester, declaring a major early in their academic careers and taking more classes toward that degree.

In the past, such changes in eligibility have caused a lot of debate. But this round of changes slid by with barely a notice.

"This legislation had the overwhelming support of college presidents," said Jamie McCloskey, associate athletic director for compliance at Florida. "So at some point, you just have to get on board."

That doesn't mean there won't be controversy once the regulations are applied.

"Who knows? They might go back later on and junk all of this," Minnix said. "There's never been anything as sweeping as this."

PRESIDENTIAL CONTROL

Roots of the recent changes adopted by the NCAA can be found in the initial Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics report issued in 1991.

The commission was responding to what was considered a crisis in college sports, as a flood of television and sponsor money had prompted several schools to violate NCAA rules in a quest to win titles.

The commission came up with a host of recommendations, but the primary focus was for college presidents to regain control of athletics at their schools.

Commissioners found that athletic directors and athletic conference commissioners were making most of the important decisions, and they believed that had helped create a culture in which winning had taken precedence over academic achievement.

The commission also recommended a renewed emphasis on academics, particularly increasing graduation rates.

Some progress was made after the Knight Commission's report, but the most significant change did not happen until 1997, when the NCAA restructured its legislative organization.

Each division was given more autonomy, and Division I took that a step further, getting away from each school having a vote and appointing a board of directors composed of 18 college presidents. That board approved the new academic requirements.

"You can point to these reforms as the first byproduct of that restructuring," said Kevin Lennon, who as vice president of membership services for the NCAA helped draft the new regulations. "The presidents are clearly in control, and this is the most sweeping legislation in the last 20 years."

FLORIDA LAGS

A month before the NCAA Board of Directors adopted the new rules, the NCAA issued its annual graduation rates report.

The overall news was good, as the graduation rate for student-athletes reached 60 percent for the first time and was above the 58 percent graduation rate for all students.

"This is very encouraging," said Francis Lawrence, president of Rutgers and chair of the Division I Task Force on Academic Reform. "This is the first graduating class of student-athletes who were required to have 13 high school core courses. The results show that we are right on track."

The last time the NCAA had dealt with initial-eligibility standards was when it hiked the core-course requirement from 11 to 13 for the class entering in 1995-96. Core courses are college preparatory classes such as math, science and English.

Florida's 11 Division I colleges did not fare well in the report. Only two, Stetson and Florida State, had student-athlete graduation rates at or above the national average.

Florida International ranked last in the state, with a rate of 33 percent.

But seven had a higher graduation rate among athletes than among the overall student population. That ranged from a 13 percent difference at FAU to 3 percent at FSU.

Of the four that graduated a lower percentage of athletes than overall students, Florida, which had the highest rate of graduation among all students with 70 percent, had a student-athlete graduation rate of 51 percent, a 19 percent gap, the biggest in the state.

Nationally, football (52 percent) and men's basketball (43 percent) continued to lag.

There are no penalties or incentives attached to graduation rates, just the scrutiny that comes when the rates are released.

No sport has been getting more negative publicity than men's basketball, as many of the top programs consistently have had no players graduating, such as Oklahoma's recent 0 percent graduation rate.

"There is no question that the bar has been raised," said Jim Haney, the National Association of Basketball Coaches' executive director. "We are advocates for graduation."

Haney said many coaches were concerned when they first heard about the new rules, but when the NABC did its own research it found that many players were already meeting the new requirements.

"Many people are prophesizing a doomsday," Haney said. "I'm not encouraging that. When one has knowledge of what has to be accomplished and it is reasonable, one can work toward it."

WHAT'S AHEAD

While athletic departments and academic advisors are still poring over the new regulations, they have alerted coaches who are recruiting, since the new regulations affect the class of 2003-04.

"It's going to force coaches to make more difficult judgments," said FAU's Allen, since the incoming freshmen will have to meet the higher standards.

Said FSU's Minnix: "We've told our coaches they should look at the GPA and start looking at younger kids, in terms of trying to direct them, making sure they have their core courses."

"It's going to require an attitude change in how we've functioned in the past," Haney said. "Coaches need to know that if you are going to bring in a student-athlete who has no interest in getting a degree, the likelihood of him stumbling is greater."

UF President Charles Young supports the new standards and said it is up to his colleagues to continue make academics a priority.

"We would be better off if everyone would just agree not to admit any student who is not capable of graduating with a level of support that is reasonable and not different from support to other students in similar situations," Young said.

