Extracurriculars

A garden variety Title IX panel discussion at Wellesley College this week received the garden variety write-up from the Boston Globe.

Meanwhile, five high school districts in Wisconsin are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights for alleged athletic disparities for females.

Expect much more of the same during this 40th anniversary year of the passage of the law.

What you should not expect are many nuanced discussions and observations that incorporate the complexities and difficulties of complying with an ambiguously written law from any other point of view than a once-aggrieved gender that supposedly thinks entirely alike on the subject.

Yet we all know that Title IX sports compliance has had an effect on others that is not always a positive one, especially young male athletes in certain sports. This is because the law, as it pertains to the 3-part sports test, is being interpreted by the courts in a manner far removed from its original intent.

Female athletes, their coaches and teams didn’t always enjoy what they have now, thanks largely to Title IX. But as I argued in my women’s sports series last year, we’re in a post-revolutionary phase of Title IX because the status of women in American society is in a post-feminist stage. This is heresy to some.

But revolutionary rhetoric and actions do draw our attention. Yesterday, Quinnipiac University in Connecticut fired its women’s volleyball coach who alleged Title IX violations several years ago when the school tried dropping the program in favor of cheerleading. A federal judge declared cheerleading not to be a sport for Title IX calculations, and volleyball survived.

But it did not thrive, as coach Robin Lamott Sparks compiled a five-year record of 20-133. The school contends it was not the Title IX litigation that led to her dismissal, which reportedly included her being escorted from campus. There’s the counterargument that how could a program succeed when the university tried to kill it?

Yet on-the-job performance is not often a factor in Title IX retaliation lawsuits, as evidenced by the rather nasty saga of women coaches and administrators at Fresno State from nearly a decade ago.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Quinnipiac is the next battleground for retaliation ligitation, which along with high school lawsuits figure to be where the main sports-related Title IX battles will be fought for years to come.

Regarding Title IX in general, the hothouse topic is sexual harassment, and the epicenter for the last year has been at Yale University.

The most recent twist includes sexual assault allegations against Yale quarterback Patrick Witt that affected his Rhodes scholarship application. Media reporting on that saga has drawn the attention of K.C. Johnson, a noted professor/crusader/blogger from the Duke lacrosse scandal.

The Women’s Sports Foundation is stepping into these murky waters, favoring a controversial “Dear Colleague” letter from the OCR on campus sexual harassment. This goes far beyond sports, and not all feminists agree with proposed intervention that has some serious free speech implications.

The WSF has co-written a pledge of support of the OCR declaration with a newly formed group known as the Association of Title IX Administrators, who are charged with compliance of the law beyond sports. Does WSF really want to get tangled up with this issue, which is only indirectly connected to sports and which could become very divisive? Is this primarily about showing solidarity with establishment feminist groups?

More on this this potentially disturbing action by the WSF in future posts.

This week I’m bringing back some of my favorite posts from the year, and especially those that generated some good conversation. Issue pieces in sports always seem to do the trick, and these were no different.

In June I posted a 10-part series I called “Women’s Sports Without Illusions,” a critical examination of the movement and where it stands as Title IX turned 39.

For years I have found much of the dogma coming out of the gender equity establishment to be indignant and tone deaf to the world that women athletes live in today. It’s as if activists refuse to leave the 1970s, which thankfully have ended. We might have gone from disco to hip-hop, but I’m more concerned about the cultural grievances that many of these so-called “experts” hold that are out of step with the reality on the ground.

Especially when the slow progress for women in sports over the decades can’t always be chalked up to men.

I offered some starting points for revising the Title IX sports regulations that are outdated, and not surprisingly they drew most of the reader comments.

Also not surprisingly, most of the readers were men, and not women who side with the Title IX diehards. This blog is part of the Women Talk Sports network that includes the Title IX Blog and two sex-and-gender standbys, After Atalanta and One Sport Voice. There was virtually no reaction. We’re talking about people who don’t like their ideas challenged, some to the extent that they don’t permit comments on their blogs at all.

What’s more troubling are the grudges that some hold against football and how they rail against portrayals of women athletes in magazines and elsewhere that the athletes themselves see very differently.

These cultural grievances form the spine of an expanded writing project, based on this series, that I will complete in early 2012. It’s less about Title IX and the controversies over compliance with the law and more about the future of women’s sports, and how such absolutist views disrespect the individual choices of girls and women and are out of step with the mainstream.

I’ll have more details about that project shortly. All I’ll say for now is that if you’ve got a problem with the Women’s Tennis Association’s “Strong is Beautiful” presentation, then take it up with Billie Jean.

This week I’m linking to some of my favorite blog posts from this year, and especially ones that drew some vigorous, and even heated, discussion. As you’ll see, most of them pertain to women’s sports but there are some other subjects I’ll revisit here.

The first installment is my post from April 27 entitled “The real elephant of Title IX compliance.” I wrote it at the start of a series of gender equity stories in The New York Times that reflects so much of what I consider wrong-headed thinking on this topic.

