Lets Do Something About Title IX

This should have been a "feel good" story; former pro football player returns to his home town and raises money for the team he played for as a boy.  However, the money he helped to raise has caused problems with Title IX, the federal law that requires equality between boys and girls sports.

Title IX, of course, has helped to screw up college sports by forcing numerous schools to cancel men's sports such as wrestling and gymnastics in order to keep the numbers of men and women athletes "equal".  According to CBS News:

Colleges have cut hundreds of wrestling teams, along with dozens of men's gymnastics, tennis and track and field teams. Men's swimming is also taking a bath. Remember Olympic gold medallist Greg Louganis? He polished his art on the University of Miami's championship swimming and diving team. That team no longer exists.  . . .

These wrestlers and gymnasts all had their teams eliminated: Jason Lewis and Nate Dotson were gymnasts at Michigan State, Brock Warder used to wrestle at Marquette University, and Colin Robertson was on the wrestling team at Utah's Brigham Young.

“Instead of adding a new women's sport, they dropped ours,” says Warder.

“Twenty-three years ago, there was 107 men's gymnastic teams in this nation,” says Lewis. Now there are 20 teams left.

Now the federal regulators are expanding their reach to high schools, questioning whether money is spent equally on boys and girls teams.  Apparently this includes money raised by boosters and volunteers.  As one Title IX advocate puts it:

"You better make sure boys and girls are treated equally," said Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation, based in Nassau County, N.Y. "If the booster club wants to give the boys chinchilla warm-ups, then the girls get chinchilla warm-ups, too."

Personally (and I speak as the father of two daughters, and as assistant coach of the under eight "Soccer Rockers") if the parents of the girls team want chinchilla warm ups for their kids they can get off their ass and raise the money for them. 

More importantly, active application of Title IX to high schools will be an enormous expansion of federal regulatory power.   Its guiding premise is that girls and boys have an equal interest in sports, which simply isn't true.  And it is based on the notion that federal regulators have to tell local schools how to allocate money and sports opportunities because the parents don't know what's best for their kids.

Personally, I am not sure what the point of having a republican president and republican majorities in both houses of congress is if they can't stop this sort of nonsense.

Comments

[Brady Westwater]

And over half-a-year later - and still nothing is being done.

[ilana]

have you seen any posative change