Presented by PRO CARE LANDSCAPE SERVICES.
This Day In Sports…June 23, 1972:
Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, is signed into law by President Richard Nixon. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 Act did not prohibit sex discrimination against people at educational institutions—Title IX was intended to seal that gap. Title IX’s most prominent applications have come in the world of college athletics, requiring schools to offer an equal number of athletic scholarships to men and women, based on overall student enrollment (although interestingly enough, there was no specific mention of sports in the new law).
In 1972, only two percent of school athletic budgets were devoted to women, and athletic scholarships for women were almost nonexistent. The number has now indeed risen to almost 50 percent of the athletic scholarship dollars at Division I schools. Also, before Title IX, fewer than 32,000 women participated in collegiate athletics and fewer than 300,000 girls were in high school athletics. Just over half a century later, almost 250,000 women are playing college sports and more than 3.5 million girls play high school sports.
In order to meet Title IX requirements, schools must pass at least one of the “three prongs” of the law. “Proportionality” addresses the aforementioned balance of men’s and women’s participation in sports versus the institution’s enrollment numbers. “Expansion” allows schools to demonstrate that they are working to expand the number of programs for one gender if it is found to be underserved. And “Accommodating Interest” permits schools to show through research that their current athletic offerings are meeting the expressed interests of their students.
One key issue now is the effect of unrestrained NIL and revenue sharing with athletes at the highest level of college athletics. In order to free up more dollars to spend on players, schools may drop Olympic and non-revenue sports. Up to 75 percent of NIL and revenue sharing funds currently are going to football and men’s basketball. The fear is that athletic departments would maintain their Title IX compliance by eliminating an equal number of athletes in men’s and women’s sports. Stay tuned.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
