Left Behind

By WELCH SUGGS

Back women don't row. Or play soccer or lacrosse. Or compete in equestrian sports. They play basketball,or they run track. Or they don't do sports at all.

That's the stereotype, and even though she breaks it herself, Brannon Johnson says there's more than a little truth to it.

"We had family basketball games growing up," Ms. Johnson, who is African-American, says of her childhood in Philadelphia. And in the neighborhood, "the height of competition was to see who could beat each other down to the corner store."

That makes Ms. Johnson, a freshman on the varsity crew at the University of Texas at Austin, the exception that proves the rule: Black women have been bypassed in the tremendous expansion of female sports under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Nearly a third of the women shooting hoops in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association are black, as are nearly a quarter of female track athletes.

But only 2.7 percent of the women receiving scholarships to play all other sports at predominantly white colleges in Division I are black. Yet those are precisely the sports -- golf, lacrosse, and soccer, as well as rowing -- that colleges have been adding to comply with Title IX, the federal law that forbids sex discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds.

All the women's sports that colleges have added over the past 14 years attract masses of white suburban girls, but very few others. Participation rates for Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian female athletes are even tinier. Even so, colleges recruit quite a few foreign women for soccer, rowing, and other sports.

Some experts blame the NCAA and the (white) women's-sports establishment for promoting sports in which minority athletes are unlikely to participate. But the problem lies deeper than that: Coaches can't be blamed for failing to recruit women of color, when so few of them show up in the clubs and tournaments that help top athletes develop. Colleges can't really be lambasted for their choices of sports, when those sports simply don't draw minority women the way track and basketball do.

Yet black women and women from other minority groups clearly are not participating in most sports as much as men and white women are. And that troubles coaches, administrators, and advocates for minority issues.

Progress ... for Some

Title IX has been around for nearly 30 years, but only in the past 14 have colleges demonstrated measurable progress in adding opportunities for women.

Since 1987, when Congress passed a law that strengthened the enforcement of Title IX, the fastest-growing sports in the NCAA have been women's soccer, rowing, golf, and lacrosse. The numbers of teams and of athletes have doubled and in some cases tripled in all four sports.

However, the number of women's basketball and track teams has risen only about 26 percent, despite the scores of colleges that have migrated into the NCAA from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics over that time. (Of course, black women in basketball and track have benefited from Title IX in other ways, as colleges have spent money on those programs to improve their facilities, their coaching, and their visibility.)

College fields, courts, and rivers are now teeming with equestriennes, female soccer players, rowers, and other athletes, but almost all of them -- 70 percent -- are white.

Women from other minority groups are similarly underrepresented in college sports: Only 1.8 percent of all female athletes are Asian, and only 3 percent are Hispanic. Coaches are happy to look further afield, though: More than 7 percent of female athletes are from other countries.

And members of all minority groups except black women have been going out for Division I sports in increased numbers since 1990-91, according to NCAA statistics. The proportions of American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, and foreign athletes on women's teams have skyrocketed, while the proportion of black women has remained steady between 13.9 and 15.6 percent over the past decade. Even so, black women continue to outnumber women of all other races except white.

A Lack of Exposure

Researchers, coaches, and athletes themselves offer a number of reasons for the dearth of black women in sports, including economics, culture, and psychology. For Tina Sloan Green, though, they all revolve around access.

Ms. Green, the director of the Black Women in Sport Foundation and a professor of physical education at Temple University, points out that most urban high schools don't have the green space needed for sports such as soccer, lacrosse, and especially golf. They don't have coaches for those sports. There is nothing to suggest to a girl that she might be successful at them.

"When you have access to a sport, either you have success, or someone else sees that they might be successful," says Ms. Green. "But the cities are so jammed up."

Ms. Green, who is African-American, has some experience in this area. As a student at Philadelphia's Girls' High School, for gifted students, she found herself with a variety of sports to play, and excelled at field hockey. At West Chester University, the lacrosse coach persuaded her to add that sport to her repertoire.

