Extracurriculars

This is the sixth 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.

Since I’ve been saying for quite a while that the 3-part test for Title IX sports compliance is flawed, I thought I ought to propose how the law might be improved. I’m not alone in suggesting at least an evaluation of where we are after more than 30 years, but you probably won’t hear much about all that this week, with Thursday’s 39th anniversary of the passage of Title IX approaching. The Sisterhood chanting has already begun. It will be largely uncritical.

The College Sports Council, which has called for changes to Title IX for a number of years, wants to reinstate the interest survey (boosted by the Bush administration in 2005 but booted by the Obama administration in 2009). This is a non-starter for the Title IX diehards, who claim that women are as interested in sports as men. While I generally agree with the CSC on Title IX issues, it offers few other ideas on reforming the law.

I may under the biggest illusion of all in believing that the 3-part test can be replaced with new regulations to fit the times. But I’ll throw out a few ideas that are by no means anything more than that.

But first, here are the three options for Title IX sports compliance that were adopted in 1979:

– The percentage of female and male athletes is substantially proportionate to the percentage of female and male undergraduates, respectively.

– Demonstrate a history of continuing and expanding opportunities for the underrepresented sex (women in virtually every instance).

– “Fully and effectively” accommodate the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex (again, this is almost always females).

Why the 3-part test must go

It’s antiquated. When the HEW policy interpretation cited above went into effect, women were in the distinct minority in college athletic programs, and far below parity in higher education overall. The latter is hardly the case today, with women comprising in many cases 55-60 percent of a college’s undergraduate enrollment.

With regards to the first test, while women are not at 50 percent in most cases in athletic departments, they are surpassing that in some instances, even at programs with large football programs. Example in my backyard: The University of Georgia, where 52 percent of the athletes are women. But because the female undergraduate enrollment is 58 percent, a school with one of the most successful women’s athletics programs in the nation is vulnerable to Title IX litigation.

That’s why UGA likely will add another women’s sport in the near future. Like many schools, it is open to a lawsuit for reasons having nothing to do with sports, but rather how many females, most of whom will never suit up, gain admission through a non-athletic component of the university administration.

It punishes male athletes. Title IX absolutists expect athletic departments to keep up with enrollment patterns, but to reasonable people this truly is the warped logic of proportionality. Georgia hasn’t cut men’s teams to move closer toward complying with the first test, thanks to bulging athletic coffers. But it’s the exception and not the rule.

As for the second test, there’s no seeming end to how long women’s teams may be added. There’s one big problem: There aren’t that many more sports to add. The NCAA’s list of Emerging Sports for Women, which is compiled to assist athletic programs with Title IX compliance, currently has only four sports, and one of them, squash, will be dropped in August.

The other three sports don’t figure to attract a groundswell of support; indeed, both equestrian and sand volleyball were issued reprieves by the NCAA last year after failing to add enough varsity programs to “show promise” of being NCAA-sponsored sports. The other is rugby, which currently has only two varsity women’s teams in the entire nation. If the NCAA can’t find any viable new sports to add then perhaps “emerging” is the wrong choice of words.

Lacrosse, now reaching into the Deep South, may be the only women’s sport left with major growth potential. There’s also the controversial subject of competitive cheerleading, which I’ll discuss in a later post this week.

As for the third test, it’s hard to “accommodate the interests and abilities” of the underrepresented sex if you can’t adequately survey what those interests may be. The Title IX establishment doesn’t trust interest surveys, claiming they could get caught in an e-mail spam filter. It’s more likely they fear the answers that women students may provide won’t jibe with their proportionality ideal. A political favor by the Obama White House has made the activists happy (as conservative interests were pleased with the 2005 Bush policy clarification), and that’s all that matters. This prong has been effectively neutered.

What I’d like to see

The battle to get girls and women in the game has been a resounding success. Shifting the Title IX compliance framework away from participation and toward taking care of what’s been built is a possibility worth pondering.

Another example in my backyard: Two years ago, Georgia Tech — which because of its low female enrollment achieved proportionality years ago — opened a beautiful new on-campus softball stadium for its nationally ranked program. Tech has just seven teams for women, and is the only school in the ACC without a women’s soccer program. Without the pressure of having to add teams, Tech is better resourcing what teams it has, which helps with recruiting and enhances the student-athlete experience.

Throughout the country, there are still are plenty of disparities in facilities, funding, equipment, travel and recruiting budgets and related components of operating a college sports team. This is part of Title IX compliance, too, but it’s overshadowed by the furor over the 3-part test. A recent series of stories in the Ball State student newspaper illustrated what work remains to be done, and it is considerable at that school and many others.

Imagine this: Instead of wasting time and money adding teams in obscure sports that struggle to attract participants, schools could use those dollars on better venues, improve coaching salary scales and create an environment for women athletes that’s truly special. New regulations based around these deficiencies would fulfill the spirit of Title IX better than the current numbers game athletics departments have to play to get right with proportionality.

So much of the money that is spent on women’s sports has often come with little of what I call emotional support, and this might be the biggest shortcoming of all. Too many athletics directors simply throw money at women’s teams because they have to under Title IX, and then go off and deal with football boosters or new arena architects. They don’t want to be bothered.

