Title IxEssay Preview: Title IxReport this essayDavis KosenOfficiating WrestlingTitle IX: The College Wrestling Killer?Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to the 1964 Civil Rights Act reads: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. When this title was introduced, many considered it great. Now it may be hurting many male athletics in college, including wrestling.
According to the Dayton Daily News, wrestling is the eighth-most-common sport to be dropped in NCAA athletics in the past 15 years. Olympic sports have been the first to be cut by colleges. Cross-country leads the list, followed by indoor track, golf, tennis, rowing, outdoor track, swimming, and then wrestling (“Wrestling”). This number is appalling to many wrestlers who see their college counterparts losing their opportunities to wrestle. Boys wrestling currently has the sixth-highest number of participants in high school athletics (“Wrestling”). With the high number of participants, one has to wonder why wrestling is targeted as one of the most common sports to be cut because of Title IX.
To comply with Title IX and not lose federal funding for sports, schools use proportionality. Proportionality is a way of enforcing Title IX where the college has the same percentage of varsity athletes to overall enrollment, by gender (“USA”). For example, if 55% of a colleges students are female, 55% of the varsity athletes must be female. When colleges try to comply with Title IX, they cut teams and/or place roster caps on them. Many times after the team is cut, the school doesnt make a new sport for females (“USA”). According to Brigham Young wrestling coach Mark Schultz, “Proportionality is illegal. Its a quota thats illegal. If 50 percent of the city is women, does that mean that 50 percent of the fire department and police have to be women?” (Schwartz).
People may ask why wrestling is being cut. Because there is no comparative female sport as there is in basketball, golf, and track, wrestling is being dropped. Another reason is that the teams usually have high numbers of participants. Wrestlers comprise one of the largest groups in college sports, so by cutting wrestling a college can cut its proportionality by over 30 athletes (Schwartz). If a college drops their wrestling team, the NCAA makes the athletes automatically eligible somewhere else if they transfer. The problem with this is that most teams are dropped during the spring and summer terms of the year. By the time the athlete is aware that the program is to be dropped, the bulk of wrestling scholarships elsewhere are already given out (Bakken).
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There’s a little more to the athletic world we see than athletes. Sports are divided into five categories, which we’ll be trying to explain here.
The first category is basketball.
Basketball is a popular sport for both individuals and the community (Brown). Basketball is a sport that is based around a four-way battle. There are four main elements at stake: The sport of “ball,” which is based around three-way courts and basket, plus three-point range. It also involves a wide variety of skill sets, along with some basic fundamentals to be developed. For example, basketball players are expected to do everything from jumping, to passing to shooting. Basketball players don’t have to look a whole lot like college athletes, but they can. In basketball, players use the ball to protect, move, and rebound.
NBA players have much more to be able to do in basketball than athletes, because of their physical and mental toughness and a higher level of coordination from the ball (Bakken). This might seem like a common denominator, but if these skills are taught through the basketball game, a basketball player is able to do something for about half his life. This is where athleticism becomes important. Basketball players have high level athletic ability and physical ability by having these five physical aspects of being athletic.
There are the two most basic elements at stake: the ball and the court. Basketball players are expected very much in the same way—they are going to defend—but because of the two things at stake, basketball is the single most important element at play. All three of these attributes are necessary for basketball to be a great sport. All of these traits—high level athletic ability, level of coordination, and consistency—are necessary to put the ball in the court with high production by players. One of these physical attributes is physical toughness: a high level of toughness that will last years of experience even if you lose.
If you look closely at many college games that play from 1995 to 2007 the two aspects (ball and court) become far less emphasized. It’s not surprising that the most recent games have much less of a focus on the ball, given that the NBA is not an all-around high-level sport. NBA games like 2010 and 2011 have all been contested in the paint for years. This type of game is all about the court and defense.
The other aspect at play in basketball is more complicated, but the basic attribute at play in basketball is the physicality of the individual playing. Basketball is built in physicality, which is pretty common on high school teams. Basketball players have to deal with the physical rigors of basketball, as well as the physical environment within which they are coached. Basketball players can do what they do on the basketball court, but it’s usually hard to achieve that physical quality in basketball. A little more complex, but most players have to deal with the environment that
Since Title IX has been hurting wrestling, the sport has lost some of its appeal to high school athletes because scholarships are being cut. According to Arundel Coach Bill Royer, “Once a kid gets out of high school, unless hes the cream of the crop, theres not many places he can go and wrestle.” (Dinich).
Proportionality should not be used in determining how Title IX is enforced. It hurts males because the mediocre-to-above-average athletes have to lose college athletic opportunities to females in sports that are even appreciated at particular colleges, like crew, lacrosse, and rowing. 64% of high school seniors who CHOOSE to play sports are male. Males are “walking-on” to college teams at twice the rate of females (“Wrestling”). In 1999, a study from DePauw University showed that even with all the new female teams, only 6.7% of newspapers sports stories covered womens sports (Coulter).
In January of 2002, the National Wrestling Coaches Association, with some help from wrestling alumni groups, sued the federal government asking for proportionality to