Ms. Green then coached both those sports at Temple, winning three national lacrosse titles in the 1980s with the Owls before leaving coaching in 1991 to concentrate on teaching and foundation work. Her daughter, Traci, played tennis at the University of Florida.

The Greens had access to good coaching and the junior tennis circuit, the costs of which are far out of reach for many families. Having a top-ranked junior tennis player can cost up to $30,000 a year, Ms. Green estimates. The private-club system dominates most sports like soccer and softball as well, and -- unlike sports like basketball, where shoe and apparel companies cover most costs for athletes -- participation is nearly as expensive as tennis.

Because virtually all of the good players go through the club system, all the coaches offering college scholarships do, too.

Access to the rich talent on the playing fields of Dallas and Houston was part of what prompted Chris Petrucelli to leave a job as coach of the University of Notre Dame's women's soccer team for the same job at Texas in 1999.

"Soccer in the U.S. is a suburban sport with a lot of little white girls running around," says Mr. Petrucelli. "There are [African-American] kids out there, but the pool we look at is very selective and relatively small. There are usually one or two minorities in it. We recruit them, but we haven't gotten them yet."

Beyond the economic hurdles, black women who do find their way into sports such as soccer or crew often have a hard time being such a small minority on their teams, according to Teresa P. Stratta, a sociologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

"There's a high correlation between the number of African-Americans on a team and their cultural expression," says Ms. Stratta, who is white. She recently conducted a two-year ethnographic study of women's teams at Temple. "A low representation of black athletes leads to more cultural inhibitions, having to put up with listening to country [music] and things like that."

If two or fewer players on a squad are black or from another minority group, they find that coaches stereotype them into certain positions, and teammates won't bond with them. It's an isolating experience, Ms. Stratta says.

"Even if you get just three or four black athletes on a team, there's a dramatic difference," she argues. "And if it gets to 30 percent to 40 percent, you have the really dynamic environment where there's an interchange, a very healthy model."

Problems at Black Colleges

Many historically black colleges and universities offer the sports that women of color shun at predominantly white institutions. But those colleges don't necessarily give students the best chances to compete.

Colleges in the Mid-Eastern and in the Southwestern Athletic Conferences -- which together include all but one of the historically black colleges in Division I -- tend to allocate less money for women's sports than other comparably sized predominantly white institutions in their regions. They also offer fewer playing opportunities for women, especially given that there are far more women than men at those colleges.

Most colleges in the Mid-Eastern conference, for example, average about 60-percent female, while only 40.5 percent of the athletes at those institutions are women, for a difference of nearly 20 percentage points. In the Southern Conference, which consists of colleges in roughly the same region as the Mid-Eastern league, the difference in proportions is only 12.7 points.

Colleges in the Southwestern Athletic Conference each spend an average of $607,452 on women's sports, or 29 percent of their total operating budgets for sports. Colleges in the Southland Conference, by comparison, spent just over $1-million apiece on women's sports, or 40 percent of their overall operating budgets.

Part of the reason has to do with economics: Most historically black institutions sponsor football teams, which require many male athletes and a lot of money, but don't make any profits that athletics departments could use for women's sports.

However, the same is true of many predominantly white colleges at the lower levels of Division I, yet more of them do a better job of accommodating female athletes than do most historically black colleges.

In the MEAC and the SWAC, the main concession athletics directors have made to women is adding bowling teams, which are cheap to support and don't require much training or any new facilities. The NCAA has named bowling an "emerging sport" for women, and by 1999-2000 there were 21 teams in Division I, more than any other added sport except water polo.

"Part of what we have found is that the sports at major institutions don't necessarily have strong support from our constituents at the high-school level, so there is no natural feeder system," says Charles S. Harris, commissioner of the MEAC and chairman of the NCAA's Division I Management Council.

Mr. Harris adds that the population of elementary- and high-school students is growing increasingly diverse, and that the association might face a problem if nonwhite children continue to avoid the sports that are popular right now.

