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Tucson, Arizona | Published: 12.14.2006
At no time can I recall a petition, an appeal or anyone beseeching the UA to add women's water polo to the school's list of varsity sports.
Not a peep from the water polo people. Public demand from a state whose high school athletic association does not recognize water polo: zero.
Yet by the year 2009, women's water polo will indeed become part of the UA's sports landscape, a transaction that will require about $225,000 annually.
This is Title IX run amok, pure excess, a gratuitous attempt to show federally mandated "progress" toward gender equity.
"I think Title IX has served its purpose," says Mary Roby, the dues-paying pioneer of Arizona's women's sports programs, now retired. "If you had told us in 1975 that we would reach this point, we would have laughed and said 'no way.'
"But the trouble is, if you back off from Title IX standards now, there would be people and institutions that would start going back to where we were."
Thus, in attempt to reach equity with football-bloated male participation numbers, the NCAA sanctions 26 women's Division I fencing teams, 33 women's rifle teams and 84 women's rowing teams. Cash-strapped Washington State, for example, in an attempt to match its female athletic population to that of its men's teams, has 38 women on its rowing team, requiring an operational budget of $272,225 last year.
Title IX participation numbers are forever skewed because football's 85 scholarships, and about 105 total participants per school, are part of the equation. No women's sport comes close to football's numbers in participation and, more importantly, in revenue.
Indeed, football pays for women's sports on almost every college campus in America, yet, because of Title IX ratios, men's sports are inherently penalized because football is so big.
It's self-defeating.
That's why, in the Pac-10, Oregon doesn't have a baseball team, Arizona doesn't have wrestling, Oregon State doesn't have men's track and field and Washington State goes without men's swimming and tennis.
"Because of football, we are never going to be equal in numbers,'' says Roby, "but I believe we have reached equality."
Amen.
At some point, Title IX activists must accept that it works, has worked, and stop digging for more.
The basic tenet of Title IX and gender equity is that a school's athletic participation numbers must reflect the student-body population. At Arizona, about 53 percent of the students are female, hence to fully meet gender-equity rules, the UA needs about 70 more female athletes.
The rules are sometimes fuzzy, however. The UA is able to count twice those female athletes who participate in both indoor track and outdoor track.
UA athletic director Jim Livengood had no choice but to add a women's sport because, with 250 (unduplicated) male athletes and 173 (unduplicated) female athletes in 2005-06, the Wildcats weren't showing suitable progress toward compliance.
If you fully count the UA's indoor/outdoor and cross country participants, the 250 to 173 ratio changes to a more suitable 263 to 226.
Not that I'm here to complain. Title IX is one of the most spectacularly successful pieces of legislation in sports history, one that provides female athletes opportunities almost universally denied until the 1980s.
Its success can be seen in this byproduct number: in 1987, the UA had 18 full-time (nonclerical) female athletic department employees. Today, by my count, it has 41.
In a Tucson sense, Title IX's success has been most vivid in the opportunities it has provided for dozens of high school softball players that now populate rosters everywhere from Virginia and Louisville to Texas, and Tucson-bred female softball coaches from Minnesota and Purdue to Long Beach State.
Imagine how many young Tucson women were denied those opportunities before gender-equity became law.
One of the best examples of Title IX's reach can be traced to former Salpointe Catholic soccer standout Kelly Walbert Cagle.
Upon high school graduation in 1992, Cagle (then Walbert) couldn't stay close to home. Neither Arizona nor ASU had women's soccer teams (both established soccer four years later).
Fortunately, Duke, which initially fielded women's soccer in 1988, offered Cagle a full scholarship. She went on to become the ACC Player of the Year and a consensus All-American. After coaching at Texas, Duke and Wake Forest, Cagle is now the head women's soccer coach at Virginia Tech.
Thank you, Title IX.
Soccer has become a mainstream sport in American high schools. But women's water polo?
Somewhere in California, there are about 20 teenage girls who will soon be recruited to play on Arizona's inaugural women's water polo team. Arizona will have the Pac-10's sixth women's water polo team, allowing the league to meet minimum NCAA requirements to qualify a champion for the NCAA tournament.
Those of us not yet introduced to water polo will have to learn as we go.
Then we will move on to the next piece of gender-equity controversy: the need for more female coaches for women's sports (there are only 64 percent in Division I women's basketball) and the hiring of female athletic directors (there are only six in Division I).
As such, the pioneering work in women's college athletics is already at work on Phase II.
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