Far too often, the mainstream media world I’ve inhabited most of my career has been terrified to address Title IX and gender equity from anything but the perspective of women’s sports activists, attorneys, academics and others who’ve made this their life’s work.

This post — and do read the comments — also triggered a longer project on women’s sports that I posted in June and that I will be revisiting this week as well.

I’ve been putting this off for a couple of weeks now but can’t wait any longer: I’m taking a bit of a break from most of my online activity, including this blog.

There’s so much I wanted to write about here before I stepped away, including the end of The New York Times’ series on gender equity (and the departure of the writer from the sports desk); a lawsuit challenging the Title IX 3-part test at the high school level; and a new era for the U.S. men’s soccer national team with the appointment of Juergen Klinsmann as head coach.

But I’ve got plenty of offline writing and reading I want to get to in the next few weeks that I have been delaying for far too long. And like anyone who spends an increasing amount of time on the Web, I just need to get away from it for a while. It’s hard to unplug and even harder to stay unplugged because you’re afraid you’re going to miss something, especially on social media.

From my series on women’s sports to blogging about the Women’s World Cup and a few other things, it’s been a blast digging deep into subjects I care about, and that readers have been responding to. I want to resume all that soon, but I desperately need to recharge, refresh and relax.

So I’m spending the rest of August tackling those projects, and enjoying what’s left of the summer.

See you in September, and thanks for being a reader.

It’s understandable that Title IX advocates are jumping on the U.S. women’s soccer team’s bandwagon as hard as they did 12 years ago. Then as now, American players roused their nation to care, at least for three weeks, about two things which were unlikely to gain mass attention, especially together: soccer and women’s sports.

Here we are again, on the eve of the U.S. match against Japan in the Women’s World Cup final, and the Title IX refrains are growing ever stronger:

– The National Women’s Law Center, naturally

– The Village Voice

– The Huffington Post

– The Santa Fe New Mexican

– Newsday

You get the drift.

It isn’t that these assessments are incorrect.

It’s that they are incomplete.

While Title IX has spurred the growth of women’s soccer and other sports in the United States, it is far from being the only major factor at work here.

Youth soccer leagues were sprouting up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, inspired by the creation of the North American Soccer League. All across American suburbia, girls were starting to play the game at the same time as boys, making it one of the few sports in this country that can make that claim.

It’s a rarely acknowledged fact that American women’s soccer icon Mia Hamm made the U.S. national team at the age of 16, just as her high school days were beginning and well before she played college soccer at the University of North Carolina. The same goes for Kristine Lilly, her UNC and U.S. teammate for many years and who only recently retired.

They were grounded in youth leagues before the scholastic level subject to Title IX had developed. Their national team coach later was their coach with the Tar Heels. Anson Dorrance, the legendary architect of women’s soccer on so many levels in America, had seen both Hamm and Lily at elite youth tournaments, which in several sports for females still remain more fertile developmental and recruiting grounds than the high school scene.

After their college careers were over, and with no pro league in the U.S. at the time, Hamm, Lilly, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain and other key figures of the celebrated 1999 World Cup-winning team benefitted from extended residency camps that few women’s national teams enjoyed. This created the atmosphere for their famous team-first ethos, and gave them time to develop first-rate fitness levels and their competitive edge.

These are the traits, handed down, that Abby Wambach, Hope Solo and Megan Rapinoe are demonstrating with thrilling effect for us now.

In one of the few recent media pieces on U.S. women’s soccer that doesn’t mention Title IX, Chris Sprow of ESPN The Magazine explains how these dynamics reflect an American competitive spirit that Wambach cited after her dazzling goal against Brazil and that’s long been the province of male athletes. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this also is why the U.S. run in Germany, as well as that of the ” ‘99ers” before them, has caught on with the American public.

The “head start” American women got years ago helped make the difference in gripping quarterfinal and semifinal wins, respectively, over Brazilian and French teams with splendid talent (except at goalkeeper) but that lack conditioning, resilience and proper backing from their national soccer federations. (The Los Angeles Times also delves into this.)

And I think I understand what Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl is trying to get across here:

“If the ‘99 Women’s World Cup was the ultimate vindication of Title IX in the U.S., this year’s tournament is exporting Title IX on a global level.”

The crowds have been great in Germany, and still good even after the home team was stunned in the quarterfinals. It’s just that when we get so giddy about women’s soccer and women’s sports (and these occasions are rare) we’ve been conditioned to think that there’s only one thing responsible.

But to take apart that sentence literally, Title IX needed no “vindication” in 1999; its current sports compliance provisions were rendered ironclad a few years earlier in the Cohen v. Brown case that reached the Supreme Court. And since there is no Title IX outside of the U.S., the development of women’s sports around the world proceeds in ways and with cultural realities that Americans simply cannot fathom. But even our women’s sports “exceptionalism,” to borrow from Sprow, has its limits at home.

After Sunday, the U.S. players will return to play in the three-year-old Women’s Professional Soccer league, which is struggling along with six teams and has issues that, in the words of soccer journalist Beau Dure, “no goal in Moenchengladbach can solve.”