Young said the new rules mean coaches need to pay closer attention to students' abilities to achieve in the classroom.

And that presents this dilemma for coaches: Do you recruit someone who is a good student and hope you can coach him or her into being a better athlete, or do you bring in a good athlete and hope you can teach him or her into being a better student?

"It's going to be harder to keep the sub-par student in school who is a good athlete," Minnix said. "So are we going to be going to end up with subpar athletes who are good students?"

That is just one of the questions that won't be answered until the new rules are implemented.

"Will it have a chilling effect on minorities?" Minnix said. "Are we now looking for kids from private schools? What opportunities will be there for athletes that are forced out of school? The fallout will be interesting."

Minnix, a former football player at Notre Dame, was director of enforcement at the NCAA for 20 years before taking the job at FSU. He is also president of the Black College Association's Board of Directors.

"When this kicks in this fall, you're going to say, `Why is everybody crying about it now?'" Minnix said. "But the horse is out of the barn. The debate is over."

Minnix's fear is that a lot of student-athletes will struggle with the new requirements, lose their eligibility and drop out.

"There may be a mutiny among coaches and athletic directors, and the presidents might want to take a step back and ask, `Are we trying to eliminate people?'"

Minnix and others involved in academic support for athletes are gearing up for the expected demands the new rules will put on them.

"These rules significantly increase the need for summer school," FAU's Allen said. "Across the nation, academic support will need to increase."

Haney said his group told the NCAA that two things had to happen if the new rules were approved.

"One is there must be adequate academic advising and support at every campus, and secondly, that kids are going to have to look at going year-round and that the institution would in fact pay for those kids to go to summer school."

Sidney Green, the FAU men's basketball coach, said academic support is his major concern. Green scheduled a lot of road games with monetary guarantees this season to generate money for his team, since there has not been money in the past for his players to attend summer school.

"I'm afraid this will benefit the elite schools," Green said, referring to schools such as Florida and FSU, which have much bigger athletic budgets and large athletic academic support staffs already in place.

"They can use that to recruit by comparing what they have to what we have," Green said.

While Minnix, Green and others are wondering about the effect of the new rules, more are in the pipeline.

The NCAA's Lennon said the legislation passed in October is the first of a four-phase package being considered by the NCAA Board of Directors.

Next up is the establishment of an annual academic progress rate. This will provide a snapshot of where each athlete is in regard to progress toward a degree.

This will replace the graduation rate as the key academic measurement and increase accountability of coaches, since it will track each student-athlete on a semester-by-semester basis.

That would be followed by establishment of incentives and penalties to encourage higher graduation rates.

The final piece would be to re-evaluate the time demands on student-athletes, with the possibility of cutting back on the amount of hours students are allowed to spend practicing and playing.

Lennon said the NCAA would study the effects of the rules while it moved ahead on the four-phase agenda.

"We will always keep the biggest goal in mind," Lennon said, "which is graduating more of our young men and women."

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FERRELL: New day looms for NCAA

Posted on January 12, 2003

f college sports is big business, then the university presidents are the CEOs.

At least that's the way new NCAA President Myles Brand views things.

Brand was known more for firing Bob Knight as Indiana University's men's basketball coach than just about anything he had done in his academic career. Now, the former Indiana University president has ascended to the top of the NCAA.

And his ascension is proof the university presidents are trying to take more control of college sports.

"Dr. Brand is a former university president and one of the things the Knight Commission has brought up time and again is the need for presidential leadership, exercising authority over athletics through the presidents," Northwestern State University President Randy Webb said. "I think that will be something that will continue to get a great deal of attention."

Webb is an example of the good that can come from presidential leadership.

He is a member of the NCAA's executive committee and management council. He has supported his school's athletic programs without being a meddler. His school's athletics programs have been successful across the board.

Not every school is so fortunate.

For example, University of Kentucky President Lee Todd admitted that he knew nothing of new football coach Rich Brooks' previous NCAA violations while the coach was at Oregon.

That is a tad out-of-touch. And that's what makes the thought of more presidential involvement scary.

Not everyone is as in touch with athletics as Webb.

Yet the NCAA is moving forward toward more presidential control.

Brand mapped out some of his objectives on Saturday in Anaheim, Calif. He said his primary goal is completing the academic reform movement.

Brand has presidential support, including Webb.

