The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 18, 2001 

Female Athletes Thrive, but Budget Pressures Loom

Welch Suggs

All the studies, all the statistics, and all the signs say the same thing: There has never been a better time to be a female athlete in college.

The number of women on varsity teams continues to rise steadily, according to data gathered in The Chronicle's annual survey of participation and financial trends in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Budgets for women's sports are rising faster than those for men's sports, as is spending on scholarships.

But the soaring cost of fielding teams is forcing athletics departments to reshape themselves, favoring money-making teams over the other squads that make up a broad-based sports program. This is not necessarily good news, for male or female athletes.

Women's teams won't be eliminated or seriously curtailed, like men's teams in nonrevenue sports like baseball and track and field -- Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination, will protect them from that.

The Athletics Arms Race

Institutions in increasing numbers are slicing their sports teams up into different tiers, putting profitable football and basketball teams on a pedestal and turning other men's sports into glorified club teams. Most women's teams will probably find themselves in the middle, protected from cuts, but limited in scope and ambition.

Teams for men and women alike are getting much more expensive year by year, and not just in football and basketball. Nonrevenue teams in Division I cost roughly $220,000 on average in 1999-2000, The Chronicle's survey shows. In the six conferences that make up the Bowl Championship Series (B.C.S.), those teams cost roughly half a million dollars apiece. Stoked by the desire to be competitive across the board, and fueled by revenues pouring in from football bowl games, television contracts, and luxurious stadiums for their high-profile sports, colleges in these conferences are spending like wildfire to try to keep up.

"Our constituencies demand that if we're going to sponsor some [sport], we're going to be competitive at the national level," says James G. (Butch) Worley, associate athletics director at the University of Texas at Austin. "I don't think our U.T. family would be satisfied with anything else."

Not every college can afford Texas's attitude, though, much less its $47-million-a-year sports budget. Teams throughout the B.C.S. conferences, not to mention other leagues, are dropping sports because they cannot afford to compete. In the Big 12 Conference alone, Iowa State University and the Universities of Kansas and Nebraska at Lincoln all have announced major cutbacks in men's sports in the past two months.

The economic factors have changed the debate over Title IX. Colleges are doing everything they can to preserve their chances of hitting the jackpot by getting their football teams to bowl games and their basketball squads to the Final Four. They'll do what they can to be competitive in sports their fans care about, which in some areas include soccer and lacrosse, and in others, swimming and baseball.

But everything else that isn't covered by Title IX is expendable.

Gains for Both Men and Women

According to data compiled from reports filed under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act of 1994, Division I colleges had 86,208 men and 63,298 women competing on varsity sports teams in 1999-2000. Those are both the highest numbers ever recorded. The number of female athletes is up 3,073 from 1998-99, while the number of men is up 2,363.

In 1999-2000, 161 colleges reported a loss in male athletes from the year before. Many of those decreases are due to the normal fluctuations in such numbers, but not all of them. On average, men's teams have 30 athletes. Thirty-one colleges lost that many athletes or more, meaning that most of them either dropped a team or imposed a strict roster cap on men's squads.

Guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights give colleges three options for ensuring that they have enough women participating on sports teams. The first is to have the number of female athletes be "substantially proportional" to the number of female undergraduates: If half the students on campus are women, then roughly half the athletes ought to be, too.

The second option is to establish a "history and continuing practice" of expanding opportunities for women in sports, and the third is to prove that the college's sports program "effectively accommodates the interests and abilities" of female undergraduates.

However, court decisions and the clarity of the first option have made athletics directors consider it a "safe harbor" for institutions, and many try to comply with it by dropping male teams and creating "roster management" plans -- a euphemism for caps on the number of male athletes allowed on teams.

Despite the gains by female athletes, Division I institutions as a whole are not getting any closer to substantial proportionality, largely because they have more and more female undergraduates. Their student bodies were 53.2 percent female in 1999-2000, while 42.3 percent of their athletes were women. Both figures are up a tick from 1998-99, and the gap between them shrank from 11.1 percentage points to 10.9 percent points last year.

Many colleges have found ways of sidelining male athletes to make their numbers look better. The University of Richmond turned its men's swimming and water-polo teams into club sports last year, trimming expenses and erasing 66 male athletes from its varsity squad lists. Bucknell University dropped its wrestling team and downgraded men's rowing to a club sport this month, trimming 44 male spots.

The problem is that dropping male athletes isn't necessarily the best strategy to reach substantial proportionality. The 31 colleges that lost a team's worth of male athletes got only three percentage points closer to the magic number, while those that dropped fewer male athletes got 1.2 percentage points closer. Colleges that didn't drop men edged 0.7 percentage points further away from substantial proportionality.