Its predecessor, the Women’s United Soccer Association, folded right before the 2003 Women’s World Cup, a deflating blow to the next phase of the growth of the sport. As women’s soccer blogger Jenna Pel noted this week, since 1999, the U.S. team’s only major titles have been at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, with no fully professional league bridging those years.

What is vital is for WPS to get more than a short-term, post-World Cup boost. This is about approaching women’s soccer, and women’s sports, as a business, which doesn’t fit the mission of women’s groups that have made Title IX the focal point of their advocacy.

Yet after all the euphoria about the latest Title IX success on the soccer fields has died down, the challenge of ensuring that these American stars can continue playing on those fields professionally and keep the U.S. team ahead of the game will have nothing to do with the law at all.

I do promise to make this brief, because I’ve already unpacked a lot over these last two weeks about women’s sports, and more precisely, the movement behind them for the last four decades.

All the links in the “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” series can be found here. And just a few other things to point out as I wrap this up:

What are the illusions?

I’ve referred to this in my series title, but didn’t allude to them specifically as I went along. The illusions, as I’ve examined them, are:

• That the women’s sports “revolution” is still young: Actually, it’s in fine middle age, as am I, and that’s a place that ought to be relished. The heavy lifting of getting girls and women in the game — the most arduous task — is over. Girls and women have won, resoundingly. But the “evolution” continues, especially in areas that Title IX cannot touch.

• That women and men are equally interested in sports: This is a major bone of contention that animates so much of the Title IX battle. But that’s not the right statement. As women have had more choices and options open to them — largely because of Title IX — we’re seeing that their interests are more wide-ranging than men.

• That the male sports culture must change: Title IX isn’t enough for some women’s advocates. But most institutions in American society and American society itself have undergone dramatic change by opening doors to those who’ve been left out: African-Americans, immigrants, women, gays and others. Their fuller participation in society, over time, results in those institutions and society changing, not clarion calls for a cultural revolution. This evolution with women in sports is well underway.

• That women athletes are helplessly “sexualized:” There is a difference between gratuitous displays of “babes” who play sports and portrayals of a healthy, mature and adult female athletic eroticism. Some women’s advocates refuse to make a distinction, complaining that women athletes are being “exploited” by a media culture bent on reinforcing heterosexual “stereotypes.” Gay male admirers of male athletes have no such hangups; they gaze, unabashedly, and so do more than a few women at women athletes. Male and female athletes use their bodies to compete. Regardless of orientation, it’s impossible not to notice the sexual element in all this, and absurd to insist that we shouldn’t.

• That girls and women “need” sports: I can’t imagine not having sports in my life. But the truth is that a vast majority of girls and women, even four decades after Title IX, are happy, healthy and well-adjusted without sports in their lives at all. They’ve used Title IX to dominate college undergraduate enrollments, and many post-graduate and professional programs as well.

Mea culpas

I didn’t get to a few subjects I intended to address in depth, but they are priorities in the near future:

• Cheerleading and “Bambi” sports: Competitive cheer is gaining traction as a possible varsity sport at the college level, but there is resistance.

• International and youth sports: The development of sports in other countries and at the community level in the United States, where Title IX does not apply, fascinate me and I really do want to explore these issues more here, and elsewhere.

• Media, marketing and business: Complaints about a lack of media coverage for women’s sports, struggles to improve corporate sponsorships, endorsements and expand wider commercial viability did not get proper examination here. Some of my previous thoughts on media are here.

• Keep it short: I see that I’ve already gone too long summing up this series, for which nearly every post went longer than I planned. My apologies for making too much work for some readers. There has been so much ground to cover, and plenty more beyond what’s been mentioned here. This series ended up being more about catching up with nearly 40 years of women’s advocacy and not enough about looking forward. Maybe there’s another series in that!

Many thanks

There have been terrific comments here and I’m gratified and humbled by the response. Please don’t be strangers; I will be posting here intermittently through the rest of the summer but need to take a couple steps back for the time being. My e-mail address is wendy@wendyparker.org. The best way to stay in touch is to follow me on Twitter. It’s become my online home.

What’s next

I’m absolutely fired up to continue the conversation and expand on these topics. I’ll keep everyone abreast of what happens when I sort out some options I’m pursuing.

A reader asked me if I wanted to “start something,” meaning a group or organization, but I’m not an activist or organizer. While I’m pleased with how this series turned out, my aim has been to be a crusader for a common-sense approach to how we think about women’s sports.

For now, I’m going to watch the Women’s World Cup, catch up on summer reading, and perhaps get to the beach.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

This is the final post in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

I’ve been promising the last two weeks to explain what the above racquet is all about as I’ve made a racket about why and how the women’s sports movement lost its way.

The racquet was inspired by one of the creators of that movement who continues to inspire me and many other women today.

I bought it just days after she beat a self-styled male chauvinist pig in one of the greatest sporting spectacles of my lifetime.

It’s a Wilson Billie Jean King Cup racquet, a fabled relic of its day, wooden with a small head and long handle, frayed strings and a crack along the insignia. It’s completely unusable now, of course; when I last took it out a few years ago to see how it felt making contact with a ball, it shimmied like our family’s old 1969 Buick Riviera when I was learning how to drive.