"That is paramount with me too," Webb said. "We strive very hard to stress the student-athlete side of it. We've adopted some academic reforms. We'll be talking more about academic reforms and how that ties into retention and graduation rates and maybe also incentives and disincentives for programs that don't meet those standards."

Already there have been new academic standards approved for incoming athletes next year. Those standards have been made a little more lenient, with academic progress standards becoming more rigorous.

Brand also wants to find ways to implement Title IX without taking away from men's sports opportunities.

"I think that's the key," Webb said. "I think that's what people would like to do if possible. Certainly people are going to remain strong in support of Title IX in regards to opportunities for women."

If Brand is successful, then there will be a new day in college athletics - a day when control will be in the hands of the presidents.

"I think we'll continue to move in that direction," Webb said.

It will be a move into the unknown.

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NCAA official: Title IX changes could hurt female athletes

January 11, 2003 CNN/Sports Illustrated.

ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) -- An NCAA official believes changes in Title IX legislation could prove costly for female athletes.

Vice president Judith Sweet told a seminar at the NCAA's annual convention Saturday that women could lose $75 million to $188 million in scholarship money and nearly 1.5 million female athletes in high school and college could be left on the sideline.

Sweet based her numbers on what she called a "worst-case" scenario of proposals being considered by a federal commission, which is reviewing Title IX, the 1972 gender equity legislation that outlawed sex discrimination in any school that received federal funds.

"I believe they are trying to make things better," Sweet told an audience of college administrators. "But I also believe that in trying to make things better, it could impact the number of participants in a way that was not meant by Title IX."

The commission, formed last year by Education Secretary Rod Paige, is reviewing whether there needs to be a change in the way Title IX is applied.

The National Wrestling Coaches Association filed a lawsuit against the Education Department, claiming Title IX doesn't fulfill its intent if it's used to restrict men's opportunities and not increase women's.

The commission has held several open forums across the country, some of which Sweet has attended. A final proposal is expected by Feb. 28.

Sweet insisted schools are not required to use "strict proportionality" rules, which would create a direct correlation between the enrollment of men and women and scholarship distribution. Sweet's calculations, however, used the basis of a proposal that would split the scholarships 50-50 and then included a variance of 7 percent, which an NCAA official said was discussed by the commission.

Under those guidelines, Sweet said there was the "potential" of losing 31,000 to 78,000 participants in women's college sports, and another 578,000 to 1.4 million in high school.

There was no indication Saturday of what recommendation the commission would make, even though one of the commission members, Stanford athletic director Ted Leland, also spoke during the 75-minute session, which was filled with statistical data.

"One of our obligations is to figure out these numbers," Leland said. "This is such a complicated situation, where there's such a diversity of interests, it's hard to put it all together."

The meeting was not contentious, and none of those in attendance spoke out publicly against Title IX.

One athletic director, Jim Nelson of Suffolk University, a Division III institution in Boston, wondered how football would be taken into consideration by the committee, since there is no women's equivalent. Leland said only that the topic had been discussed.

Dick Aronson, executive director of the College Gymnastics Association, who has signed onto the wrestling coaches' lawsuit, questioned whether college sports' largest governing body should even take a position on Title IX, suggesting it should stay neutral.

"I'm perplexed because I wondered if an NCAA vice president should be giving her opinions," he said. "Whether that reflects the standard of the NCAA, I'm not sure."

Sweet said she understood the concern about the cuts in men's teams, the most prevalent of which have come in wrestling, gymnastics, swimming and track and field. She attributed the decline to institutional decisions, not Title IX.

"The reality is that loss is painful," she said. "Whether it's taken away from you or whether you never had the opportunity in the first place."

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Proponents Worry That Title IX Will Be Eroded

Run Date: 01/12/03
By Allison Stevens
WEnews correspondent

Women's rights advocates step up their efforts to preserve the landmark federal law now under scrutiny. Title IX requires schools that receive federal funds to provide equal treatment to women and men--including opportunities to play sports.
WASHINGTON (WOMENSENEWS)--Women's rights advocates are planning a full-scale attack on expected attempts by a presidential commission to weaken Title IX, the 30-year-old civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against girls and women in education and school sports.

A coalition of women's rights advocates met late last year in Washington to plan protests when the panel meets in the next few weeks to vote on proposals that they say would roll back the clock on a law that has revolutionized women's sports. The coalition has already held a telephone news conference to assail the panel's proposed modifications to the existing law and is planning a larger news conference on Jan. 23. They also are planning activities to coincide with the 17th annual National Women and Girls in Sports Day, which falls on Feb. 5.

