Extracurriculars

You don’t have to get all worked up like David Zirin does (and this he does about most anything related to culture and sports) to see how FIFA is missing a magnificent opportunity to be a global agent for positive change. For a change.

The international soccer governing body’s tumultuous summer took another regrettable turn last week when it barred the Iranian women’s national soccer team from a major qualifier for the 2012 Olympics because the players compete in headscarves.

This violates FIFA’s policy against such attire, and Iran was forced to forfeit its match to Jordan, dashing its hopes of getting to London. Even Jordan’s Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein thinks this has gone too far, and has offered to mediate a resolution.

FIFA took this action on the heels of the dreadful re-election of boss man Sepp Blatter and allegations of bribery that have marred it in the worst scandals of its history, and that’s saying something. Appointing Henry Kissinger and Placido Domingo to the new “Council of Wisdom” won’t make the graft go away, nor will it offer anything of note beyond perhaps some good music.

Neither does Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad deserve much praise for accusing FIFA of being “dictators and colonialists who want to impose their lifestyle on others.” He’s been rather good at doing that to his own people.

But it is a damning statement on the state of FIFA at a time when its reputation couldn’t be worse.

While soccer’s status as the world’s most popular sport has given Blatter the cover to be his own dictator, he’s been a poor steward in fostering the growth of the women’s game.

As the United States won the 1999 Women’s World Cup, there Blatter was on the platform with the trophy winners, prompting his many refrains that “the future of football is feminine.”

Except that in the 12 years since, it doesn’t appear to be anything more than what he intended at the time: A cheap and easy slogan, cashing in on a landmark moment. There are now age-group competitions for women, which is a good thing on one level. But on another, this has only expanded Blatter’s global network of patronage that maintains his power. It is, for the most part, a rather sorry all-male contingent.

Consider this: There is not a single woman on the FIFA Executive Committee, the group that chooses World Cup venues and that has been embroiled in the scandals. FIFA does have a Committee for Women’s Football, but its top two officers are men. Strangely enough, FIFA insists on all-female representation only in refereeing crews for its women’s international tournaments.

And yet Blatter still has the temerity to proclaim, as he did at the Women’s Under-17 World Championships last year, that the sport can liberate women.

FIFA’s headscarf policy, and its governing structure devoid of females in any position of authority, has had the effect of squelching them.

Women in Iranian society have shown their passion for soccer often enough for the frightened mullahs and government to bar them from going to stadiums and even movie theatres to watch games. All across the Arab and Muslim world, women are taking part in demonstrations to open their societies.

In some countries there, leaders are seeing the value in opening up the fields of play for women. Qatar, the controversial winner of the 2022 World Cup sweepstakes, started a women’s domestic soccer league — in part to woo over the European-dominated Lords of FIFA — and will be sending women athletes to the Olympics for the first time in London. Question the Qataris’ motives if you will, but they are encouraging women to get in the game.

(I’m sorry, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s girls soccer initiative launched this week won’t have the impact of a meaningful FIFA women’s soccer program that would tap into the organic growth of the game. This just looks like more America-knows-best preaching.)

In a sense, FIFA is acting the same way by requiring those from a different culture to meet its Western-based standards of dress. Iran’s women, who have been victimized enough by their own rulers, are now being denied the chance by FIFA to make a poignant statement against that very oppression. FIFA and Blatter need to understand that opening the doors of competition to women from countries like Iran is the first order of business. If FIFA had any women on its most powerful committees, they might have been able to advise them that the simple act of getting on the field, with or without a hijab, would be undeniably powerful and hard to reverse.

Start there, and then work on the cultural differences. Better yet, respect them. All FIFA has done is make Ahmadinejad seem more reasonable and enlightened by comparison, and that’s not easy to do.

Later this month, another Women’s World Cup gets underway in Germany, another reason to lament the timing of FIFA’s action. There will be no countries from the Middle East: Asia’s representatives are Japan, North Korea and Australia.

Arab and Muslim women will see no glimpse of women like themselves. Unless FIFA reverses its policy and gives the Iranian team another chance, the same is likely to be the case in London.

That would be bad not just for women’s soccer. It also would be a tragedy for women living in that part of world who may yearn for a different life, but have little to inspire them to try.

The producers of the Title IX documentary “In the Game” Tweeted a link to this ESPN story over the weekend about the paucity of women in action sports. The headline, “Gender Gap,” sums up so much of the wrong-headed approach to gauging the progress of women in sports, especially in the mainstream media. Says writer Matt Higgins:

“According to Marie Case, managing director of Board-Trac, an action sports market research company, in 2010 there were about 18 million participants in the U.S. across skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing, 25 percent of whom were women. Of approximately 2.6 million surfers, 31.8 percent were female; of 6.7 million snowboarders, 24.2 percent were female; and of 8 million skaters, only 12.6 percent were female.

And then there’s this:

“Title IX, a law dating to 1972 that bars discrimination among programs that receive federal funding, has meant more opportunities for girls to play sports in school. But with action sports typically outside the scope of public schools and universities, opportunities for females are largely governed by the rules of the marketplace.”

