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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