The commission is expected to release its final proposal in mid- to late-February. Many college and university athletic directors and others contend that athletic departments at schools around the country have seen their budgets stretched too thin in an attempt to create equal opportunity even when there isn't always equal demand for sporting opportunities. As a result, they say, colleges have been forced to cut hundreds of men's teams, especially lower-profile ones like wrestling and gymnastics.

Proponents of Title IX are expecting that the commission will issue recommendations that will reflect changes sought by the law's critics.

"This will have devastating consequences for the rights of women and girls across the nation, will conflict with basic requirements of Title IX, and will weaken the fundamental principles that underlie our nation's civil rights laws," said Jacqueline Woods, executive director of the American Association of University Women.

"Instead of approving the radical and destructive proposals currently on the table, the commission should, as a whole, reaffirm that current Title IX policies are essential to enforcement of equal opportunity and must be maintained and more strongly enforced," Woods said.

Commission Says Criticisms are Speculative
A spokeswoman for the Department of Education, however, called the complaints purely "speculative" and "completely bogus" and insisted that the commission's intent is to strengthen--not undermine--the enforcement of the existing civil rights law.

"They've done nothing but attack the administration and the commission from day one," said department spokeswoman Susan Aspey. "We think that what is on the table are reasonable findings and recommendations that come from disparate academic backgrounds. They're talking about something that hasn't even happened."

Education Secretary Rod Paige, a former football coach at Texas Southern University, convened the Commission on Athletic Opportunity last June to measure the effectiveness of the law.

Since then, the panel has held several meetings where members have discussed a number of revisions to a law that critics say constitutes reverse discrimination and diminishes opportunities for men.

At Issue Is Controversial Proportionality Test
The committee has discussed a number of changes to the existing law, the most controversial of which would change the principle of proportionality, the first of a three-part test used to measure whether a school meets Title IX requirements.

But some fear that weakening the proportionality test, which requires schools to match the percentage of female athletes to the percentage of their female students, would enable schools to significantly cut back on the number of programs offered to female athletes.

The two other tests are not under scrutiny. The second says a school must demonstrate that it has a history and continuing practice of expanding opportunities for women. The third requires schools to show they are fully and effectively meeting their female students' interests and abilities, even if they do not provide equal sports opportunities.

Women's rights advocates say there is no reason to change the proportionality test because Title IX does not require schools to set aside a mandatory number of slots for female athletes, nor does it require schools to cut men's teams. Moreover, they note that a school must pass only one part of the test to comply with the law.

"The attacks on the three-part test are premised on the notion that women are inherently less interested in sports than men," argued Jocelyn Samuels, vice president and director of educational opportunities at the National Women’s Law Center. "This is the kind of stereotyping that we should never accept as a basis for government decision-making."

Panel's Critics Take Issue with Its Existence
The commission has also considered a number of other controversial recommendations. These include enabling schools to distribute a survey to determine levels of interest among female students and adjust sports opportunities accordingly; a proposal to determine proportionality based on the number of slots on a given team rather than by the number of participants; and a proposal to eliminate requirements calling for disclosure of the number of opportunities available to girls and women.

Critics of the panel take issue with all of these possible changes to the law. But they also contest the panel's very existence, contending that the Bush administration established it specifically in response to backers of men's sports who assert that quotas have hurt men's sports teams.

They also claim that the committee is unfairly stacked against women athletes because two-thirds of its members hail from schools' Division I-A sports teams. Those schools tend to place greater emphasis and expend more resources on their all-male football teams than do second- and third-tier schools. The panel, critics say, invited twice as many Title IX critics than supporters to speak before the commissioners in their four public meetings.

"With lack of equal representation, biased questions, clear manipulation of the process, among other things, it is quite evident that the commission is being used as a vehicle to push forth a pre-determined agenda to weaken Title IX," said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a law professor and the former president of the Women's Sports Foundation. "The system is being rigged to provide greater advantage to an already advantaged population. This is both wrong and un-American."

The Education Department's Aspey disputed this claim as well, contending that the 15 committee members come from disparate backgrounds. "Reasonable people can debate," she said, "but they're taking it to a new level when they start attacking the committee's ethics. Every commissioner will tell you if they thought things were rigged they wouldn't be serving. They're attacking the integrity of the commissioners as well as the commission."