I keep this racquet on the wall above my writing desk, as much a symbol of what King’s example has meant to me as her feat that night in Houston — and in everything else she has done — has meant to literally hundreds of thousands of women.

I had never been so fired up in my life, or since. Finally, I didn’t feel so all alone as a “tomboy.” The word didn’t sting so much any more. Here was a woman who did so much more than beat an old man on a tennis court in the Astrodome. She gave us the heretical idea that we might actually be able to do something in sports after we had grown into women.

I’ve lost so many things in so many moves in all the years since: gloves, cleats, my red, white and blue ABA basketball, a childhood’s collection of baseball cards. But somehow I’ve managed to hang on to the racquet, without really trying. There’s something metaphorical in all that.

In many ways, this racquet also symbolizes what I think the women’s sports movement has become today: Tough but brittle, successful but chastened, worn down but not without the goods, once refreshed, to spark future generations of females all around the world to get in the game, and to stay.

During this series I’ve explained how the noble intentions to live up to Title IX have been accompanied by hard-edged gender identity politics with little sympathy for displaced male athletes, rants against football and sexual expression, and desperate pleas that girls need to be “saved” by sports. Not only do these leaders ignore the notion that women may just choose not to play, they define equality in sports as based on participation numbers and percentages, and think this can be achieved only by their eternal vigilance in the court system.

Reviving the joy of play

The activists claim they’re only trying to make sure Title IX is being enforced, but as I have written in this series, what some truly crave goes far beyond what the law requires, and has ever been about. For them, this isn’t about sports, but to overthrow a dastardly “patriarchy” that haunts their dreams.

Their attempts to impress these notions upon young women hasn’t been as persuasive as it might have been, and I think I know why.

There's crying in basketball.

For years, the Women’s Sports Foundation (that King created), National Women’s Law Center and other advocacy groups serve up a battery of data and studies to illustrate not only how beneficial sports have been to girls and women who participate, but how they must be encouraged for females who have not. Or to underscore the legal rights for females to have equal access as boys to get in the game.

Learning how to compete and cooperate, staying fit and feeling healthy, getting good grades and avoiding teen pregnancy and boosting self-esteem are good things. If young women derive these benefits from sports, fine. If not, that should be fine too. Title IX is the law of the land and should not be repealed. It must be reformed to reflect the times and stop causing harm to men’s teams.

But what’s missing the most from this advocacy is the reason why we flock to sports in the first place.

Instead of being badgered to play for social and career imperatives, or for scholarship offers or fame and fortune on ESPN, both girls and boys need to be reintroduced to the idea of the pure joy of play, perhaps a quaint and even naïve notion in today’s society. It’s the subject of one of my favorite sports books, and it has informed me as I wrote this series.

I’m learning in middle age that extrinsic motivations simply will not work. Corporations keep pushing them on their employees, hoping the offer of a little beer money bonus will prompt more productivity and keep their docile little worker bees in line.

I may be getting older, but I’m no less rebellious about this kind of conformity, and I hate to think that we need to make sports yet another activity marked by duty and obligation, rather than fun and play. And most of all, a passion inspired by people such as Billie Jean King.

But that passion has stir inside the girl, and it has to stir deeply. Nothing else is possible without it.

Imagine

When I stepped inside the lines, the rest of the world melted away.

Like opening a book, taking the field and the court was for me an act of the imagination, as well as a means of escape. The world of adults — their rules and demands — could be blown off, at least to some degree.

I could hear coaches and parents cheering, and sometimes yelling, and occasionally I let an umpire have it. I could talk back to a grown-up and get away with it, although I came close on one occasion to getting tossed for my big mouth.

At the age of 12!

I’ve often wondered whether I’d be sore today if had I had more talent and ambition than the limited options offered to me at the time, slow-pitch softball and six-on-six basketball. I participated in what I could, and did the best that I could. Playing for the Atlanta Braves, or being the female Pete Maravich, all the way down to my gray socks, were fanciful notions better left for the dream world inside the lines.

This used to be my playground.

I didn’t have a point of reference for any of this. When Donna Lopiano repeats her oft-told story of being crushed as a young girl to learn why she’d never have a chance to pitch for the New York Yankees, I can relate to that. Although I have always hated the Yankees, and always will.

She ended up being a Softball Hall of Famer, playing for the famous Raybestos Brakettes. I gather this might not have been as satisfying for reasons I came to realize about my own experience: Softball was and is a fine sport, but it just isn’t baseball. If your heart is set on playing baseball, the so-called “female” alternative is really no alternative at all.

(Even more intriguingly, Lopiano never fielded a softball team when she was women’s athletics director at Texas; it was added only after she had become the CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation and her old school was hit with a Title IX suit.)

What I can’t relate to is how Lopiano and other women’s sports advocates have allowed those stymied dreams to animate their activism beyond the simple notion of working to tear down the barriers of participation and competition for girls and women. That certainly was difficult and painful enough to do, and they should be tremendously proud of what they’ve done on behalf of hundreds of thousands of young women.

