Posted on 10/10/2007 8:17:51 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
WHEN Title IX was passed 35 years ago, high school athletics were an overwhelmingly male pastime. The boys played sports and the girls cheered them on from the sidelines.
In the years since, Title IX has radically changed the local high school sports landscape. Once the law banned schools from engaging in gender discrimination in sports, girls flocked by the millions to the fields, courts and swimming pools to join their school teams. Today, a high school without opportunities for girls to play sports is almost unimaginable.
Yet as much as things have changed, much has remained the same. Though schools added competitive girls' sports to their athletic programs years ago in response to Title IX, they still frequently treat the boys' teams better than the girls' teams. And in the area of special treatment, football reigns supreme.
Because of the tradition and importance placed on high school football, school administrators routinely turn a blind eye toward the special treatment given to the football team. Football teams frequently have their own special locker room and weight room. Football teams have a proportionally higher number of coaches than other teams. Most football teams have booster clubs that raise money to provide special benefits for only the football team.
Title IX is not just about opportunities to play - it also mandates that girls and boys compete on a level playing field. Title IX requires schools to provide equal athletic benefits to male and female athletes. That means that athletic facilities, uniforms, equipment, practice and game times, publicity, coaching and transportation must be of equal quality and quantity for girls and boys teams.
While the football team has its privileges, invariably, the girls' teams do not. Instead, girls' sports are typically provided with fewer benefits than boys' basketball and baseball, and are often treated worse than other boys' sports as well.
The main rationalization for the special treatment provided to the football team seems to be tradition - that it has always been done that way. Yet, no school administrator would argue with a straight face that tradition was a sufficient justification for providing the boys with calculators and the girls with slide rules to use for their calculus homework.
At many schools, football is more than just a sport - it defines the school's culture. By eliminating the football team's special privileges and instead providing equal athletic benefits to boys and girls teams, schools will do more than just comply with Title IX. They will stand for a new sports tradition - equality for all.
www.cwlc.org
Vicky L. Barker is the legal director of the California Women's Law Center. She has successfully litigated Title IX cases throughout California.
Some people think that they can make boys and girls biologically identical through wishful thinking. Title IX is the legal extension of that thinking.
Put in even simpler terms FOOTBALL MAKES A HIGH SCHOOL MONEY!!
Does this mean more guys will be able to play Girls’ Field Hockey? ;)
Should be called Entitlement IX.
Correctomundo! In most schools, football is the only one that actually makes a profit and helps to pay for the other programs.
Forget Watergate, Nixon should have been impeached for signing that monstrosity.
I’m not so sure about that. I was always under the impression that a football team is one of the most costly line items in any high school athletic budget — mainly because of the equipment requirements, the size of the roster (especially in terms of travel costs), liability insurance, etc.
One impact of Title IX, especially at the college level, has been the elimination of men’s sports so the numbers of male and female athletes are equal. It’s especially true in non-revenue sports.
It was intended for Title IX to promote women’s athletics, but like so much Federal legislation, it hasn’t exactly done what was intended.
It’s a simple fact - successful football programs are money-makers, sometimes paying the freight for most other sports at a school. So they need to stay.
“The main rationalization for the special treatment provided to the football team seems to be tradition”
Morons, I’m surrounded by morons.
Football makes money. Period. End of story. Never get in the way of the money train.
It was for (some of) the children.
Who wants to bet that Vicky Barker never dated the high school quarterback and still doesn’t date men???
It actually is quite costly, but usually it brings in more then enough to support itself. They were going to eliminate it at my alma mater and figured out they’d lose rougly $5000 a year, after cost of the team and decided against it. If the team makes the play-offs, they usually make a bit more.
What it did was take the money away from sports. My high school provided us uniforms for the sports we played.
Now we are paying for the children’s school uniforms made even more expensive as the school does a deal with Nike so the we have to buy the uniforms with their logo on them. We have to pay for transportation to away games. You cannot drive your child there they must travel with the team on a bus. We also had to buy balls, nets, practice uniforms.
We parent is now funding the schools sports as opposed to previously, the taxes you already paid for did.
Are there pucks involved?
I've long advocated the separation of sports and academics at the high school level. Athletic teams could still be affiliated with schools in some way, but let the participants pay all of the costs associated with those sports.
I don't see a problem; the lesbians need to stop shrieking.
BS!
Typically, football raises more admission revenue than any other sport, basketball second.
If girl's volleyball produced the same revenues I'd bet they'd get their own locker room too.
That would be hard to do, I mean I come from a very poor family. We honestly struggled to pay the $40 yearly fee to play sports at all. My mom actually had to save up for it like she was buying a new big screen TV.
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