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Proportionality in athletic programs, a social construct, should be banished

ROBYN E. BLUMNER © St. Petersburg Times
published January 12, 2003

Thanks to the way it has been enforced, Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, including college athletics programs, has turned college athletic directors into bean-counters. Rather than worry about quality of their programs, they are busy making sure they have enough players with the right chromosomes.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is a prime example. After a complaint was filed against the university in the 1980s, charging that women athletes at the school were being short-changed, bureaucrats from the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education swooped in and aggressively nit-picked the UW program. When the school in 2000 had successfully recruited enough female athletes onto sports teams, and pared down enough men's sports, so the ratio of male to female athletes was nearly even -- there were 425 women athletes and 429 men -- federal regulators said the effort still fell short. Because the student body was 53 percent female, said OCR in a letter, the school would have to add another 25 women in order to be viewed as in compliance with the law.

Steve Malchow, assistant athletic director for communications at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in order to keep the regulators happy, his department is deeply involved in "roster management." "We are constantly trying to manipulate numbers to reach equity," Malchow said. The school does so by keeping women's teams as full as possible and turning away men looking for walk-on opportunities.

It is this kind of experience repeated in athletic programs at colleges and universities around the country that has led to a call for change. In the hands of zealous government bureaucrats, Title IX has been transformed from a needed tool to open opportunities for women in college athletics to a rigidly applied formula that uses the radical feminist pipe dream that men and women have an equal interest in athletic competition, as the basis for law.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. According to Department of Education guidelines, there are three ways to demonstrate compliance with Title IX: Show that the number of female athletes is substantially proportional to the number of female undergraduates; that athletic opportunities for women are being steadily increased over time; or that the school is meeting the athletic interests of female students.

But schools have learned through hard experience that meeting the proportionality test is the only "safe harbor," and, according to Jessica Gavora, a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Justice and author of the book, Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX, the courts have supported this view.

Gavora points to a 1996 case involving Brown University which was sued after it attempted to demote two womens' varsity teams, the gymnastics and volleyball teams, from university-funded to donor-funded. It didn't matter that the school also demoted the men's water polo and golf teams. According to Gavora, when sued, Brown's women's athletics program was the second most generous in the country. Yet, the university still lost because it had a 13 percent disparity between female athletes and female student enrollment. Gavora said the ruling broadcast that "proportionality is the only means of compliance with Title IX."

While girls' interest in sports has exploded, partly thanks to the impact of Title IX, girls are still not as interested as are boys. These lingering gender tendencies may be due to biology or culture, but either way they are real. To say women must be represented on sports teams relative to their presence in the student body, is social engineering.

For many schools, reaching proportionality has meant dumping men's sports (though clearly some of the thinning has been done for budgetary reasons.) The nonrevenue generating sports where there are no corresponding women's teams have been hit hardest. According to the National Wrestling Coaches Association, hundreds of wrestling teams have been cut as a direct and indirect application of Title IX. Out of desperation, the association has sued the Department of Education alleging that the way the law is being enforced discriminates against males. The federal lawsuit includes the experiences of wrestling programs such as that at Marquette University, where the wrestling team was disbanded even though it was fully funded by private donations. The team's continued existence would have thrown the university's Title IX numbers out of whack.

The problem for men's shrinking opportunities is exacerbated because OCR counts only actual participants. If a women's basketball team offers 14 roster spots but only 11 women join, the school only gets credit for the players. So, for every women who is too uninterested in sports to show up, another motivated male athlete has to be shown the door.

Let's hope some sanity will come soon. A special commission constituted by Secretary of Education Roderick Paige has been studying this problem since June. Its recommendations are expected by the end of next month. Hopefully one of them will be to banish proportionality as a test of Title IX compliance. Then, universities would no longer have to worry about being penalized for having an extra man on the field.

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Recommendations for Title IX Law Stir Controversy

Maura Jane Farrelly
Washington
11 Jan 2003

When it comes to men's football, or "soccer" as Americans call it, the United States has struggled to earn a respectable international reputation. But change the genders, and America is an undisputed world leader - winning the first ever Women's World Cup in 1991 - and taking home the Gold in 1996, when women's soccer made its debut as an Olympic sport.

Indeed, when it comes to women's athletics in general, the United States is far ahead of many countries and experts say it's because of a landmark piece of civil rights legislation enacted in 1972. "Title IX" requires all high schools and colleges to provide equal athletic opportunities to boys and girls. But at the end of January, the U.S. Department of Education plans to recommend some changes to Title IX. It's a Thursday night at the McDonough Gymnasium on Georgetown University's campus in Washington, D.C. About 200 fans have gathered to see Georgetown's women's basketball team take on their archrivals from George Washington University.