But to parlay that activism into an angry grievance against the so-called “male sports culture” smacks of an embittered sense of vengeance that’s just unbecoming. Even when it attempts to call out the unbecoming behavior of male athletes. The women’s sports movement was not supposed to have been about reflecting matriarchal attitudes.

Even after I became aware of how truly limited my sports options were because of my gender, I never believed that rectifying that meant others had to pay a price. I didn’t envy or hate boys because football and baseball were all-male pursuits, with their standalone cultures. If anything, I grew to love those sports even more, curiously attracted to the reality that they would always remain mysterious to me.

For me, it was all about getting in the game, and staying there, first as a kid on the sandlots of suburban Atlanta, and later as an adult privileged to write about sports from all over the country and the world for my hometown newspaper.

It ranged from collecting names and times of competitors at a youth track meet to watching Brazil win the World Cup in person. In between were lots of high school and college football and basketball, soccer and Olympic sports and quite a bit of women’s sports.

It was a theatre of dreams that will never die.

Billie Jean showed that it wasn’t a place just for boys.

When I stepped inside the lines, I could dream.

And be.

What’s Next: On Saturday I’ll post a collection of all the individual posts in this series with a few final thoughts, and explain why I wasn’t able to get to everything I intended. It’s been a thrill to do this, and an honor to have some really thought-provoking comments from readers.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the ninth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Today is a day to celebrate. As it should be.

As Title IX enters its 40th year, and with another 12 months of buildup until another milestone, we will be hearing a lot more of what we’ve been hearing about the law from all the usual suspects.

The individuals and organizations I have examined here will be undeterred in sticking to their talking points, all of which have been examined in this series.

While I do believe that many of these people do believe what they say, they’re also smart to keep the charge in their rhetoric. It furthers their advocacy, and helps them accrue brownie points in their careers as professional feminists.

A subversion of the law

Latest example: University of Pittsburgh law professor Deborah Brake, author of the recent book “Getting in the Game: Title IX and the Women’s Sports Revolution.” Formerly a staff attorney at the National Women’s Law Center (a charter member of The Sisterhood), Brake promises readers what she claims to be the first legal analysis of the law as it pertains to sports. More than anything, she serves up warmed-over diatribes about the patriarchy, and gives away her true aim — adding sports to the realm of “feminist legal theory” — almost from the start:

“It is time to move gender equality in this area to a more central place in a feminist agenda.”

This book is not really about sports at all. As the following passages reveal, for Brake the story of female athleticism is an abstract to serve a much more holy purpose. Not only that, but she actually disdains everything that Title IX was meant to be when Congress passed it 39 years ago today. To her, the law hardly goes far enough, because men still rule the roost in sports. A few dreadful examples:

“Unfortunately, Title IX’s approach to gender equality has made no serious attempt to expand the range of masculinities sports constructs, and it has failed to disrupt sport’s linkage to hegemonic masculinity.”

“Degendering sports is an important part of securing sex equality in sports.”

“For the most part, schools have done little to change a sports culture that links hetero-masculinity to athleticism.”

“The law has been less successful at reigning in the privileges of elite men’s college sports.”

And then there is this:

“. . . Title IX’s utter lack of success in challenging the culture of heterosexual male privilege that pervades men’s sports.”

And so it goes on like this, for 230 bloody, mind-numbing pages.This was not Mariah Burton Nelson writing in 1994, but rather a law professor in 2010.

Brake is less a Title IX legal scholar than an ideologue. But you wouldn’t know it judging from uncritical interviews on a higher education website and NPR’s acclaimed “Only a Game” program when her book was published.

Not only do Brake and her like-minded sisters I’ve profiled here give women’s sports a bad name. They also marginalize them more effectively than any hegemonic masculinist ever did.

The temptation to fight the past

For nearly three decades, Jack Fertig was as a men’s assistant basketball coach at a number of universities, including Tennessee, where he became an early and still-avid admirer of Pat Summitt. At USC, he was fond of Trojan basketball great Cheryl Miller, who served as head coach in the mid-1990s and became a pariah in her own sport when she succeeded Marianne Stanley, who was fighting and later lost an equal pay battle in federal court.

Fertig also served on Fresno State’s athletics gender equity committee while on Jerry Tarkanian’s staff in the last decade, during one of the nastiest Title IX disputes in recent memory. In a recent blog post, Fertig, now a public speaker and teacher in Fresno, recalled those memories while watching his current high school’s girls softball team, and wondered what the landscape for women’s sports might be like today had females not been held back for so long. He appreciates the historical march women have made in sports, and like a lot of men of his time, has regrets about the past.

But then there’s his frank closing passage:

“There is no argument that the female gender was hindered by the lack of opportunity and, certainly, the women’s rights movement hastened justice in that area. Now that women are afforded the chance to compete, whether it be in the athletic field, medical field or, simply, at the ballot box, there are some women who aren’t – and never will be – satisfied. They are bound and determined to ‘make up for the past.’