Far too many women’s teams, especially in basketball, could stand to be better marketed and promoted. There’s plenty of TV exposure in hoops thanks to rich conference multi-sport deals, but a more ground-level marketing wouldn’t hurt. If they’re not going to make money, at least they could draw more of a crowd. Too many schools do too little in this regard, and this change has to start at the top.

On the other hand, women’s sports activists who have won resoundingly in the courts for their cause also have won over few people with their us vs. them, to-the-death tactics. It’s hard to give something emotional support when you might be sued by people who have no interest in persuading you to care.

Coming Tuesday: Why all these ideas — or anyone else’s — are likely to go splat. And why unwedding football from proportionality is a longshot.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

Thanks to all those on Twitter and elsewhere for their comments this week to the start of my series, “Women’s Sports Without Illusions.” I’m really humbled by it all.

Of course, I’m not expecting the precincts of The Sisterhood to report in, at least directly. They prefer to stay wrapped in a cocoon of their own making, locking up blog comments and talking only among themselves.

I’m not sure I intended it to turn out this way, but my posts this week ended up being a short history of the women’s sports movement, nearly decade-by-decade. As I’ve been pointing out, this isn’t just about Title IX. Perhaps my biggest arguments have been about the cultural grievances that I outlined in Parts 4 and 5.

Next week, which marks the 39th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, I want to lay out some ideas about where women’s sports goes next — indeed, where they actually are now. These include reworking Title IX and examining the challenge of women’s pro sports and developing women’s sports around the world, where true oppression still exists.

Of course, I may under the biggest illusion of all in thinking we can move beyond the rhetorical, legal and other cultural realities of the present. I just want to revive the notion of “joy” in women’s sports, which its leaders have disdained for a very long time now.

Regardless of your views on this — and if you disagree, please speak up — let’s start having a conversation. This was one of the main reasons for me taking the plunge and putting this series together. Feel free to comment here or on any of the posts in this series.

Oh, and I promise to write a lot shorter next week!

Part 1: The elusive notion of gender equality in sports

Part 2: Women’s sports and the matter of choice

Part 3: How women have held back women’s sports

Part 4: Making football the enemy of women’s sports

Part 5: Sports and eros, or why sex is more fun than gender

This is the fifth 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.

After she revealed the famous black sports bra that was dubbed “the cloth symbol of Title IX’s success,” World Cup-winning soccer star Brandi Chastain was rebuked by other women for showing a lot more than that before she ever became famous.

It wasn’t the provocative demonstration of underclothing following her clinching penalty kick in July 1999 in the Rose Bowl that drew the ire of some women’s sports figures. Instead, it was a pre-World Cup pose in Gear magazine in which Chastain was crouching and completely in the buff except for two strategically placed soccer balls.

Other photos in the spread showed off a ripped physique that symbolized Chastain’s arduous journey back to the U.S. women’s national team after she was dropped from the 1995 World Cup squad for being out of shape. Chastain was proudly defiant, and hoped it would inspire young girls:

“Hey, I ran my ass off for that body.”

More than a year later, as the American team prepared for the Olympics, the Village Voice rounded up the voices of disgruntled sports feminists — referred to fondly on this blog as The Sisterhood of Perpetual Indignance — to lecture a fully grown adult for apparently letting her entire gender down. Said Mary Jo Kane, an oft-quoted critic of such poses:

“If you’re a female athlete or you’re somebody who’s trying to promote a female athlete and you’re concerned that they might have the ‘wrong’ image, the easiest way to establish their so-called heterosexuality or their normalcy is to take their clothes off.”

Translation: Chastain was unwittingly implicit in media exploitation of her body. She didn’t know that she was buying into the twin evils of “heterosexism” and “homonegativism” that are rampant in American media culture. That’s why Kane had to speak for her. She and her ilk do this a lot, and they even conduct academic research into this subject, as I’ll detail below.

Here’s another former fan, so turned off by the “sexualization” of the U.S. women’s team, that she said she rooted for China in the finals.

For the love of God.

As I wrote yesterday, the anti-football fetish of some sports feminists signified a troubling new grievance on the gender equity front during the 1990s. But when it comes to the subject of sex, establishment feminists have an even greater level of discomfort than the clashing of shoulder pads. They’d rather talk about gender. Incessantly.

Indignantly.

Representation obsessions

The 1999 Women’s World Cup might be regarded as highly as Billie Jean King’s “Battle of the Sexes” win in 1973 over Bobby Riggs as a touchstone in the development of women’s sports in America. The U.S. team was seen as the wholesome girls next door, and as David Letterman’s “Soccer Mamas!” Even star midfielder Julie Foudy, later a president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, jokingly referred to herself and her teammates as “booters with hooters.”

William Saletan of Slate proclaimed this event had something for every feminist, which ought to have been a good thing. But the “difference feminists” were not amused, especially when it came to sex appeal.

For them, there is no such thing.

Kane is the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota. She is frequently cited in major media outlets as an expert on sports and sexism, and was most recently an advisor for espnW, for which she was quoted in The New York Times. Like many professional feminists, Kane is very accomplished at being front and center on these topics. It all appears so mainstream and reasonable, until you look at what she and her Tucker Center cohorts are researching:

“Examining Online Intercollegiate Head Coaches’ Biographies: Reproducing or Challenging Heteronormativity and Heterosexism?”