Of course I wish there were more women in sports, politics, technology and international finance, for much more than the sake of representation. Our games, laws, gadgets and economy would be a hell of a lot better, fairer, easier to use and more inclusive than they are now.

But we’re so busy counting up numbers and determining percentages even in relatively new sports involving a post-Title IX generation of women and where gender equity laws do not apply that we overlook another major factor that is mentioned nowhere in this story.

Choice.

That’s always been an important word for establishment feminists when it comes to a woman’s right to control her own body, a concept with which I strongly agree. But they never seem to consider it when it comes to examining why women don’t do certain things in greater numbers.

They may not want to.

Consider the example of competitive cheerleading, which is producing a bit of a split among women’s sports advocates and that The New York Times examined earlier this week in its continuing “Gender Games” series. Says Nancy Hogshead-Makar of the Women’s Sports Foundation:

“As long as it’s actually operating as a sport, we welcome it into the women’s sports tent.”

Which sounds fair enough. Then there’s former college basketball player Barbara Osborne, whom were told now advises college athletic departments as an “expert” on gender equity:

“What we consider sports are things that men have traditionally played.”

To be fair, Osborne said she wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea of counting cheerleading as a legitimate sport, but there remains quite a bit of reluctance.

Both women are quite eager to declare themselves authorities on what other women ought to aspire to athletically. Both could be more tolerant toward the individual courses that women are choosing for their lives thanks to Title IX. It’s a good law that needs to be kept on the books.

But Hogshead-Makar’s organization has been a stingy gatekeeper of a “women’s sports tent” that isn’t as expansive as it might be. And Osborne’s comment gives away the primary conceit of the gender equity establishment: That male-dominated fields should be the Promised Land for women to satisfy their ambitions, whether it’s sports or other educational or professional areas.

Cheerleading is such a hot topic because of the unending numbers game college athletic departments have to play in order to keep Title IX litigants at bay. As are the so-called “emerging sports” the NCAA suggests schools consider adding to get to proportionality but that don’t generate much interest from actual female athletes. Sand volleyball received a last-minute reprieve from being dropped from the NCAA list last year, but squash will soon get the axe. In August, the list will be down to just three sports — equestrian, rugby and sand volleyball.

(And I’m not the only female sportswriter who’s had a change of mind about cheerleading.)

The presumption that women would naturally be flocking to sports in the same numbers as men if only the “opportunities” were there is undercut by the first story in the Times series that revealed how men are counted as women in order to get the numbers right.

This desperation will continue as long as Title IX sports compliance remains tethered to a set of numbers that made sense 30 years ago, when women were in distinct minorities as students and athletes. That is no longer the case, as women are dominating undergraduate enrollment and even at big football schools are approaching or surpassing 50 percent of the athletes.

Here’s a better baseline for not only reworking the Title IX regulations but also rethinking what we mean by gender equity:

Celebrate the women who do choose to participate in sports and make it a big part of their lives, but respect and honor the choices of women who do not.

Never mind the gender gap. It’s not the truest measure of equality, but rather the most simplistic way of comparing men and women with the effect of perpetually dividing them.

When longtime Old Dominion women’s basketball coach Wendy Larry resigned on Tuesday, it didn’t come as a surprise. Athletics director Wood Selig announced several weeks ago that he was not going to extend her contract beyond the 2011-12 season.

Larry, who was an assistant on the great Old Dominion AIAW national championship teams that featured Nancy Lieberman and Anne Donovan in 1979 and 1980, got the Lady Monarchs to the NCAA title game in 1997 and as far as the Elite Eight in 2002.

But that’s a lifetime ago in the rapidly pressurizing world of big-time women’s college basketball. Even at Old Dominion, which had dominated the Colonial Athletic Association until recently, the wishes of a new AD have resulted in a rather quick and contentious change at the top. After 24 mostly winning seasons as head coach at her alma mater, but no NCAA appearances sinc 2008, Larry will see out that last year in a fundraising role.

Selig, who replaced the venerable Jim Jarrett, one of the most passionate ADs for women’s college basketball shortly after the advent of the AIAW era and after it was ushered into the NCAA age, is operating in a very different time. He stepped down from his position on the NCAA women’s basketball committee last year to take the Old Dominion job, which came with a new football program that Jarrett had created in one of the most competitive mid-major conferences in the country.

Larry’s departure wasn’t a pretty one, and is the latest casualty in a busy spring clearance of coaches whose careers have dated back to AIAW times. Debbie Ryan of Virginia and Naismith Hall of Famer Van Chancellor at LSU also were edged out, also unwillingly but a little more gracefully, replaced by younger coaches with fresh recruiting success.

The notables remaining from that pre-NCAA era can essentially be counted on less than both hands: Pat Summitt of Tennessee, Vivian Stringer of Rutgers, Tara VanDerveer of Stanford, Andy Landers of Georgia, Sylvia Hatchell of North Carolina, Jim Foster of Ohio State and Gary Blair of Texas A & M, who last month, at the age of 65, became the oldest coach to win an NCAA title.

