http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E87%257E680030%257E,00.html
CU, CSU fall in line with Title IX balancing act By Natalie Meisler Denver Post Sports Writer Tuesday, June 18, 2002 - Colorado and Colorado State, frequent visitors to the top 25 in football, women's basketball and volleyball, never want to appear on another list they previously shared. Five years ago, the National Women's Law Center produced a list of the 25 leading offenders in per capita scholarship gap between men and women. The cross section of NCAA division levels ran from Bethune-Cookman to Wofford with CU and CSU in between. Other recognizable Division I schools included Brigham Young, Duke, Vanderbilt and Oregon. A list of 30 schools will be released today, the number expanded to mark the 30th anniversary of Title IX legislation. The Washington, D.C.-based NWLC will send letters warning of possible Title IX violations. Although the list is embargoed, The Denver Post has learned CU and CSU are not among those schools. "These are not the 30 worst or the only 30," NWLC communications director Margot Friedman said Monday. "We'd like not to be on that list," CSU senior women's administrator Marsha Smeltzer said. "The last time we were already under review by the Office of Civil Rights." Scholarship proportions at CSU are at the mercy of in-state/out-of-state tuition balance and rising enrollment of women, which continually raise the bar for the athletic department. In celebration of Colorado State passing muster with the Office of Civil Rights after a landmark Supreme Court suit that led to the reinstatement of softball, CSU legal counsel Brian Snow ordered "TITLE 9" vanity license plates. A place on the NWLC list would have shocked CU, which received a letter of compliance from the OCR in early April. That letter informed CU it met 12 provisions in a Corrective Action Agreement signed in 1994. Lillian Gutierrez, director of the Denver OCR office, further congratulated CU for its 30th anniversary Title IX celebration and reunion of former athletes during the 2001-02 basketball season. "A lot of effort has been taken to address a number of issues since the audit," CU senior associate athletic director Bob Chichester said. He noted more opportunities exist at CU in leading club sports, such as cycling and lacrosse, that don't count for NCAA statistics. Keeping it level The disparity in scholarship proportions is one of numerous measures of Title IX and NCAA gender equity compliance. Title IX is a three-prong test of proportionality, history of progress and proof of opportunity. Gender equity additionally takes in facilities, recruiting budgets, staffing and staff salaries, to name a few of the criteria. Wyoming walked a fine line two seasons ago when the women's basketball team moved its games from the 15,000-seat Arena-Auditorium to a smaller gym used for volleyball. Wyoming men have one of the nation's top home-court advantages, between the altitude and vociferous full houses, but the few hundred women's fans just rattled around the big arena. A young team trying to build a following wanted to get a better home-court edge by packing the fans and band into a smaller facility, Wyoming senior women's administrator Barbara Burke said. The school could show the team had the opportunity to play in the bigger gym. The Cowgirls since moved back to the main facility. The Chronicle of Higher Education this week updated its national databases taken off filings from the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Acts. Schools are ranked according to the percentage of women's scholarships compared with the percentage of women in an athletic department, participation relative to the overall enrollment by gender, recruiting budgets, operating budget and coaching budgets. Don't be surprised to find Wyoming on today's NWLC hit list. Wyoming lists female participation at 43.87 percent, but women get 35.6 percent of the scholarship dollars - sixth worst on the national list, with a negative 8.26 percentage point differential. Yet Wyoming ranks 18th best of Division I-A schools when participation is compared with enrollment. "We received OCR clearance in April 2000, and we're still maintaining proportionality figures," Burke said. "We agreed to add tennis and soccer. That helped our numbers." Nebraska has the second-best ratio of scholarship percentage to participation percentage (behind Mississippi), where 35.7 percent of the department athletes are female and 43.5 percent of the scholarship money goes to women athletes. The 35.7 percent participation rate lags compared with a 47.2 percent female enrollment. The key is participants, which includes walk-ons compared with scholarship athletes. "We added three sports (soccer, rifle and bowling) in the '90s," Nebraska spokesperson Chris Anderson said. "It takes hard work to get to the numbers. It's just a commitment to women's sports." The schools in the equity conferences (Bowl Championship Series) join Nebraska atop the rankings for having a greater proportion of scholarship dollars for women than the actual women's participation proportions. On the participation list, the Mountain West is better represented with four of the top 18. Air Force and the other service academies with small female enrollments lead the list. However, San Diego State, with 56 percent female enrollment is a fraction ahead in participation. The Aztecs, in fact, will have to add a men's sport if an NCAA proposal establishing Division I-A program minimums passes this fall. Advanced mathematics b Although scholarships aren't an issue at AFA, Falcons senior women's administrator Marti Gasser said she constantly lobbies for support dollars. AFA has been Division I in women's sports for six years. The NWLC based its 1997 list on 1995-96 data. CU showed a gap of $2,386 to rank as the seventh worst; CSU's gap was $1,648. To arrive at this formula, the actual dollars representing the percentage of scholarship money given to women in any school is subtracted from the percentage of female participants in relation to the entire scholarship budget. The difference is then divided by the number of female participants in a program to reach a per capita number. Using that formula, CSU's average gap was $647 and CU's $1,811 for 2000-01. But it's not really that simple, given disparities between in-state and out-of-state provisions, full scholarship and full-time equivalency scholarship sports. Some student-athletes have earned academic scholarships that cover part or all of their tuition. There also are disparities in reporting the number of multiple-sport athletes. Football (85 scholarships) and basketball (13) account for 98 of CSU's 115 scholarships for men's athletics. "We're giving every one all we can under the NCAA; we can't give any more," CSU's Smeltzer said. Most women's sports have more scholarships than correlating men's sports (basketball and track, for example). No women's sport carries the 85 attached to football. Further complicating the picture is CSU following a national trend, where female enrollment hasn't tilted to a 52 percent majority. Yet for all the EADA reporting requirements, it's difficult to compare the Front Range five Division I schools when the University of Denver doesn't have football and Air Force Academy doesn't give athletic scholarships because every cadet is, in effect, on scholarship. DU further differs from the state institutions because tuition is the same for everyone. For the reporting year 2000-01, DU showed 52 percent female enrollment, 52 percent of athletic scholarship dollars but only 47 percent participation. "I don't know of any school that doesn't want to do the right thing, whether it's a major state university of a small private school," DU athletic director Dianne Murphy said. "I don't know if I would want to attribute (the proportionality) of our numbers to not having football, but historically, DU has tried to do the right thing." When DU eliminated baseball in 1998, former coach Jack Rose cried Title IX foul. But Murphy insists the decision was the result of expansion of the Ritchie Center taking over the baseball fields and an inherent climate disadvantage for the Pioneers when they entered the Sun Belt Conference. The long, winding road For all the Title IX success stories, locally and nationally, groups such as the NWLC concentrate more on the road ahead. The Chronicle of Higher Education shows in the five years, women's share of the budgets have grown from 30.9 percent to 34.6 percent and approach a billion dollars throughout Division I schools. "Reports from the NCAA show recruiting and operating budgets inching up for women, but it's still paltry," said Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel for the NWLC. "There's definitely a little improvement, but it's not great. When the NCAA shows women get 36 percent of the operating budgets and 32 percent of the recruiting budgets, it's still pretty pathetic." No legislative body can mandate whether one keeps score by the distance logged or the distance that remains ahead. =========== "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Ralph Waldo Emerson _____________________________________________________________ Sign up for a 6mb FREE email from http://www.spl.at Join the buzz, chat with us! http://chat.spl.at _____________________________________________________________ Promote your group and strengthen ties to your members with [EMAIL PROTECTED] by Everyone.net http://www.everyone.net/?btn=tag