“Playing Unfair: The Media Image of the Female Athlete”

And there also is a full-fledged lecture series with these headliners:

“Sex vs. Athletic Competence: Exploring Competing Narratives in Marketing and Promoting Women’s Sports”

“Images of Women, Sexuality and Nationalism: What’s (Olympic) Sport Got To Do With It?”

“Confronting the Triad of Violence in Men’s Sports”

To be fair, the Tucker Center also researches issues involving youth sports, sports and aging and sport-related health issues like concussions. Kane and her colleagues are professors of kineseology, which appears to have supplanted the traditional physical education curriculum as a hothouse for what they refer to as “sport scholars.”

But when it comes to media issues, this “scholarship” descends into insufferable, incomprehensible dogma. Here’s most of the background paragraph on the first title mentioned above, of which Kane was a co-author and which was presented in 2009:

“Past research in intercollegiate sports connects heteronormativity (i.e., societal and/or institutional assumption that heterosexuality is the norm) and heterosexism (i.e., prejudicial and discriminatory practices and beliefs toward any non-heterosexual identities and relationships) to the creation of privilege for the dominant group. Sport media scholars contend that coverage and framing of athletes and coaches present females in heteronormative ways in print, broadcast and new media. To date, research examining heteronormativity and heterosexism on university-sponsored athletic websites is scarce. . . . . Online biographies of NCAA Intercollegiate Head Coaches were examined for textual representations of dominant ideologies documented in sport media research — specificially heteronormativity and heterosexism.”

What the H?

Apparently, this is considered legitimate academic research.

‘A divine nimbus exhales from it’

This report came amid an outcry over the cover of an online media guide featuring players on the Texas A & M women’s basketball team dressed in — ahem — dresses.

The picture of heteronormativity?

Some of the same Aggies obviously felt so exploited by this that they went out the next season and won the NCAA championship. There was nothing in the way of what we in the South call “nekkidness” to this pose. It was along the lines of a James Bond theme. The fuss here was about all that heternormativity and heterosexism that’s supposed to signal a pivot away from lesbianism, all through mere representation. Some have even called it “drag” for women athletes.

Former Vanderbilt basketball star Chantelle Anderson begged to differ:

“It’s not about sexuality at all. It’s a photo shoot. As women, we want to show both sides. I don’t understand why it has to be us trying to prove we’re not gay.”

The official website for the Florida State women’s basketball team also got caught in the crosshairs two years ago when the players were depicted in senior prom photos — and sneakers. No nudity was involved here either, and there was nothing distasteful, except to those who think too much “beauty” is being peddled to attract new fans to the women’s game. The only plausible concern is that these are college athletes being made to represent their team in such a way, instead of pros able to make their own decisions.

Interestingly, the Seminoles had a rather rather unexpected defender in former National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland:

“We didn’t fight against dresses, but did fight against the fallacy that said if you wore a dress, you couldn’t be a competitor. To now suggest the opposite — that if you play sports you shouldn’t wear a dress — is the same kind of backward thinking that in the past attempted to block women from full equality.”

As someone who hasn’t worn a dress since, oh, high school graduation, I have just one question:

What the H?

There will always be feminist scolds to scream that women athletes are participating in the marginalization of their sisters. But iconic figures like Candace Parker understand better than most that sex and the body cannot be separated, and what’s more, this is a good thing. They are defining their own brand of femininity for themselves. Isn’t this what the movement was supposed to be about?

If a “Second Wave” feminist diehard like Ireland can come around on a subject like this, than anything’s possible, right?

Whitmanesque.

There wasn’t much of an outcry last fall when WNBA star Diana Taurasi featured on the cover of ESPN The Magazine’s body issue, with not even basketballs as props. I mean, honestly, how could you not marvel at all this, for aesthetic, athletic or sexual reasons?

The Mary Jo Kanes of the world want women athletes to be portrayed only as that, as hollow one-dimensional figures who reflect only a strict feminist visual ideal of what’s permissible to them. Judging from her comments and writings over many years, what Kane is suggesting is at the water’s edge of a certain kind of body fascism, but that’s a highly charged word and I’ll stop there.

Women’s sports, sexual expression and glamor do not have to be mutually exclusive, and I’m encouraged that the women who actually play the games, instead of those who theorize about them, are embracing that and ignoring the fusspots. They are athletes, and they are women. Thank God for that.

Sports historian Allen Guttmann, who’s admiringly chronicled the history of women’s sports, wrote in the mid-1990s that not only were feminist claims of “sexualization” passé, but the link between sports and eroticism can no longer be denied, especially where women are involved:

“Complaining that the media have portrayed Katarina Witt ‘as a sexy female’ rather than as ‘a serious, committed athlete with a discipline and desire for athletic excellence,’ Mary Jo Kane and Susan L. Greendorfer fail to acknowledge that Witt — like thousands of other women — is a serious athlete and a sexy female (who is very obviously aware of her attractiveness). . . . it is time to recognize that most of today’s journalists are more than willing to acknowledge the strength, endurance, toughness and skills of women like Witt.”

Now more than ever.

Coming Monday: Next week I’ll begin offering some ideas on what I call “The Next Frontier for Women’s Sports,” starting with the need to rework Title IX.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the fourth 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.

Women’s sports leaders had long done battle with college football figures over financial resources, with University of Texas women’s athletics director Donna Lopiano famously lambasting the “golden goose” of the gridiron that had become too fat and needed to share with women’s sports.