In the last decade and a half in particular, the stakes in major women’s college basketball have grown dramatically higher. More schools are getting ambitious about the sport, which has been a good thing, although parity at the very top levels of the game remains elusive. With those ambitions have come bigger salaries — in some cases, astounding pay checks — along with more intense pressure to win. That in turn has ratcheted up a recruiting scene that doesn’t have as deep a talent pool as the men’s game.

And the usual suspects are again scoring big in the current chase for the best high school stars: UConn, Tennessee, Stanford, Duke, etc. Texas, which is desperately trying to elbow its way back into the national picture, had its heart broken last week when a coveted in-state recruit reneged on a verbal commitment and after considering UConn, said she would play at A & M.

What have you won for me lately?

The realities of these greater demands have become enough of a concern that for the last few years, the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association has scheduled roundtable discussions at its Final Four convention to address issues of work/life balance. The money is alluring, but, says WBCA chief executive officer Beth Bass, it also comes with a much steeper price:

“You have to be careful what you wish for. You have to be careful of the devil at the bottom of the wishing well. . . . You’re going to be held to the same standard as on the men’s side. We have make sure we’re ready to go for what comes with that.”

What’s required to be an accomplished head coach while trying to raise a family recently prompted Arizona State’s Charli Turner Thorne to take an unpaid leave of absence for all of next season so she can devote more time to her three young sons.

Not only is that an unprecedented move given her employment at a school in a BCS conference, but Turner Thorne is still in her 40s. She’s one of the younger ones. She’s also richly successful, with nearly 300 wins in 15 seasons, including an Elite Eight finish three years ago.

She’ll miss the first season in the expanded Pacific 12 Conference, which is basking in the glow of a new $3 billion TV contract with ESPN and Fox Sports, the richest ever for a college sports conference. As that was being negotiated, commissioner Larry Scott, formerly the head of the Women’s Tennis Association, said women’s basketball could turn a profit — someday. After the jaw-dropping terms of the new media deal were unveiled, including the addition of a Pac 12 Network, Scott also called it a “turning point” for women’s athletics because of the massive boost in exposure that’s certain to come.

While he acknowledged this development may take years — decades seems more likely — Scott must address first the lack of competitive balance in what has been the Pac 10 and the lowly attendance numbers that have come with it, even at powerhouse Stanford.

But at least he’s stating something that’s rarely heard in his lofty circle of college athletics. He’s raised a very high bar, but it’s one well worth talking about and pursuing at all levels of the sport. Perhaps he can persuade ADs in his conference and elsewhere to do more than just throw money at the game. They need to put more of what I like to call “emotional” support into it, much like Jarrett did at Old Dominion, before money became the element it is now.

Marketing, promoting, boosting attendance and concerted efforts to make women’s hoops a little more commercially viable are lacking, and have been for years. The aggressive young coaches who are getting the plum jobs — and the money and the pressure to win — are in prime position to improve the product, and to broaden its appeal off the court as well. It’s the only environment they’ve known.

Yet the downside of this — the loss of loyal, dedicated coaches like Larry who have struggled to keep up — also needs to be acknowledged. The women’s game is changing — on balance, I think for the better — but some of its finest ambassadors are feeling just than a little more than displaced.

This week espnW has been running a series examining the possibilities of women competing in men’s professional sports leagues. Veteran reporter Jane McManus does a good job detailing the physical and cultural obstacles women face in football, while Pat Borzi does the same in baseball.

I do admire the women facing very long odds of ever succeeding on the most-dominated fields of play that exist in American sports, and I don’t suspect the cultures of baseball and football will ever embrace women as basketball and soccer have. Theirs is a passion bordering on obsession that is hard to deny — and it is generally a healthy obsession. Perhaps some of these women may parlay that passion into front office and off-the-field careers that are rarities today, or inspire other females to do so.

I also understand the media fascination with this subject, because this is another part of the women’s sports realm devoted to novelty. In fact, the entire field of women’s athletics for many — including some of its biggest advocates — is regarded as experimental ground for working through social issues.

Another trendy topic that gets women’s sports advocates all aflutter is American-style gridiron football — whether it’s championing the fledgling pro women’s league that’s been around for several years or condeming the new lingerie variety that has some of the Sisters of Perpetual Indignance absolutely beside themselves.

But while the latter is mildly amusing, the rest of all this is frankly boring. While women have made enormous athletic and physical strides in my lifetime, the constant obsession — and this is an unhealthy one — to see whether women can really hold their own against men is more than quixotic.

It takes away from acknowledging the most remarkable development there has ever been in women’s sports: The everyday exploits of females on fields, courts, pools and other venues of play, just to play. They’re not always doing so to chase a college scholarship, or aim for professional or Olympic glory, although some get that far. Hardly any do it to prove themselves against men.