Basically, this means that if colleges are dropping male athletes to comply with the law, they aren't doing a very good job of it.

But the economics of college sports are dictating that they make cuts wherever they can, without violating Title IX. And that doesn't bode well for men or for some women.

Busting the Budget

The cost of living is rising very quickly for athletics departments.

In 1999-2000, athletics-department budgets were $11.2-million on average for Division I institutions, up more than $1-million from two years earlier. B.C.S. institutions had an average budget of $28.7-million in 1999-2000, more than $2-million higher than in 1997-98.

Football, of course, dominates any discussion of expenses. B.C.S. teams received $6.4-million budgets in 1999-2000, while other members of Division I-A had an average football budget of $2.9-million. Only 15 Division I-A institutions spent more on women's sports in their entirety than they did on football.

For the most part, spending also is rising for men's nonrevenue sports. B.C.S. institutions spent an average of $3.7-million on male teams other than football and basketball. That is actually down 3 percent from the previous year, but Division I-A teams outside the B.C.S. spent 21 percent more on their nonrevenue or "Olympic" sports than in 1997-98, and those in Divisions I-AA and I-AAA also increased spending on men's Olympic sports.

Income from the big-money sports has risen as well. B.C.S. institutions took in $37.5-million in revenues in 1999-2000 on average, compared with $26.4-million two years earlier. At all Division I institutions, revenues averaged $11.1-million last year, up from $9.4-million in 1997-98. At most institutions, that revenue includes transfers from other university accounts, such as general funds and student fees.

Rising Expenses

However, expenses are rising faster than revenues at 149 of the 321 institutions in Division I. And even at colleges where revenues are up, they won't last forever, athletics directors say. Television contracts have grown as far as they're going to, and ticket revenue is hitting its peak, yet costs continue to grow for revenue and nonrevenue sports alike.

By separating the University of Virginia's 24 varsity teams into four tiers, eliminating men's indoor track, and adding women's golf, a campus committee developing a 10-year plan for Cavalier athletics says the sports program can cut its 10-year deficit from $47-million to $25-million. (The report doesn't discuss how to deal with the rest of the red ink.)

The main idea is to place football and men's and women's basketball in the top tier, giving them a full complement of scholarships and coaches and priority in budgeting each year. They'll be expected to battle for conference and national titles.

In the second tier will be teams that have been fairly successful in recent years: men's and women's squads in lacrosse, soccer, and swimming, as well as women's field hockey and rowing. They'll receive all or most of the scholarships allowed by the N.C.A.A., and also will be expected to be nationally successful.

The third tier of teams contains all other women's squads: softball, volleyball, golf (if added), tennis, cross country, and track and field. They would receive a few scholarships, "minimal" coaching staffs, and smaller budgets. Finally, a fourth tier of men's teams -- baseball, golf, tennis, cross-country, outdoor track, and wrestling -- would get no scholarships and few coaches, and would compete only on a regional basis.

While Virginia's plan is designed to contain expenses, it would also get the university closer to, but not at, substantial proportionality, says Carolyn P. Callahan, Virginia's faculty athletics representative. It will also give the university a slightly stronger history of adding opportunities for women, so Virginia ought to be on solid legal ground, she says.

This won't work at every college in the N.C.A.A. Some institutions just can't afford to maintain 24 teams anymore, not when colleges like Texas can spend whatever it takes to recruit and pamper the best athletes in the country.

Cedric W. Dempsey, president of the N.C.A.A., and other individuals are calling for an end to the athletics "arms race." But the rewards for institutions that "hit the lottery," as M. Terry Holland, athletics director at Virginia, puts it, by winning a national title in football or basketball are so great that there's no incentive not to keep ratcheting up the stakes for those teams.

Harvey Perlman, the chancellor at Nebraska, is still bothered by the decision to drop swimming. He says he'd like to find a way to maintain the sport that would attract "ordinary" students -- Nebraskans and people from other states who would like to swim competitively, but not at a highly competitive level.

"In exploring options to eliminating men's swimming, we considered the possibility of tiering," he wrote in a letter to other Division I-A presidents. "Implementation of this idea became impossible for us to implement alone because such a team could not effectively compete against Division I schools that continued to fully support swimming. Such a circumstance would not create a constructive experience for our student-athletes."

Mr. Holland makes a similar point. Division I institutions may end up with fully financed football and basketball teams and some number of Ivy League-style teams with no scholarships and limited resources.

"At some point, there's got to be a change in the way we do business at the national level," says Virginia's athletics director, who is stepping down June 1.

"If we're not going to drop sports, maybe we all need to drop the competitive level. We all know what's right" in terms of giving athletes the opportunity to compete at the highest level of their abilities," he says. "We also know what we can afford."

Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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