By the early 1990s, Lopiano had become the head of the Women’s Sports Foundation while a wave of sports-related Title IX litigation ensued, highlighted by the landmark Cohen v. Brown dispute.

But the animus over gender equity on legal grounds was compounded by a fiery charge from a new breed of sports feminist fulminating with deep cultural resentment against men and the games they play.

Former Stanford and pro basketball player Mariah Burton Nelson earned plenty of mainstream media attention for her unrelenting 1994 polemic “The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football,” for which she was also deemed a cultural authority on women and sports.

What she didn’t receive was much scrutiny of her sweeping claims that the male sports culture in America was limiting the progress for women in sports and becoming an unchecked breeding ground for violent male athletes who were a danger to women off the field.

The pigskin as patriarchy

With American football at the metaphorical and literal core of her argument, Nelson advanced a dreary narrative that initially surfaced during the women’s movement of the 1960s. The Catholic theologian Michael Novak, in his classic “The Joy of Sports,” writes that the century-old American gridiron game collided head-on with the ideology of feminists determined to rip apart the pillars of mainstream culture:

“They have wished to feminize the male, in order to ‘humanize’ him. They will extirpate, they say, machismo, militarism, fascism. Football has become for many the symbol of everything they loathe.”

Nelson’s scornful prose follows the path of feminist legal advocate Catherine MacKinnon, who waged various anti-pornography crusades and asserted that heterosexual sex was tantamount to rape. This deepened divisions with American feminists committed to the First Amendment and skeptical of gender and cultural wars. The legendary New York journalist Pete Hamill, among many others, lamented the warped views of “The New Victorians” whom MacKinnon embodied.

A seamless blend of the toxic ideas of MacKinnon, “Backlash” author Susan Faludi and feminist academic theory, “The Stronger Women Get” was Nelson’s attempt to bring sports into the “airless, sunless” world that Hamill described. In that, she succeeds quite well.

But a few pages in, open-minded readers are smothered by this dour absolutism as Nelson states in her thesis that sports are not communal experiences shared by Americans of both genders. Instead:

“They unite American men in a celebration of male victory.”

This is the first of dozens of one-sided, unprovable, ludicrous and even mean-spirited claims Nelson makes, as she ditches intellectual rigor to traffick in cheap emotionalism and male-bashing. A few examples:

“Everything that happened a hundred years ago is happening today.”

“Men have culturally sanctioned rights to violence.”

“Sportswomen disrupt the manly sports lovefest.”

“Who will win, Team Macho or Team Feminism?”

Nelson was writing before the creation of the WNBA, the 1999 Women’s World Cup and the growth of television interest in sports like women’s college basketball. Her unremitting diatribe reflected a new, more virulent strain of women’s sports activism that went far beyond the realm of Title IX.

But American women weren’t buying it. At the same time, some the fastest-growing groups of football fans were women untroubled by the manly lovefest. If anything, they reveled in it, for many of the same reasons many men admit to loving the game.

Nelson, however, sees full-flush male genitalia even in the routine act of a football official measuring for a first down, with the yardstick the penis and the ball, well, a ball.

Did this imagery keep her awake at night?

By the time she’s finished, Nelson has vilified practically every male who’s ever put on shoulder pads and equated male participation in “masculinist” sports as license to commit rape, especially gang rape. She trumpeted debunked studies about increased domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday, and hailed other advocacy research that exaggerated the levels of sexual violence committed by male athletes, in order to make her most scurrilous charge:

“Maybe the the question is not why so many sportsmen rape, but why more of them don’t?”

There is no element of this sports world in which women (many of them athletes) are not constantly being excluded, hounded, harassed, molested, beaten, raped and even killed by males sanctioned through their sports to do these things.

As loopy and ham-fisted as this was, Nelson has inspired her own adherents who perpetuate this gloomy pronouncement.

Tales from the Pink Locker Room

Before she began the Title IX Blog that is often cited by the gender equity establishment and major media outlets, Erin Buzuvis was a visiting law professor at the University of Iowa. In 2005, she was horrified to discover that the visitors locker room at Kinnick Stadium was awash in light pink. Indeed, it was a very calming shade ordered up by former football coach Hayden Fry as a psychological ploy. It worked.

The late Michigan football coach Bo Schemechler hated that locker room for competitive reasons. Buzuvis hated it for cultural reasons, denouncing it as a symbol of misogyny and homophobia:

“With a pink locker room, you’re saying that ‘You are a girlie man. You are weak like a girl.’ That implies that girls are non-dominant, therefore, lesser. And that is offensive.”

With that, all hell broke loose in Hawkeye Nation, as Iowa football fans vigorously attacked her on message boards and blogs, with some regrettably making death threats and posting other vulgarities.

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post couldn’t resist putting in a dig at this antiquated grievance:

“It’s so 1968. What’s missing from the picture is merely 40 years. What’s also missing is the recognition that male and female athletes alike have been deconstructing and subverting pinkness for years quite cleverly. Joe Namath put on panty hose. Roosevelt Grier did needlepoint. Herschel Walker took ballet and used moisturizers. Fry understood something Buzuvis apparently doesn’t: The people most likely to be undone by pink walls are not straight men, women or gays, but misogynists and homophobes.”