It’s been this critical mass, built up over decades, that has helped lead to entities like the WNBA, which is holding its own after a sometimes-rocky decade and a half of existence. Yet in Thursday’s espnW installment, Diana Taurasi is asked the inevitable question about women playing in the NBA, and she handles it well enough. But her fellow pro hoopster Tina Thompson, the last active charter WNBA member, really throws it down the best:

“The question is insignificant. The point of creating the WNBA was to have a league of our own.”

Thank you.

With all due respect to an intriguing topic, what’s the point of all this? I thought it was a marvelous moment for women’s sports earlier this year when the frat boys of American sports media got all worked up with comparisons between the winning streaks of the UConn women and the UCLA men. These are the things that make sports great — the arguments on talk radio, message boards and social media that never end, and always fascinate. Who was better? Mays or Mantle? What about DiMaggio or Williams? Russell’s Celtics or Magic’s Lakers? Lombardi’s Packers or Montana’s 49ers? You’re forgetting the Bulls and the Steelers, idiots! Etc., etc.

That a women’s team sport had reached such a lofty perch in the mainstream sports spotlight was perhaps as notable as what it accomplished on the court. Even amid the clamor of this being apples and oranges, or claims that the UConn women could never beat the UCLA men on the floor.

That was never the point. Neither has it been the purpose of the development of women’s sports to see whether the best females they produce might have an actual shot against the men. There’s a fairly obvious reason why most sports are sex-segregated, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. While the espnW series thankfully doesn’t address the absurd claims of Colette Dowling in “The Frailty Myth,” it still gives far too serious credence to an unrealistic, as well as an insignificant, question.

As I read these stories, I detected a ghost that haunts women’s sports advocates — the fear of invisibility. The barrier-busting, “woman in a man’s world” narrative holds media attention, but only as long as the novelty lasts.

Auriemma, who will lead the American national team in the London Olympics, said at a U.S. training camp this week in Las Vegas he doesn’t worry about the comparative lack of attention for women athletes:

“We could go 39-0 (at UConn) three years in a row and not get the amount of media that goes to a men’s Final Four. It’s just part of the deal. People are either going to appreciate you or they’re not. I’m sure there is an (Olympic) swimmer who says, ‘I’m up at 5 a.m. every day. Where is everyone?’ Or the guys on the crew team who say, ‘We’re in the water busting our ass every morning. Where is everyone?’

“Does it bug me? No. When you look back five years, the attention is better now than it has ever been. I would just like it if one of our players made a 3-pointer at the buzzer to win the gold medal, she wouldn’t have to take her shirt off to get the coverage it would deserve.”

I firmly believe that the biggest challenges facing women’s sports in America have nothing to do Title IX or wasted cultural obsessions, but with broadening their mainstream appeal, attracting corporate sponsors, working to establish the viability of professional leagues and taking the ideological fury out of getting in the game. Some may find it boring and even dispiriting, but some recent developments make this even more imperative:

– The extremely endangered state of the Women’s Professional Soccer league has taken another heartbreaking turn. If this 3-year-old circuit, now down to six teams, makes it through the season, it will be a miracle.

– The WNBA continues to get a strong endorsement from David Stern, and as long as he feels that way it isn’t going anywhere. But he didn’t dance around his rationale for recently hiring successful marketing executive Laurel Richie as the new WNBA president. He wants to strengthen the league as a business.

– Even the venerable LPGA, now 61 years old, remains on enough fragile financial ground that a respected and fair-minded golf journalist not long ago created a possible scenario for how it might thrive as part of the PGA.

The next barriers to be broken for women in spectator sports will not be about crashing men’s leagues, but making the leagues they have and the games they play compelling and worthy to just more than a small, intense few.

In some ways, not becoming a novelty might be a more difficult feat to pull off.

Quite a bit has transpired since I wrote here last week about the growing clamor over Title IX and the proportionality debate that isn’t new, but has taken on a fresh dimension:

• First of all, in a column that slams the graft and corruption of college football, George Vecsey of The New York Times on Saturday piled on the “football is the enemy of Title IX” meme, and this was rather unfortunate:

“Let’s ask the question: What causes this insatiable need for female (or ersatz female) names and numbers? It stems from the gigantic elephant leaving proof of its presence smack in the middle of most college campuses: King Football.”

• Missing from Vecsey’s analysis — and he’s a columnist I’ve long admired — is any mention of the fact that “King Football,” men’s basketball and their ultra-rich television contracts pay the freight for the most successful women’s athletics programs. For those who doubt this, check out the nifty little deal revealed Tuesday between the soon-to-be Pac 12 Conference, ESPN and Fox.

It’s for 12 years and is worth an estimated $3 billion, the richest ever for a college sports conference. Like previous media packages involving the ACC, SEC and Big 12, women’s and men’s non-revenue sports will benefit from the increased exposure. As I wrote recently, the wildly successful Big Ten Network is combining handsome profits with a commitment to devote half its programming to women’s sports. Football is the benefactor, not the enemy.