“I was in a coaches’ meeting once when the director of athletics posed the following question to a female coach, ‘Would you rather see the football team win so we make more money and everybody’s budget is increased or would you rather everybody’s budget be cut?’ Without hesitation, she chose the latter. Later, when a foolish, vengeful proposal was brought up, one of the men coaches said, ‘That would screw the men’s sports.’ The same miserable female coach retorted, ‘Good. We got it for 20 years; now it’s your turn.’

“If you guessed the meeting took place at Fresno State, you wouldn’t be too far off. Fighting for a just cause is noble. Continuing to be – I coined the term, a contrarian – does nothing but cause ill will and becomes a divisive force helping no one but the ego of the contrarian.

“It’s truly a shame women weren’t offered identical chances men were at the same time nor does it make sense. As the popular Virginia Slims commercial told the world, though, women have come a long way, baby. Unfortunately, there are those who feel they haven’t won unless someone else has lost. Since we’re all members of the same ‘team,’ it would behoove us to work together constructively rather than destructively.”

(If you think Fertig is tough toward some of the women he dealt with at Fresno State, check out his assessment of Nick Saban during the latter’s one season as Toledo football coach, where Fertig also worked. “Alpha dog” and “Big Kahuna” are among the more charitable descriptions he has for the current Alabama coach.)

One of the most troublesome issues I have with establishment sports feminism is its zeal to allow the past to influence the present, as if we were still in that past. Because of this, there also is little contemplation of the future. What Fertig has written here is something he and I discussed at length last summer when we first became acquainted.

He’s also making a crucial distinction between the need to identify and eradicate true discrimination and the doggedness of some women’s sports advocates who feel the need to fight every grievance, real or perceived, to the death. This is a distinction that has been long lost on the likes of Deborah Brake, Donna Lopiano, Erin Buzuvis, Mary Jo Kane, Mariah Burton Nelson, et al. Their fanaticism is cemented, even though they will continue to be regarded as authorities on Title IX when they’re cited by the mainstream media.

Yet Fertig is closer to appreciating the true spirit of Title IX than any of them.

In perhaps the only true sentence of her book, Brake just glosses over it:

“Title IX’s biggest success, and its most revolutionary impact in term of producing cultural transformation, is the huge increase in the number of girls who grow up playing organized sports, with many of them continuing to do so into adulthood.”

That’s all the law was meant to do.

Title IX was never meant to be an end unto itself, a self-perpetuating mechanism commanded by those who have mastered the legal process and are adept in connecting with the media, and for those who have made it a creed, an article of faith, and even a belief system.

It was, and is, a vehicle for those girls and women who encounter legal obstacles to gain equal access to educational and sports opportunities. It’s up to them to take advantage of those opportunities (or not), and it has been their continuous and growing participation that has changed the culture, as Brake mentions, and not the male-bashing, utopian notions of jargon-spouting academic feminists like her trying to boost their professional bona fides.

If Title IX and women’s sports are to continue to thrive, the law needs a new compliance framework for sports and the “movement” needs some new leaders. Because both Title IX as it is enforced now and some of its most vocal adherents are worn out and have nothing new to offer.

Coming Friday: In the concluding post of this series, I finally explain what the racquet pictured above is all about, and why I’ve found it necessary to make all the racket about women’s sports. This might be more personal than I planned, but what I’ve learned from writing this series, and exchanging thoughts and ideas with readers, has been a revelation.

Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the eighth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

At about the time young girls in America were beginning to flock to playing fields and other athletic venues in unprecedented numbers, women’s sports leaders in the 1990s began cranking up some new rhetoric about the reasons they should be participating and competing.

This went beyond obtaining an athletic scholarship and a college education in the process, as Title IX was permitting them to do.

As the female experience in sports was poised to make astonishing breakthroughs later in that decade — the Atlanta Olympics, the creation of the WNBA and the Women’s World Cup — a new line in the sports feminist narrative was sounding a bit more stern, even grim: Participating in sports was imperative, for the sake of good health and a prosperous career, among other factors. Former University of Iowa women’s athletics director Christine Grant summed up this sentiment rather famously:

“Girls must play sports. It’s essential for successful people.”

Her sister-in-arms, Donna Lopiano, at the time presiding over the Women’s Sports Foundation, added more details of how girls and women would benefit from sports:

“Greater confidence levels, self-esteem, and a better self image. They are also less likely to be involved in an unintended pregnancy, less likely to take drugs and engage in other high-risk behavior, and more likely to stay in school. The health benefits are tremendous and include a lower risk of breast cancer and osteoporosis.”

It’s hard to dispute that a positive experience in sports can yield these and other benefits, beyond the pleasure of playing. I understood that even as a young girl in pre-Title IX America. Told how unusual it was for a girl to want to play ball as much as I did, I shrugged off such statements, defiant of even polite suggestion of conformity. I was (and remain) stubbornly independent off the field as well, but never in my life did I think the urge to get girls to get in the game would become even more conformist than what I fought against.