In 2008, after she had become a professor at the Western New England College law school, Buzuvis published a paper (PDF) about the Iowa incident that would have made Nelson and MacKinnon proud. Infested with academic feminist jargon, Buzuvis cites Marxist theorists in laying out a “cultural studies” framework for her argument that football indeed is the enemy of women in sports, the color pink does indeed signify its misogynist nature, and that there are serious Title IX implications to all this as well.

Her poverty of ideas is surpassed only by her pretentious and obscure use of language that few people outside the academic world even know about. Read this passage and weep:

“Interpellation can be accomplished by visual as well as verbal calls, which is to say that individuals’ relationships to ideology are often ’symbolically mediated.’ Analysis of ideology and hegemony thus incorporates semiotics, the studies of signs. Semiotics is incorporated into much of cultural theory because it positions the reader or consumer of cultural symbols as actively engaged in the construction of the meaning of symbols by producing symbols themselves.”

Diagram those sentences.

There used to be Bad Writing Contest some academics started to mock this. A professor Buzuvis approvingly cites in her paper is a previous winner. It’s too bad the contest ended before Buzuvis picked up her poison pen; she might have been a worthy honoree.

Buzuvis makes repeated references to “hegemonic masculinity” and phrases not commonly heard in everyday English. This is just the point: To make it indecipherable to all but a few “scholars” like herself. She finally gets to her point, at the end of 53 godforsaken pages of this:

“The conclusion I draw from the PLR is that cultural values must change before the equality guarantees of Title IX will ever be fully realized.”

But of course. How original.

Coming Friday: While the lords of college football gained more power and wealth as a new century dawned, women’s sports advocates continued to push themselves further down a cultural rabbit hole, obsessed with sexuality and media representation. Naturally, they blamed all of this on the “patriarchy.”

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the third 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.

The standard narrative script followed by women’s sports activists is that men are to blame for the slow progress of female athletics.

But it doesn’t take much digging to discover that women — female physical educators until the 1970s and politically-minded feminists since then — also have hindered what’s referred to now as the women’s sports “revolution.”

Starting in the 1890s, when Senda Berenson Abbott formulated a restricting first set of basketball rules for women, leading figures in women’s athletics wanted anything but a revolution. As much as any men, they expended decades’ worth of energy to prevent that from ever taking place.

The singular philosophical line running through organized women’s scholastic sports has been anti-commercial, and until the 1960s, largely anti-competitive. For the better part of 70 years, these women resisted efforts to expand competitive athletic opportunities, working especially hard to prevent varsity sports from trumping intramurals and “play days” on high school and college campuses.

That’s because for many of these women’s leaders, maintaining control of women’s sports — and keeping them out of the hands of men favoring a commercial, highly competitive model of sports the women reviled — has mattered above all else, even at the expense of increased opportunities for female athletes.

Maiden Aunts don’t always know best

“When equal opportunity knocks,” posted on the NCAA website in January, chronicles the dramatic, contentious 1981 vote at the NCAA convention to sponsor women’s college athletics, which since 1972 had been governed by the female-led Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The story amply quotes two high-profile AIAW stalwarts who still believe that women’s sports was dealt a severe setback when the organization collapsed.

Said former Texas women’s athletics director and Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano, the AIAW president during its last sports season of 1981-82:

“I think the NCAA takeover slowed down the development of women’s sports probably by a good five to 10 years.”

For most of its existence, however, the AIAW was short of money, and ambivalent about pursuing commercial options. The AIAW also was the defendant in one of the first Title IX sports lawsuits because it initially banned athletic scholarships, while the NCAA permitted them for male athletes.

Just let this sink in for a moment: Women discriminating against women, as the age of Title IX dawned. How many years did that set back women’s sports?

This policy, eventually dropped in an out of court deal, was a byproduct of the AIAW’s egalitarian philosophy but untenable in the wake of the new law.

From that point on, AIAW leaders were focused more on holding on to power and their self-proclaimed virtuous approach than catering to the competitive desires of female athletes. Within the organization there was disagreement about later revisions of the scholarship policy that prevented women athletes from receiving aid for anything more than tuition and fees, and other rules that banned schools from paying coaches for recruiting trip expenses.

According to data gathered by sports historian Ying Wushanley, the AIAW spent more than 20 percent of its overall revenues ($847,000) on legal expenses during its 10-year history, while allocating only eight percent ($315,000) on championship competitions for women athletes.

During its final three years (1979-82), as it battled for survival, the AIAW burned through $569,000 for lawyers, mainly to fight the NCAA.

But even well before the NCAA vote, top women’s coaches — including Tennessee Lady Vols legend Pat Summitt — were publicly saying that the NCAA was the way to go, as she reflected 20 years later:

“For me it was tough emotionally, but professionally it was clear cut. We felt emotionally tied to the AIAW, but there comes a time when you have to look at the big picture, opportunities for your sport and women’s athletics across the board.”

That the AIAW required schools to pay their own way to national tournaments also made it easier for athletics departments to cast their lot with the NCAA, which then as now foots the bill for those expenses.

Virtue or politics?

Also by this time, even some AIAW leaders had become disenchanted with the organization’s activities, including what women’s basketball writer Mel Greenberg described as a vendetta against schools and individuals supporting the NCAA move. Judith Holland, like Lopiano a former AIAW president, felt that women athletes were being shortchanged amid all this, and testified on behalf of the NCAA during the AIAW’s unsuccessful antitrust trial.