SEC football behemoth LSU recently hired away Nikki Caldwell from UCLA to coach its women’s basketball team, and will be paying her a minimum of $700,000 a year. Not bad for someone with only three years of head coaching experience in a sport that loses millions. But unlike activists and journalists, Caldwell lives in the real (perhaps surreal) world of college athletics and like many in her position understands the need to make the alumni and booster club rounds with her football and men’s basketball counterparts.

• Former Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano continues her decades-long lament to stop “this damn arms race in football and men’s basketball.” It is true that the money some coaches make and the expenses these sports roll up are increasingly breathtaking. But so are the sums being spent on women’s basketball, and coaching salaries in particular, although she does not acknowledge this, nor how they are being financed.

What’s driving this argument is the activists’ longstanding animus for football, which might be as insatiable as the appetite of fans for more televised college football. It is the arms race in non-revenue sports — for both men and women — that ought to be a greater concern.

• The Times on Monday detailed the University of Delaware’s recent decision to cut its men’s track and cross-country team as a pre-emptive measure against any possible Title IX violations in the future. Now that’s a relatively new twist to an old, sad story. But with women the majority of the undergraduate students at Delaware and many other schools, the male athletes’ claims of discrimination as the “underrepresented” gender bear watching.

• However, the real pain that too many young men have been feeling in the name of “leveling the playing field” falls on deaf ears within the Title IX establishment. Judging from an account inside the echo chamber of this week’s NCAA gender equity confab, the status quo was firmly upheld. Furthermore, invitees were treated to “a brilliant keynote address” on policies dealing with sexual abuse by coaches and calls to eliminate sexist and homophobic language in sports.

Good luck with that last one.

• Welch Suggs, a former reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education whom I met on the Title IX “beat” and who has written a very good book on this subject, is challenging me to come up with a “serious, dispassionate review of Title IX regulations.” Well, although I do have certain point of view I think I’ve done some of that here, and I will expand on this soon.

As Suggs notes, I’m not the only woman who feels the way I do, as noted journalist Hanna Rosin commented on this topic last week at Slate. Her perspective comes from delving into gender-related issues that are far larger than sports: How women, with their superior numbers in higher education, could dominate the post-industrial economy, and what that might mean for American society. She also wrote a compelling piece last year about Baylor All-American Brittney Griner and “the feminine dilemma of women’s basketball.”

• I appreciate the kind words from a number of people who read last week’s post, including sports business analyst Kristi Dosh, who’s begun a new blog, the Business of College Sports that I highly recommend. She’s been laying out a very methodical — dispassionate? — examination of how revenue sports are becoming increasingly necessary. I look forward to following what she uncovers. Fascinating stuff.

• A few other recent suggestions — none of them new — have sprung forth from various media quarters on solving the riddle of proportionality: Remove football from the head count. Add cheerleading to the head count.

I used to think these were good ideas, too, but what they don’t do is take proportionality out of the equation altogether. They merely perpetuate the numbers game — the head count — and that’s the main problem.

• The other two tests for Title IX sports compliance are just as unworkable. Some college athletic administrators are saying the same thing to the Title IX establishment, which, not surprisingly, seems surprised to hear this.

Toward the end of Tuesday’s story in The New York Times detailing how some schools “fudge” female participation numbers to reach Title IX compliance, former Syracuse athletics director Jake Crouthamel uttered a sentence that has long reflected the sentiments of women’s sports advocates:

“Football is the elephant in the whole thing. That’s the monster.”

He was stating the frustrations that many of his peers have felt in trying to adhere to the law because of the numbers of athletes required for football, which has no female equivalent.

Here we go again.

We’re rehashing some of the pitched rhetoric that has marked Title IX battles for the better part of 40 years. If not for football, this line of thinking goes, perhaps we wouldn’t be seeing some of the startling realities that Times reporter Katie Thomas uncovered about the results of some dubious bean-counting that schools submit to the federal government:

– Male practice players in women’s basketball count as women. Of the 32 participants counted last season for recent NCAA champion Texas A & M, 14 were men.

– Fifteen of the 34 members listed on the Cornell women’s fencing team roster are men.

– More than half of the 71 women listed on the South Florida cross country roster in 2009 didn’t run a race in that year. Some said they didn’t know they were on the team.

– Some female athletes are “underqualified,” with little or no experience in the sport for which they are listed as participants.

– Tight roster limits have been placed on some men’s teams to prevent male participation numbers from “skewing” attempts at reacing gender balance.

And so on and so on.

Some of these practices are not new revelations, especially the last two.

And interestingly, they don’t appear to run counter to federal regulations or NCAA objectives. The NCAA, for example, has actively encouraged roster management (especially in football) as a tool for reaching Title IX compliance.

In the most stunning admission in the story, Thomas reports that deputy assistant education secretary David Bergeron thinks “men should be counted on women’s teams if they receive coaching and practice with women.”

What Thomas didn’t do was examine the premise of the first test of Title IX compliance, known as proportionality, which has had the de facto force of the law since the mid-1990s and which has had athletics directors scrambling ever since. It’s also been the biggest bone of contention by forces advocating on behalf of male athletes who’ve lost their teams when schools make cuts for gender equity purposes.