Playing for all the wrong reasons

The symbol of this almost desperate attempt to encourage girls to get involved in sports was a 1995 Nike commercial, If You Let Me Play Sports. An influential sports shoe company with a brilliant reputation for powerful marketing and imagery packed more into this 30-second spot than all the pronouncements of sports feminists could manage in 30 years:

This ad certainly felt like a triumphal moment for women’s sports leaders, a cultural watershed in reaching the American public about the values and virtues of sports for girls. Clucked a Nike copywriter:

“It wasn’t advertising. It was the truth.”

But was it?

I was initially chilled at seeing this ad when was first unveiled, and my feeling soon switched to horror.

First of all, the title of the ad.

Who was stopping girls from playing? Anywhere in America? In the mid-1990s? This has been part of the sports feminist mantra — that girls and women, even then, were somehow still being prevented from playing, even two full decades into the Title IX era. If not actually on the field, then in a larger cultural context. Except that this was patently untrue.

Secondly, there has been little response to having young girls spout the same talking points of activists, as if they have any idea what they’re really saying. The worst example was the somber girl, sitting on a swing and saying in a monotone that if only she could be allowed to play sports:

“I will be more likely to be leave a man who beats me.”

To have the words of adults come out of the mouths of children is reprehensible, this line above all. There’s an implication here that females must be implored to get into sports, to “become strong,” if for nothing else than to deal with abusive men. Mariah Burton Nelson must have been beaming.

Rarely has the veracity of these statements in this ad, and in the entire “girls must play sports” meme been questioned. What are the sources for these claims? We are never told. This all sounds so right, so they must be true.

It’s OK not to play — really, it is

Yet a flood of books, research and other claims were forthcoming in the wake of the Nike ad, and as social scientists, academics and the larger feminist community issued warning signs about how girls were being “shortchanged” in American society.

A 1998 book, “Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem and Save Girls’ Lives,” plays off these claims, which were expertly demolished by dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers.

Now girls needed to be “saved” through sports. But what if they stop playing? This is a terrifying prospect for the well-meaning co-authors, Jean Zimmerman and Gil Reavill, so they devoted a chapter to it. “When Sports Fails Girls” leads where the title suggests. There are lengthy discussions of eating disorders and body image, and of sexual abuse by and relationships with coaches.

Zimmerman and Reavill mention only in passing that girls may become interested in other activities, and even “in boys.” Apparently, “some people” believe this, but they don’t bother to explore that possibility. It is a glaring omission.

Today, as a third generation of young girls and women participate in sports, there is more research being conducted into the topic, and that is being widely hailed in the mainstream media. So is the Nike ad, still uncritically. Chirped The Wall Street Journal:

“A 10 percentage-point rise in girls’ participation in high school sports leads to a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point increase in female labor-force participation.

“Maybe athletics should be added to reading, writing and arithmetic.”

Yet women are more than 50 percent of college students today, and are becoming more in demand in a labor force that increasingly favors knowledge- and information-based collaborative skills. Whether or not they played sports does not appear to be a factor. They’re changing the cultures of education and work, indeed, they may be actually shaping it, by the sheer dominance of their numbers. This is hardly being shortchanged.

While these developments are good news, there are other basic questions unanswered. Why, when women are diving deeply into all kinds of academic, athletic and extracurricular activities, is such a disproportionate amount of attention being focused on those who play sports? Stevenson’s research doesn’t address those girls and women who don’t play sports and who aren’t interested in it at all, but are having succesful, happy and healthy lives. What about them? What about those of us who did play, once upon a time, and did drop out, and are just fine?

Yes, Title IX and the women’s sports movement opened the doors of sports to girls and women who might not otherwise have been able to play. But to continue to insist that this must be a top priority, a higher-value choice among many that females now have available because of health, fitness, academic and professional reasons, is to disrespect the fact that not all women will make the same choices. There’s a certain comformity in this notion that I find detestable, given the rebellious roots of my sports experience.

And finally — and I will write about this in more depth in my final post on Friday — all these feel-good stories and studies are missing any examination why those of us who love sports were drawn to it in the first place:

If not for the joy of sports, then for what? What’s the point?

Coming Thursday: As the Title IX establishment celebrates the 39th anniversary of the passage of the law, some envision how the “revolution” might continue. Their ideas subvert the original intent and spirit of that statute and do little to broaden the mainstream appeal of women’s sports. Warning: I may get a little angry about all this.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the seventh in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Yesterday I mapped out a few ideas on how Title IX compliance might be changed to reflect the progress of women’s college athletics today, mindful that none of these will probably go anywhere. Instead of boosting participation numbers to match proportionality, I argue that issues over funding, facilities and related matters be made the focal point of new sports regulations.

Today I’ll explain why what we have now is what we’re stuck with, probably for at least another 30 years.

Has this all been a waste of time, then? I don’t think so. The public’s view of what Title IX is has been defined by just one narrow band of interest groups that nonetheless dominates, in large part because there’s not much in the way of any alternative being presented.

Why the 3-part test won’t go

It’s politics. The Women’s Sports Foundation and National Women’s Law Center have made Title IX their highest priority, and it shows. Ever since the mid-1990s, with the Cohen vs. Brown decision and a policy clarification that made proportionality the de facto standard for sports compliance, the Title IX establishment has scored victory after victory, in courts of law and public opinion.