For that, Holland, then an associate athletics director at UCLA, was labeled a “co-conspirator,” as if she were the Whittaker Chambers of women’s sports. In a recent video interview posted on the Pac 10 website, Holland, now retired, affirmed her belief that the NCAA-AIAW merger was good for women athletes (picks up at the 2:50 mark):

“I don’t think you should have different rules for women than you had for the men. And the women couldn’t have an impact on the rules for the men unless they were in the same association.”

But in the same NCAA website piece linked above, former Iowa women’s AD Christine Grant, who preceded Lopiano as AIAW president, underscored the political animus of sports feminists like her:

“The whole decade of the ’80s was pretty much a whole downer. We just seemed to be losing one thing after another.”

She doesn’t define who she meant by “we,” but in truth it didn’t include female athletes. The AIAW was gone, and from 1984 to 1988 Title IX sports compliance was on the back burner thanks to the Grove City vs. Bell Supreme Court ruling, which exempted parts of educational institutions not receiving direct federal aid. (Congress pre-empted the decision by passing the Civil Rights Restoration Act, then overrode a veto by President Ronald Reagan.)

Concluded Wushanley in his 2004 book, “Playing Nice and Losing,” which culminated with the AIAW-NCAA dispute:

“Toward the end, the AIAW became more of a political agency for women leaders than a national organization devoted to the advancement of women athletes.”

But women’s sports were starting to flourish at the college level, especially basketball, in which iconic figures like Cheryl Miller and Teresa Edwards were competing. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Summitt guided the powerful U.S. team to the gold medal. Two years later, the women’s hoops team at Texas, where Lopiano still presided, won its first and still only national championship in undefeated 35-0 fashion.

While basic Title IX compliance still lagged in far too many places, the superior resources and organization of the NCAA were beginning to pay off for women.

Coming Thursday: Longstanding complaints about football hogging financial resources took a darker, nastier turn in the early 1990s, when more radical voices in sports feminism demonized the sport on cultural grounds.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the second 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.

When I was 13 or 14, I did something I never thought I would ever do.

I quit playing sports.

This was the mid-1970s, before I’d ever heard of something called Title IX, and just as Billie Jean King was lighting a fire in me (the racquet above has her name on it) and many other young girls who were thrilled to play slow-pitch softball and six-on-six basketball because that’s all we had.

It was more than enough, until it wasn’t.

At the very moment in which women’s sports broke through the surface of American culture, I decided that I was done playing. For the rest of my high school years, I deeply regretted doing this, almost to the point of depression.

Zealots might be quick to point out that given the lack of options at the time, it was understandable that I would give up. I was being held back by sexists, apparently, and antiquated rules.

Except that I wasn’t. Frankly, I couldn’t hit a softball thrown under slow-pitch rules, and in basketball I was a short guard who couldn’t shoot, even after being freed from the defensive side of the halfcourt line. When I tried out for my high school basketball team after a couple of years away from the game, I blew a layup with a rare chance to touch the ball. I wasn’t just rusty; I was bad.

Instead, I covered that team for my high school paper, and my college’s women’s team and on from there as a professional journalist. Playing was a thrill while it lasted, but reading and writing and evolving into an inveterate history geek and aspiring journalist surpassed everything else.

My days as an athlete ended here, but never the passions that inspired them.

Can I interest you in something?

All along I’ve believed that my wavering interests are not that unusual, for females of my generation and for those who have come after me.

The familiar, comfortable narrative spun by women’s sports activists has been that females are just as interested in playing sports as men. It’s social attitudes that have prevented this seemingly organic “equality” from taking place.

I do think that held some more truth when I was younger and women’s sports at the collegiate level were still in the early stages of development. But as girls and women continued to make their participation in sports so common as to be unremarkable, the stridency of the activists became increasingly defensive. What I knew in my own experience was being hotly denied by women who claimed to be speaking for people like me.

One of the tests for Title IX sports compliance is for college and university athletic departments to “accommodate the interests and abilities” of female athletes. But the Title IX establishment actively resists having those interests surveyed in any serious manner. This hot-button issue was triggered anew during the deliberations of a Title IX commission created by the George W. Bush White House.

In 2002, I covered the first commission hearing in Atlanta, and like a later meeting in Washington, tempers nearly flared over the subject of interest. Three years later, the Bush administration issued a “policy clarification” that allowed schools to conduct an interest survey to meet that test.

Bush officials erred in making it almost too easy for schools to put a compliance stamp on their gender equity efforts. Instead of making a case for incorporating interest as a factor in the Title IX equation and fostering a discussion about what I’ve tried to examine here, the Bush policy clarification predictably backfired.

Still, the feminist orthodoxy went into a rage, when not indulging in raw hyperbole about having Title IX examined at all.

When the Obama administration took office in 2009, that clarification was reversed, and one of the three ways to measure Title IX compliance was effectively neutered. How can college athletic departments “accommodate the interests and abilities” of female students if they can’t find out what those interests might be?

The activists say only that they don’t trust the results of surveys that could get caught in an e-mail spam filter. That’s a cop-out, for they have never suggested improving the methodology of a survey, nor its retrieval options.