Neither did Thomas address the subject of interest, which women’s sports advocates loathe and which has become something of a third rail not to touch. The party line is that women are just as interested in men in participating in sports, but they’ve been unfairly held back. That might have been true in the past, but the examples shown in Thomas’ reporting illustrate a desperate attempt by colleges to play Title IX’s numbers game any way they can. If they had been able to find an ample supply of interested female athletes to fill roster sports, isn’t it fair to assume they would have done that? Especially with the constant threats of lawsuits hanging over their heads?

These are questions that beg for answers, but they were not asked here.

Instead, Thomas interviewed the usual suspects in stories like this: Women’s Sports Foundation mouthpiece Nancy Hogshead-Makar; Russlynn Ali, the current head of the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights in an administration friendly to the Title IX establishment; and an indignant university president, in this case Donna Shalala of Miami, Fla.

Hogshead-Makar called these practices a “fraud.” Shalala, a former Clinton cabinet member who ought to have bigger concerns with a new AD, football coach and men’s basketball coach, took the time to accuse schools of “end-running Title IX for a long time.”

Even the Times headline was loaded, suggesting that schools are “relying on deception.”

Except that they’re doing nothing that could land them in court, or run afoul of federal regulators. At least not yet.

Do these “roster management” techniques follow the spirit of Title IX?

Absolutely not.

But neither does the proportionality test, which was treated like a ghost in this story. Thomas later answered some reader mail online, but again passed on the opportunity to address either that or the interest topic, which was foremost on the minds of many commenters on her story.

Wednesday’s unsigned Times editorial was also predictable, accusing schools of playing “cynical games” but remarkably uncritical of the warped logic of proportionality that created the conditions for these actions. There’s an assumption here that women naturally will rush to fill the percentage of sports slots to match the undergraduate enrollment at their schools if only discrimination were ended. This assumption is not to be challenged.

I will suggest here that it is interest, and not football, that is the real elephant when it comes to Title IX compliance.

When I covered these issues for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I once interviewed the newly appointed coach of a newly created women’s rowing team at a major southern university. This was a sport that was added solely for the school in question to get its Title IX numbers right and not invite unwanted litigation. Now rowing is a legitimate and wonderful sport, and this campus was located near an ideal body of water to field this sport, so all of this made sense on the surface.

But when I asked this upbeat young female coach how she was planning to fill as many as 50 or so roster spots, she told me that one method included scouring the campus, looking for female students with long arms and legs.

I kid you not.

She wasn’t particular about demanding any previous rowing experience, or even a background in competitive sports, for that matter. She had to get numbers, and get them fast. Does this not fit the definition of “underqualified?”

My next questions, which I realize were a bit unfair to ask her, were as follows: So where is the interest level here? Where is the groundswell of female students demanding a rowing team? She really didn’t have any good answers, for she was hired only to recruit and coach the team, not provide the rationale.

This was in the late 1990s, and ever since any questions along these lines have come to be rhetorical. UConn women’s hoops coach Geno Auriemma — who’s becoming perhaps the sanest observer of women and sports that we have — was asked about all this by ESPN’s Hannah Storm on Tuesday. He too mentioned football, but also said this:

“Title IX is supposed to provide an opportunity. It’s not supposed to demand that you participate in that opportunity.”

Bingo. This was never the intent of Title IX, which was passed, ironically enough, to shatter artificial numerical limits placed on women in education.

The law must stay on the books and it must be enforced. There are still some serious problems with the proper funding and resourcing of existing women’s teams, as this recent series in the Ball State student newspaper demonstrates. This should be the greater emphasis of Title IX enforcement, not the further addition of sports for the sake of playing the numbers game.

But the 3-part test for Title IX sports compliance is broken, and needs to be fixed. We need a new set of regulations to reflect the status of female college athletes today, and not in the late 1970s, when the test was formulated and when I was in college. It is a very different world now, and a much better one.

Before we can do that, we must also have an honest discussion about women and their interest in competing in intercollegiate sports. The Times is rolling out more stories on Title IX compliance that I hope will seriously delve into this subject in ways the first installment of this series did not.

As I wrote during the Women’s Final Four, there’s growing media interest in some of the astonishing pay scales for a growing number of top women’s college basketball coaches.

During that same weekend in Indianapolis, there were quite a few coaches taken aback by the news that UCLA coach Nikki Caldwell was jumping to LSU after just three years in Westwood, where she had developed a Top 10 program while earning an annual salary of around $300,000. On the bayou she’ll pull down $700,000 per annum with incentives taking it to $900,000.

There are no typos or extra zeroes in that last sentence. The commas between those zeroes are placed correctly.

Caldwell reportedly turned down an offer from Virginia, ostensibly to stay at UCLA, and was seen greeting fellow coaches at the Final Four in what turned out to be her final days as the leader of the Bruins. On the same day the semifinal games were to be played at Conseco Fieldhouse, she had traded in her sparkling light blue and gold attire for purple and gold threads (a move which has West Coast women’s hoops blogger Sue Favor thoroughly disenchanted).