Rather uncritical mainstream media coverage hasn’t hurt with the latter, even though some reporters do a good job explaining the concerns of those advocating on behalf of displaced male athletes. But critics like the College Sports Council have struggled to get any kind of sustained traction for their views, outside of “he said, she said” stories purporting to demonstrate “balance” on a hot topic. And they simply don’t have the law on their side, as it is being interpreted by the federal courts. At times, the CSC can sound as shrill as the women’s groups it opposes, and that’s saying something. We have two entrenched positions that are ironclad. This will not spur meaningful change.

There’s also no willpower in Washington to change any of this. Title IX has become something of a third-rail issue, and frankly, it wasn’t a terribly high priority in Congress even before the current economic crisis. Bush’s education secretary didn’t act on his own Title IX commission’s recommendations, some of which tried to stake out at least a few new ideas worth pondering. They’ve been shelved, probably permanently.

It’s legal. There’s quite a bit of case law and legal precedent for maintaining the status quo. A new set of regulations would take years to craft into a workable set of options for colleges to follow, as guided by the courts. The Supreme Court declined to take up Cohen v. Brown in 1997 because there had been no disagreement at two lower court levels. There has been little since about anything significant regarding the 3-part test.

Football and proportionality

Because the 3-part test is here to stay, here’s another vexing issue that has been around for years: Should football be counted in the proportionality equation?

I’ve long said no — and so have others — because football is a different animal, both in having no female equivalent and with the specialized nature of the sport prompting large rosters. I say this realizing that this suggestion now is basically a non-starter.

Here’s a little history lesson: Two years after Title IX was passed, there was an effort in Congress to exempt revenue-producing sports. However, the Tower Amendment failed, leading to legislation that created the sports regulations we have now, including the 3-part test. I don’t see how any renewed effort to take football out of Title IX compliance will fly.

And given the current problems in college football, it’s implausible that any position to keep that sport away from the gender equity fray can be taken seriously. Even if it makes sense. If you make it a men vs. women thing, which the women’s advocates will do, it will be very easy to pinpoint where the more troubling issues lie.

Currently the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly I-A) scholarship limit is 85; it used to be 120 before Title IX compliance began in earnest. I’ve thought for a while about cutting the number, perhaps to 70, and then taking football out of the picture.

But I hate the idea of more men being turned away. Even if you agree that football is bloated, there are real human beings who did nothing to hold back women athletes but who are paying the price for what happened before they were born.

I also loathe roster management, although keeping down costs is a persistent issue in football. Here’s another doozy from Ball State, which spent $88,000 to lodge football players before home games. The NCAA could put some teeth in curtailing this, but it hasn’t for years. Serious college football reform efforts would need to include much more than any impact on women’s sports, but those are about as likely to take place as scotching the 3-part test.

Title IX advocates insist there’s still a lot of fat remaining that needs to be cut. Especially below the BCS level schools do lose money on football, sometimes a lot of money.

The political reality is the women’s advocates won’t budge in having football tied to proportionality, and they’d raise holy hell if anybody tried to cut it out. Without football in the mix, most schools would comply with Title IX, and men’s and women’s non-revenue teams might get more proper attention.

These changes alone still won’t yield the money that would conceivably be redistributed to the women’s side. And scaling back football, even to a modest degree, has never encouraged a young woman to try out for a team.

Some other suggestions for reform

Sportswriter Beau Dure doesn’t think that football “should be given a pass.” But he suggests adding a fourth prong of compliance for schools that already provide a healthy roster of sports for women:

“If you’ve got fully funded women’s basketball, field hockey, golf, lacrosse, soccer, softball, tennis and volleyball, do you really have to add women’s-only rowing and equestrian just for equity’s sake? Or cut a men’s program for fear of following Brown as a loser in court?

“If I have a bias in all this, it’s as a fan of soccer and Olympic sports. They’re threatened — across the board. Women’s basketball has grown by leaps and bounds — at Duke, I attended games that drew a couple hundred fans; today, they draw several thousand. Great. Let’s invest elsewhere.”

What an amazingly sane idea.

Little room for optimism

However, the last thing the powerful women’s interests groups want is for colleges to actually reach compliance; it would endanger their advocacy. Besides, there’s fertile new ground for litigation at the scholastic level, and the National Women’s Law Center’s most recent publicity stunt is a declaration of these intentions. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of high school districts across the country face lawsuits and some very painful prospects at a time when many of them are laying off teachers, gutting academic programs and closing schoools.

More disturbingly, so-called Title IX legal experts are getting all dreamy about the future of the law, interpreting the current status as only just the beginning of where they want to go next. Says former NWLC attorney Deborah Brake in her recent book on Title IX:

“Degendering sports is an important part of securing sex equality in sports.”

Protect your privates, fellas. Here we go again. More on that later in the week.

Coming Wednesday: Do girls and women really need sports? Yes, this is another heretical question I’m asking here. But you may not be aware of the soul-crushing reasons women’s advocates have cited to virtually beg females to get in the game.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.