5 CSUN Men’s Sports Face Elimination Under Title IX

Adrian Mendoza came to Cal State Northridge for the baseball.

Mendoza wanted to play for a nationally known team that had reached the NCAA playoffs four times in six years. The freshman first baseman dreamed of taking his place among All-Americans and pro prospects who had come through the school.

Then he heard the news.

“At first I didn’t believe it,” he said softly. “They told me the whole program might be cut.”

At Northridge, and many other universities nationwide, administrators are facing a simple, brutal equation as they try to bring athletic programs into compliance with the gender-equity laws commonly known as Title IX.

The 1972 civil rights legislation requires that schools move toward “proportionality”--if half of the student body is female, then half of the varsity athletes should be female.

But many universities have procrastinated and are now trying to comply at a time when they cannot afford to add women’s teams. As a result, a recent NCAA study shows, women’s gains are coming at the expense of eliminating men’s teams.

UCLA cut its storied men’s gymnastics program. Notre Dame cut wrestling. Title IX was not supposed to work this way.

“It’s about equitable treatment of men and women,” said Janet Justus, an NCAA official who advises schools on gender equity in sports. “I do not think that cutting teams is the answer.”

CSUN administrators can see no other way. Women account for only 39% of the more than 400 varsity athletes in a department that went $700,000 over budget last year. As many as five men’s programs may be eliminated next week, including baseball and volleyball, which have brought national prominence to the suburban campus.

Northridge Athletic Director Paul Bubb said a decision on which programs will be cut will be announced Tuesday or Wednesday.

“I don’t want to get involved in the whole gender thing,” Mendoza said. “But this is very disappointing.”

It may seem odd that CSUN and others are only now coming to grips with a 25-year-old statute. But the history of Title IX is a tumultuous one.

The legislation was written as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, a sweeping civil rights tool that stated “no person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex . . . be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity.”

The federal government spent much of the 1970s interpreting and reinterpreting how Title IX should apply to college athletics. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that it should not apply at all. The 1988 Civil Rights Restoration Act reestablished Title IX’s jurisdiction.

Moreover, a 1991 ruling allowed plaintiffs to recover attorneys’ fees and damages from gender-equity lawsuits.

In 1992, a Brown University student successfully sued her school for cutting its women’s gymnastics team. In 1993, the National Organization for Women sued all 20 schools in the California State University system.

A 1988-89 CSU survey had shown the ratio of women athletes dipping to 30%. “They had made some progress in the early ‘80s but then, with budget cuts, it was obvious they were going the opposite way,” said Linda Joplin, former state coordinator for NOW.

As part of an ensuing settlement, state universities promised to bring their ratios within 5% of proportionality by the 1998-99 school year. The agreement put schools under the gun.

Gender-equity laws usually allow a good deal of leeway--schools can comply merely by showing improvement, by gradually adding women’s teams over a course of years. The CSU schools, however, had to bring their numbers quickly in line.

“Back in 1972, a federal law was passed and people stuck their heads in the sand and ignored it,” said Betsy Alden, the athletic director at San Francisco State. “The presidents of colleges and universities should have directed their athletic directors to sit down and draw up a plan.”

San Francisco State was forced to eliminate its football program.

“If proper planning had taken place, none of this would have happened,” said Alden, who also serves as president of the National Assn. of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators.

Faced with a similar deadline, CSUN administrators believed that they could afford to add women’s teams. Water polo, lacrosse and rifle were mentioned. It wasn’t until this week that Ron Kopita, Northridge’s vice president in charge of student affairs, said the budget was too tight to allow any additions.

Cuts were unavoidable. And the task would be more difficult because of a seemingly unrelated decision the school had made more than a year ago.

In early 1996, when its American West Conference folded, CSUN had the option of joining another conference or going it alone. Independent schools struggle to find quality opponents because so many teams are busy playing in their own conferences. With weaker schedules, independent teams find it harder to qualify for NCAA playoffs.

CSUN chose to join the Big Sky Conference, the only conference that would accept it.

The Big Sky demands that its schools compete in a number of “core” sports. That now limits CSUN’s potential cuts to baseball, volleyball, soccer, golf and swimming. The school cannot consider eliminating the most expensive sport, football.

The projected 1997-98 budget for the football season is almost $890,000. That’s more than double the amount set aside for men’s basketball and triple the amount for the nationally ranked women’s softball team. Though the football team recently trimmed its roster from 95 to 85, it must increase its scholarships from 45 to 63 in the next few years to meet conference requirements.

And unlike other sports, football has no equivalent for women. The only way to balance football is to add a handful of women’s teams or, in Northridge’s case, eliminate a number of men’s teams.

“That is certainly not what we had in mind,” Joplin of NOW said. “I think that Northridge is not living up to the spirit of the agreement.”

Kopita compared the situation to pulling off a bandage.

“You can rip it right off and have a sharp pain for a short time, or you can try to ease it off and feel a slow pain,” he said. “I like to rip it off.”

These kinds of decisions have made Title IX as controversial as ever. Some critics argue that football should be eliminated from the gender-equity equation.

“The numbers are skewed in the case of football because there is no comparable women’s sport,” said Mel Pulliam, a spokesman for the American Football Coaches Assn.

The suggestion rankles Title IX proponents who contend that at many schools football accounts for as much as 60% of the athletic budget. If it were exempt, women would be left to fight for half of the remaining 40%.

“The people who play football are male athletes,” said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington. “Women students deserve just as many opportunities in other sports.”

Critics have also attacked the the concept of proportionality. They say women are less interested than men in playing college sports.

In the Brown University case, for example, administrators testified that their intramural sports program, which offers equal opportunities to both genders, draws far more men than women. At CSUN, administrators say that women account for only 20% of the students who sign up for intramural sports such as volleyball, basketball and Ultimate Frisbee.

So far, the courts have upheld proportionality, saying that “women, given the opportunity, will naturally participate in athletics in numbers equal to men.” And Greenberger points to the 1996 Summer Olympic Games as evidence that gender equity encourages participation.

“When we saw the women’s softball team, basketball team and soccer team all win gold medals, those were team sports that were directly affected by Title IX,” Greenberger said. “Those young women who made our country so proud would never have been able to develop their skills without Title IX.”

At NCAA headquarters, Justus has made it her mission to show schools how to provide such development without taking from men. She preaches skimping.

Schools can spend less by printing smaller media guides. Football programs can discontinue the common practice of keeping players in a hotel the night before every home game.

“I really hope that schools, when they make these decisions, have gone through every viable option,” she said. “I hope they have looked at every dollar that’s going into their program and seen how it is being spent.”

At CSUN, where teams run on bare-bones budgets, there was not much to trim. And there was not enough time to ease toward proportionality.

“I don’t think it could have happened another way, but I wish it could have,” said Jeanette Armentano, a women’s assistant basketball coach and board member of the San Fernando Valley chapter of NOW. “Unless people rebel pretty strongly, people don’t change.”

Mendoza can only wonder if he will have a team next school year. The first baseman sounds wistful when he recalls the recently completed season in which the Matadors compiled a 42-20-1 record, narrowly missing the playoffs.

“Next year was going to be even better,” he said. “We were going to have a good, good team.”