It might be seen as a bait-and-switch, but I suspect they fear women students may not tell them what they want to hear, that not enough of them may be as prone to playing sports and back up the untested creed about equal interest. For what it’s worth, I think male and female students should be surveyed for sports interest, but women’s groups might be even more wary of that data.

The vanilla gender ideal

In her 2008 book “The Sexual Paradox,” Canadian psychologist and columnist Susan Pinker interviewed high-achieving North American women in such fields as the law and the hard sciences and found many of them, at mid-career, lacking the desire to carry on. Some expressed an obligation to please others, or to adhere to feminist pleas to invade strongly male-dominated professions. Some of her subjects, in fact, gave up tenured professorships and executive posts to teach grade-school children and other lower-paid, lower-profile work that nonetheless offered immense gratification:

“. . . women can now have what men have, but many decide after trying it that they don’t want it. The vanilla gender idea that every given opportunity they should want it, if that’s what men choose, hinges on the assumption that male is the default against which we measure everyone’s wants and dreams.”

The wrong kind of feminist activism has been to push women toward this ideal of “sameness,” and we are seeing this in sports as well. While I loved playing sports, and prided myself in knocking down barriers and even “taking on” the boys, ultimately that wasn’t my greatest passion.

One leading women’s sports legal advocate contends that the Title IX statute and its sports regulations are part of the problem. University of Baltimore law professor Dionne Koller calls this “the interest paradox,” and provocatively claims that the current sports participation model predicated on Title IX is a “male” model that does not invite female “assimilation.” It’s a suggestion I’ll take up in a later post, as Koller’s argument essentially makes the case for the non-commercialized vision of the Association for Women in Intercollegiate Athletics (plenty more on this tomorrow) and college athletic reformers.

Women’s advocates have long accused men resistant to the changes brought about by Title IX as “dinosaurs,” and certainly there has been plenty of retrograde thinking and action to tackle. It’s not over by a longshot, but the common assumptions women’s advocates make and the straw men they invent to perpetuate their party line have become stale.

Coming Wednesday: Some of the biggest dinosaurs standing in the way of women’s progress in sports have been women.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the first in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that will critically examine 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. The story behind this racquet, which symbolizes some seemingly conflicting thoughts and experiences I’ve had in women’s sports, also will be revealed.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Reading this unsigned editorial earlier this year in The New York Times prompted me to wonder anew — and yet again — about the meaning of a word that seems simple enough, but that has become fraught with confusion, contentiousness and ill will in the realm of women’s sports:

“Equality.”

The University of California-Berkeley’s decision to reinstate three of five varsity sports that were initially dropped because of severe budget deficits is the latest in the long, continuing and often fractious history of Title IX compliance. As far as this anonymous Times editorial writer is concerned, as well as some others in the mainstream media, there’s only one side to this story: The alleged grievances of women being “denied” opportunities to compete because their participation numbers do not closely match the percentage of female undergraduate students.

As I re-read the brief commentary, I was struck not just by the lame, pop culture-influenced headline — “True Grit and Title IX” — but also by the implicit suggestion that no reasonable person could ever disagree with how gender equality in sports should be defined.

Yet players and coaches on the Cal baseball and men’s gymnastics teams had a very different perspective that was unaddressed, as was the fact that a vocal advocacy has existed for more than a decade that favors revising Title IX to curb unintended consequences against male athletes.

For the Times editorial writer, apparently, male athletes exist only in the abstract, as privileged creatures who stand on the exalted side of the elusive “gender gap” that must be closed in terms of statistical parity.

On Feb. 8 the Times revealed threats of Title IX lawsuits on behalf of athletes on the Cal women’s gymnastics and lacrosse teams. Those sports will be continued, along with the highly successful men’s rugby team, due to fundraising efforts. In an interesting twist, the Cal baseball team was given new life in April, with the aim of making a profit. Even more happily, the baseball team on Sunday qualified for the College World Series in what has to be one of the more gratifying sports stories of the year.

And yet . . .

“The march toward equality is long,” began another paragraph of the Times editorial, and it was here that my attention trailed off, as I jumped to an even more dubious conclusion:

“Thanks to Title IX, if something has to give, equality doesn’t go first.”

In other words, male athletes with no legal protections have to go when something has to give. Or, as in the case of Cal, the men’s teams have to raise money to pay their own way, while the women get their teams back by threatening legal action. This is what should not be ignored, especially by fair-minded advocates for women’s sports.

Defining equality down

But more than 30 years since the the three-part test for Title IX sports compliance came into being, we are are stuck with the reality, bolstered by the courts in such landmark cases as Cohen v. Brown, that “equality” is all about getting numbers right. The mandate according to proportionality, since Cohen the de facto letter of Title IX sports law, is to raise the percentage of female athletes to nearly match the percentage of undergraduate female students. At many colleges that’s a figure ranging between 55 and 60 percent.

And if this doesn’t happen, according to this line of thinking, then there still must be discrimination.

This is how the push to end sex bias in sports — a noble effort that I have always supported — evolved into a highly-charged, occasionally angry crusade oblivious to the individual choices women have made because Title IX has opened up a multitude of educational, vocational and extracurricular pursuits to them.

