Outspoken Price Cites Gender Gap Inequities

To John Price, the whole concept is skewed.

“It’s equality but not equity,” Price said.

Price, the men’s volleyball coach at Cal State Northridge, is talking about gender equity in sports.

The topic, in this age of political correctness, is considered taboo, a live grenade better left untouched.

Not to Price.

If something is on his mind, something he feels should be addressed, Price won’t keep it hushed for long.

Of course, gender equity in sports is not entirely new, but Price is negatively affected by it every day and he’s frustrated.

He’s bothered by a forced-fed system created to ensure that female athletes receive the same opportunities as their male counterparts, a system Price believes is flawed.

When Price says the scales have been tipped, he points to two culprits: Title IX, the federal statute that guarantees women equal opportunities in sports; and the California State University system’s decision in 1993 to require funding and participation parity in men’s and women’s sports by the 1998-99 school year.

That action was part of a settlement of a lawsuit filed by the National Organization for Women against the CSU system.

In short, it calls for the schools to fund men’s and women’s sports programs within 10% of each other; provide athletic opportunities for women proportional to the number of eligible female undergraduates at each campus, within 5%, and provide scholarships for women’s sports in proportion to the number of eligible female undergraduates at each campus, within 5%.

The mathematics don’t add up to Price.

“The problem is that men’s sports and women’s sports aren’t equal, just like men’s sports are not equal to each other,” Price said. “Men’s volleyball and men’s basketball are not equals.

“The men’s sports that are generating most of the revenues should be treated even better than other men’s programs. Basically, they fund [all of] us. But that doesn’t matter in gender equity.”

Now, Price doesn’t want to be confused with a sexist swine, and he shouldn’t be. In his opinion, women athletes didn’t get a fair shake before Title IX, when school athletic departments were run by the good old boys’ network.

And although he wouldn’t mind preferential treatment for the major men’s revenue-makers--football and basketball--Price concedes that women’s programs should be funded properly. But the other portions of the CSU-NOW settlement are, well, unfair . . . to men’s programs.

Two cases in point:

Price has three scholarships to distribute among 16 players and he has 22 guys trying to make the squad. That’s a tough fit for a program ranked in the top five nationally in six of the past seven years.

Conversely, the newly reinstated women’s golf team also has three scholarships available--but only five players, the NCAA minimum to play an intercollegiate schedule.

That’s because, in trying to balance as much as possible the books already tilted in the men’s favor by 40 football scholarships, the women’s programs at Northridge received more scholarships than their male equivalents. Women’s volleyball, for instance, gets 12 scholarships.

“We only have one player who’s almost at a half [a scholarship] and everyone else is significantly below that,” Price said.

By dishing out partial scholarships, Price is making the best of an impossible situation, which is compounded by the popularity of his program. The Matadors are never short on volleyball players.

But that is not necessarily true in other sports. Carrie Leary, the women’s golf coach, had to scramble to find players.

That is another thorn in Price’s side.

“Women’s sports have problems getting athletes, men’s sports don’t,” Price said.

His argument is substantiated by a CSU system survey for the 1994-95 school year, the last period for which data are available.

The survey shows considerable disparity in men’s and women’s athletic participation figures at some schools without football programs and with similar number of sports offered for both genders.

At Cal Poly Pomona, for example, the ratio was 133 men to 84 women. At Cal State Stanislaus, it was 118-70. At Cal State Los Angeles, 109-72.

Take that a step farther and the prospects are not good for improvement.

A statewide high school survey found that 318,336 boys and 195,803 girls competed in interscholastic sports in the 1995-96 school year.

The total for girls hasn’t jumped dramatically. Ten years ago, 141,084 girls participated on school teams.

But Price and other men’s team coaches must bite their lips and follow rules they say are hurting their programs, much like women’s programs were being shortchanged before Title IX.

“The ideal situation would be to increase women’s opportunities without reducing the men’s, but that’s not going to happen,” Price said.

“Whoever the [CSU system] lawyers were on [the NOW agreement], if it had been a criminal trial, there would have been a retrial for incompetence.”

Going to court, the California pastime, is not the answer. But maybe taking football players out of the equation is. Without them, gender parity would be much easier to accomplish.

Either that, or start women’s football teams.