At the bottom of his Monday column, Shreveport Times LSU beat writer Glenn Guilbeau asks a question that likely will persist as this trend escalates:

“Still it is somewhat alarming and mysterious that a coach of a non-revenue sport like women’s basketball, which for the most part has not been very popular here, would make more money than the coach of the immensely popular sport of LSU baseball (though not this season) and as much as LSU’s two football coordinators.

“ ‘There’s a whole series of things that sometimes are hard to explain to me,’ LSU chancellor Mike Martin said. ‘We pay football coaches more than athletic directors, and we pay athletic directors more than chancellors. But a lot of it has to do with the market and the fact that we now have a very strong long term investment in women’s basketball. She is certainly a first-rate coach.’ ”

While “the market” for elite women’s coaches figures to grow, where is any semblance of a plan to try to produce a nominal amount of revenue, or at least try to draw better crowds? Despite being one of the best women’s programs in the country — including five consecutive Final Four appearances between 2004-08 — LSU has struggled to get a consistently good home draw.

LSU has already gotten busy trying to reverse that. Caldwell’s telegenic likeness has already been plastered in a billboard campaign underway in Baton Rouge, and that’s a good sign. The school has a very marketable, attractive and dynamic coach who is being paid a generous salary to procure and develop talent and put a winning product on the basketball court. I don’t doubt that the former Tennessee standout will do this, especially in a part of the country that is awash with talent and the kind of football cash not only to compensate her but also to fund her program.

It’s also encouraging that more athletic directors want to be ambitious about women’s basketball and build winning programs. Hence, the increasingly high value placed on the best coaches “the market” has to offer.

But as Final Four weekend stories by Bloomberg and USA Today also illustrate, the sport is one of the biggest money guzzlers in college athletics. Even UConn, which unlike other women’s programs has its own media deal with Connecticut Public Television, is reporting losses and lower crowds, even with the fabulous Maya Moore matriculating.

The stakes in non-revenue college athletics — men’s and women’s — are rising, and so with this comes the demand for the money to pay for them. Women’s basketball is funded as if it were a revenue sport, but the reality is that at far too many schools there’s not enough “emotional” support beyond the money. UConn coach Geno Auriemma sledgehammered this point during the NCAA tournament last year, accusing too many ADs of not caring about the sport at all, dispensing just enough money to keep Title IX hounds at bay and little more:

“What has to happen is that enough athletic directors and university presidents need to make more of a commitment to the women’s game so they will put more pressure on their coaches to coach better. They don’t put enough money into the programs to demand from their coaches that they play at that level.”

Well, that’s certainly changing, isn’t it?

Perhaps the growing expenditures will prompt some ADs to get serious about maximizing their investment. At future hiring press conferences, I’d like to see them also outline how their departments plan to market and promote the program, offer ticket packages targeted beyond the sport’s fan base of seniors and younger families and get the community more interested in women’s basketball.

Some people I’ve spoken with who are involved in the business and marketing side of the women’s game doubt that separate media deals for women’s basketball, at the school, conference and national levels, will ever come to pass. The women’s NCAA tourney package that includes other non-revenue sports (and that expires after next season) probably cannot stand on its own.

So the pattern of “insane jack” being paid to major conferences in new football TV deals will have to become even more insane. And even if attendance grows, revenue for women’s basketball will be paltry because tickets remain at bargain prices. That Caldwell billboard also advertises season ticket packages ranging from $50 to $125.

What isn’t talked about with any kind of candor in the sport is why the women’s game isn’t more popular, even during the NCAA tournament, in spite of so much television exposure and the money that’s being fed into it. But that’s a topic for another time.

For the time being, I’d like to expand on Guilbeau’s question to pose this one:

How high does “the market” for coaches become in a sport that does not, and probably will not, produce any serious revenue?

Because while the laissez-faire ideal may be handsomely rewarding the likes of Nikki Caldwell, the real economics of this sport reflect a far more troubling, and possibly unsustainable, reality.

Bravo to Sally Jenkins a couple of weeks ago for calling the farcical prosecution of Barry Bonds for what it was while it was going on. And double bravo to Roger Cossack and Art Spander post-factum for saying the same thing on “Outside the Lines” on Thursday.

Even George Dorhmann argues that the jury, after being unable to reach a verdict on three other counts:

“. . . found Bonds guilty of rambling, of dancing around a question, of being (for anyone who has ever interviewed him can attest) Barry Lamar Bonds.”

Yet the feigned moral outrage from The Tribe is sucking up far too much of the oxygen. Here’s a breath of fresh air:

(video h/t Daily Motion)

Update: And Jeff Passan launches into to those waging The War on Steroids:

“The same selfishness that pervaded steroid users afflicted those on the opposite side. The anti-doping fiends profited off the drug testing they insisted upon. The moral police used the time-honored canard – the safety of children – to advocate against PED use. The cops and government turned power into score-settling trials.

“It’s no wonder baseball came out so well. Turns out MLB was no worse than the people running the War on Steroids.”