No More Walk-Ons

In the past, college coaches often would introduce themselves to women on campus who might make good athletes. Anita L. DeFrantz remembers walking to class at Connecticut College and seeing a long, skinny boat in front of a classroom building. "I went over to inquire, and there was a man standing there," recalls Ms. DeFrantz, who is African-American. "I didn't know he was the coach, but he said, ëThis is rowing, and you'd be perfect for it.' "

"Since I'd never been perfect at anything, I thought I'd give it a go."

That encounter led her to an outstanding career in rowing, and she was named to the U.S. Olympic teams in 1976 and 1980, winning a bronze medal in the former. She is now president of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles and a member of the International Olympic Committee.

But her story is a little outdated, for most sports. Athletes specialize at ever-earlier ages, and college coaches recruit players with years of experience at high levels of play. The chances of someone "walking on" to a Division I soccer team today, without being recruited or having years of experience, the way Ms. DeFrantz picked up rowing in the early 1970s, are somewhere between slim and none.

Is the largely white sports establishment to blame for the lack of black women in those sports? No and yes, according to administrators and advocates.

Coaches can't be blamed for recruiting only the most skilled athletes they can find, or at least that they can get into their institutions. They're paid to win, not to provide growth opportunities for athletes who can't contribute.

Some advocates for female athletes blame the women's movement. According to Ms. Green of Temple, feminists, and particularly advocates for women's sports, have overlooked the needs of minority women.

"When you increase scholarships in these sports, you're not going to help people of color," she says. "But that's not in their line of interest. Title IX was for white women. I'm not going to say black women haven't benefited, but they have been left out."

Donna A. Lopiano, president of the Women's Sports Foundation, says Ms. Green has a point.

"The women's movement is so focused on so many gender issues that the plight of women of color, who are in double jeopardy, is oftentimes on the back burner," Ms. Lopiano, the former women's athletics director at Texas, said in an e-mail message. Encouraging Signs

Ms. Lopiano says it has been difficult to get sports-participation statistics for college and high-school sports broken down by race, while it is relatively easy to get those numbers for the sexes. The Chronicle used the NCAA's 2001 graduation-rates statistics, which include demographic data for scholarship athletes but not for college athletes over all.

Moreover, the NCAA's rules requiring athletes to meet minimum standards for standardized-test scores to be eligible to play college sports have further restricted opportunities for black women, Ms. Green says.

Ms. Johnson is adjusting to college life and college rowing. Classes are tough, she says, but she's enjoying them as well as the rest of her two-months-and-growing adventure. She is the first in her family to attend college.

"People may look at you twice" at regattas, she says, because a black woman in a boat is still a rarity. But her teammates have made her welcome.

She got into rowing through a program for inner-city kids run by Vespers, one of the oldest rowing clubs on Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. By the time she finished high school, she was among the area's top rowers, and people along the banks of the river would yell, "Go, black girl!" as she raced by, much to her embarrassment.

Similar programs to encourage kids in urban areas to play nontraditional sports have been started by most of the national governing bodies of various sports, including the U.S. Tennis Association, the U.S. Soccer Federation, and others. They haven't borne much fruit yet, but college coaches are hoping for a parallel to the "Tiger Woods effect" -- kids from unusual backgrounds getting interested in their sports, much like they did in golf when Mr. Woods emerged as a star in the late 1990s.

The NCAA and its member colleges also have encouraged these kinds of efforts through the National Youth Sports Program, a college-based effort that involves coaches and athletes in putting on clinics and organizing games for children throughout the country.

Ms. Green says that the program, which she administers at Temple, has reached children who never would have been attracted to sports before.

Eventually, black women will not have to be "firsts" anymore. But at least some of those who are firsts now are proud of it.

"I'm the first black scholarship rower at Texas," says Ms. Johnson with a smile on her face. "That makes me feel pretty good."

But she hopes that one day, they won't have to yell "Go, black girl!" at anyone in Philadelphia. Because there will be too many.

_________________________________________________________________
This article from The Chronicle is available online at this address:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i14/14a03501.htm

Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education