The law, which initially made no reference to sports, was passed by Congress in 1972 to lift the artificially low numbers ceiling on women students in male-dominated fields of study. How ironic it is that Title IX sports compliance, as well as the definition of gender equality in sports, has become beholden to numbers.

Indeed, as women continue to flock to colleges and universities, they have demonstrated that they will go undaunted where their interests lead them. With the exception of the STEM curriculum — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — women are at or above 50-50 parity with men across the academic spectrum. This includes medicine, business and law. Certainly there have been concerted pushes by colleges and universities to make educational programs more attractive to women, as the Wharton School of Business has demonstrated with its MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania.

What also has been clearly documented after these decades of dramatic progress is that the interests of women, both in the classroom and away from it, are far more wide-ranging than those of men.

This goes right to the heart of the trouble with defining, much less achieving, a universal notion of equality in the sex-segregated world of college athletics. While special measures also have been necessary to open the fields, courts, pools and other venues of sports to females, the three-part test, and especially the proportionality provision, places an artificial mandate on college athletic departments that may not necessarily coincide with the desires of female students.

It may have made more sense at the time to set some general and reasonable numerical goals, some “affirmative action,” if you will, given the lack of women’s teams and athletes.

That is no longer the case, and to presume that women are as interested in sports at the same rate in which they enroll in a school is absurd, even if that number is around 50-50. That the percentages are more skewed toward women has come at the expense of some unfortunate male athletes in sports that don’t produce revenues, don’t have strong constituencies and don’t have the law on their side.

It’s about more than Title IX

More importantly, this hardline view about Title IX has infected so much thinking and action about women in sports that goes beyond the issue of complying with the law.

The Cal story illustrates what I’ve felt for many years, that the simplistic ways in which equality for women in sports is defined and advocated is actually hurting the cause for women’s sports. While these pronouncements are nothing new, it’s also startling that nearly four decades after Title IX, we haven’t allowed for a more nuanced and open-ended public debate that incorporates more than one strident point of view.

We’re saddled with outdated regulations, rhetoric and assumptions that come straight out of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was in college and women were in the minority on most campuses. We inhabit a very different world, and for women athletes now it’s a far better world.

As a pre-Title IX youth athlete who supports the law but advocates changes in how it is enforced, I’m devoting daily posts over the next two weeks detailing how the women’s sports movement lost its way, and what a future for female athletes might look like if we can ever get beyond the current manifestations of Title IX, a seemingly endless caravan of litigation and some of the noxious cultural wars over gender and sports that have resulted.

Coming Tuesday: Why women’s sports advocates ignore the individual choices of women who don’t go for sports, all in the name of equality.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

So what’s this racquet all about?

There is an excellent answer to this question that I do plan to reveal here very soon. It will be a very personal reply to one of the most important aspects of my life, and it’s one that I’ve also had the privilege to explore as a journalist.

If you haven’t read much of this blog before, you’ll see that the issue of women’s sports, and how they have grown in my lifetime, takes up a lot of my attention.

For those of you who have read, you’ll be familiar with some of the material that I’ve posted here. I hope not to sound too repetitive over the next two weeks as I lay out a special series I’ve been preparing for quite a few months.

I will take a critical look at the women’s sports movement as it enters its fourth decade since the passage of Title IX. My dissident views on its more recent effects are rather frank, and here’s a recent sampling of that.

But I also have grave concerns about many of the cultural and sociological arguments that are being made by women (and a few men) in the name of female athletes, but that hardly reflect the experiences of the vast majority of girls and women in sports. Sadly, these so-called “experts” are called on by major media outlets far too often, with far too little scrutiny.

I think these views do much to prevent broadening the mainstream appeal of women’s sports, though I’m sure the targets of my critique won’t see it that way.

But I want to do more than just point out the problems I see. I’ll share a few ideas on reworking Title IX and creating a realistic framework for how women’s sports can continue to grow, without utopian illusions of “sameness.”

Oh, and this will be done without trashing men or American football, whining about media coverage or using a single word of feminist or Marxist academic jargon. If it seems impossible to believe, well, ya just gotta believe!

To borrow a phrase from The Sisterhood, I want to “take back” women’s sports from the ideologues and activists who have hijacked them for nefarious purposes.

"It's not groupthink, it's exercise!"

In the next frontier of women’s sports, it will be imperative to look beyond our own borders, where often women have a hard time just getting in the game.

We don’t really have those issues any longer in the United States, but sometimes I think that defining “equality” when it comes to sports has been a big part of the contentiousness.

So that’s where I will start this journey on Monday. I’m going to be making quite a bit of a racket to get to the story behind the racquet you see pictured above.

As for the Stalinettes doing jumping jacks, well, they should get worked up into a really hot lather because they’ve richly deserved this for a very long time.

In the meantime, snack on these links, many of which have informed and directed me as I worked on this series. I hope they whet your appetite for more.

• Bad sports, or when sisterhood doesn’t feel so powerful (July 23, 2010)

• A chastening time for women’s sports? (Aug. 23, 2010)

• A Whitman’s sampler and athletes in the buff (Oct. 6, 2010)

• The wasted cultural obsessions of women’s sports (Nov. 7, 2010)

• The women who can’t enjoy the UConn women’s streak (Dec. 18, 2010)

• If you read nothing else about the Women’s Final Four (April 2, 2011)

• Never mind the gender gap in sports (May 25, 2011)

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.