My “Outside the Lines” appearance Sunday prompted the understandable and passionate response from gay and transgender sports advocate Pat Griffin that I thought it would, although that was never my purpose in saying what I did. I responded on her blog, and I do appreciate Pat being a rare sports-and-gender blogger who opens up her site for commenting. I had my reply, and a few other readers were in my corner to some degree, at least for raising issues that are largely uncomfortable to question.

What did surprise me was the feedback I got from a few coaches and others in Indianapolis at the Women’s Final Four who had seen the program and thought I made some valid points. I do appreciate those comments as well, and I’m not trying to pat myself on the back here.

While I’m not obsessed with this, I do feel it’s important to engage in more than one point of view when it comes to the dicey mix of culture, gender and sports. Far beyond the scope of Title IX (which has made me enough of a bête noire in some women’s sports circles), what I regard as the wasted cultural obsessions of women’s sports (delving mostly into the Kye Allums matter) have not had an adequate public hearing.

Most of this centers on issues of sexuality, of course, and the recent piece in ESPN The Magazine on homophobia in recruiting (always a media favorite, regenerated with a big splash every few years) illustrates this.

But a recent acquaintance sympathetic to sexual minorities in sports put it best to me: It’s understandable that Pat Griffin and Helen Carroll of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (and a former college basketball coach) go to the lengths they do to work on behalf of, and give a voice, to athletes who feel without a place to go. But if all you do is focus on these issues, then it does give knuckleheads further ammunition to bash women’s sports.

I would add only that women’s sports advocates also tend to marginalize themselves because some assume their views are more mainstream than they really are, and that everyone else “should” believe what they do. And some who may not follow the party line, especially on a touchy cultural subject, are reluctant to say anything at all for fear of being viewed as intolerant.

However, this acquaintance, as well as other women with whom I discussed some of these issues in Indy, are part of a younger generation that’s not as hung up on these matters to the degree that we geezers seem to be.

So this was all a more intriguing and encouraging experience than I imagined.

As soon as I saw this Tweet from USA Today’s Christine Brennan this morning . . . .

@cbrennansports For those unhappy (disgusted?) with how #womensfinal4 is covered by most newspapers, check out#USAToday sports: http://usat.ly/2QcFT

. . . I realized it deserved the following response. I posted this first on Twitlonger and plan to explore this more in a later post, but this is what I should have told her when I had the chance in Indianapolis during the Women’s Final Four. I’ve edited and expanded it slightly from what I originally Tweeted:

“Print is not the future for women’s hoops coverage. I know, because I covered the sport for a major newspaper for many years. Then the newspaper business imploded. To assert that the mass media will, or should, devote more resources to a niche interest is ludicrous. Especially when better alternatives are available.

“The suggestion that coverage is ‘worse’ because of the decline of print — and the ever-present ’sexism’ that she and her ilk spout like they’re breathing air — is wrong-headed. I’ll blog more about this later, but on Saturday I sat next to Christine Brennan at a Women’s Final Four panel discussion about coverage of women’s basketball, and was taken aback by her dismissive attitude toward the ‘Internet.’ It is not a monolithic entity but the place where coverage of women’s hoops, like most niche topics, can and must flourish.

“Of course there is sexism there, but so what? You make of the Net what you want. It’s not a passive medium like print. This is 2011, but her tone came right from the late 1980s.

“There are two innovations that I’d suggest any fan of the sport, and students of new media, should look at: the Twitter account of @hoopfeed, which is a curated, constantly updated news wire that’s all women’s basketball. There’s nothing like it, and fans can’t get enough. If Christine would check it out, she’d see that there’s quite a bit of coverage of the game, and not just from newspapers.

“There’s also Inside Women’s Basketball, which is a very well-done quarterly women’s hoops online magazine that includes blog posts from Mel Greenberg, who created the first women’s poll in the late 1970s.

“The individuals behind these efforts and I and others have been talking about all this a lot since we’ve been here in Indy, and frankly we don’t have time to gripe about the way we think things should be. The Web, social media and especially mobile is where a burgeoning part of the women’s basketball audience — young girls and women who play the game — gets its news and information. It’s time to go there, instead of demanding they come to a place where few of them will ever go.

“The national dailies like Christine’s and the smaller papers, especially those in college towns, will follow women’s teams most extensively. But the major metro dailies like the one I used to work for are the missing element here. As much as I wish at times that I could have my old beat back, this new reality doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

“Marie Hardin of the sports journalism program at Penn State examined this issue recently in Nieman Reports, but I contend the focus is misplaced. If you’re always going to compare coverage of women’s sports to men’s, you’re always going to be disappointed. Perhaps some people feel the need to find something to gripe about (in women’s sports I call them The Sisters of Perpetual Indignance), but this is the wrong way to approach the subject.

I’d like to ask Christine (and Marie and anyone else who subscribes to their meme) to check out these new women’s hoops ventures and give them her support, but I rarely see her interact with her nearly 7,500 Twitter followers. So I doubt she’ll see this post, or even acknowledge it if she does.”