"Three points for Mary Lisicky" the announcer said.

The Georgtown "Hoyas", as they're called, have a record of 7-1 so far this season. They're considered a tough team to beat and all the players bring a good deal of experience to the court. Most learned how to play basketball while they were in high school, but starting player Sarah Jenkins said she might not have ever played the sport seriously, if her high school had offered a broader array of choices to its girls.

"I got into basketball, because I wanted to play soccer," Ms. Jenkins said. "And at the time, there weren't any girls' soccer teams. So I had to pick something else. And I just chose basketball, and I found it was something I liked to do, so I stuck with it."

Title IX was enacted more than 30 years ago, but many women athletes who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s will tell you their high schools and colleges didn't offer equal opportunities to boys and girls. Sometimes this was because the schools simply ignored the law. But often, it was because there's been some disagreement about what it means to offer "opportunities" that are "equal." Title IX doesn't say a school has to have a girls' soccer team simply because it has a boys' soccer team.

Instead, "equal opportunity" is defined in three different ways, and a school can adopt any one of them as its definition. The first two ways involve having a "history" of promoting girls' sports and "meeting the interests" of it's female athletes. But these two definitions are vague and not easily quantified, and schools that have adopted them have been sued by girls who feel they've been denied athletic opportunities.

So attorneys have begun to advise schools to comply with Title IX by adopting the third definition. It's known as "proportionality," and it says a school is providing equal athletic opportunities to its students, if the percentage of male and female athletes mirrors the percentage of male and female students.

"So if 55 percent of the full-time enrollment at a university is women, then 55 percent of the athletes must be women," said Mr. Moyer.

Mike Moyer is executive director of the National Wrestling Coaches Association. He and his colleagues are suing the U.S. Department of Education, because they say the proportionality component of Title IX has led to discrimination against male athletes.

Women make up a majority of the student body at many universities. But Mike Moyer said girls aren't as interested in sports as boys are, and many don't join teams, even when those teams are available. As a result, Mr. Moyer said a number of schools, such as Marquette University in Illinois, have had to reduce the number of male athletes, in order to keep the male to female ratio in line with enrollment.

"Marquette had an inter-collegiate wrestling program that was almost entirely self funded for six years. And in the spring of 2001, they were forced to discontinue their wrestling program, because they could not meet the proportionality prong of Title IX" he said. "It did nothing to benefit women on that campus, and those boys were very clearly discriminated against, just because they were boys. It flies completely in the face of what Title IX stands for."

The Wrestling Coaches Association wants the Department of Education to get rid of the proportionality component of Title IX. The group's lawsuit has provoked a formal review of the law, and the government says at the end of January, a special commission will recommend some changes. One modification being considered would allow the ratio of male to female athletes to vary by as much seven percent from the ratio of male to female students. But this proposal is totally unacceptable to Jamie Fastow of the American Association of University Women.

"What is that going to lead to? What's going to be the next civil rights law that's gutted? Which is basically what we're talking about doing to athletics participation," she said. "You know, having a variance on proportionality, which would say it's OK for you to discriminate by seven percent."

Jamie Fastow denies Mike Moyer's assertion that girls are less interested in sports than boys, and says whenever a college or high school has fielded a girls team in any sport, there's been no shortage of players. Ms. Fastow says schools wouldn't have to eliminate wrestling programs if they just expanded their athletic programs for women. But that costs money, and Jamie Fastow says many universities simply aren't willing to divert funds from their large men's basketball and football programs to do that. Instead, they eliminate men's programs that are slightly less popular.

"It's important to remember that those are budgetary decisions schools are making. They actually have nothing to do with proportionality. Take Marquette University," Ms. Fastow said, "that's something the wrestlers use a lot. They had a wrestling team cut. They have a huge basketball program, and so it's really unfair to blame the girls for budgetary decisions that schools make."

Jamie Fastow says Title IX is fine the way it is, and she worries that if it's changed, hundreds of women's sports programs could be cut. She says that could have all sorts of unintended consequences, since studies show girls who play sports are far more likely to go to college, and far less likely to do drugs, or become pregnant as teenagers.

Meanwhile, Mike Moyer of the Wrestling Coaches Association says he's encouraged by the Department of Education's review of the law, but says if proportionality isn't eliminated, his group intends to follow through with their lawsuit.