Federal Sports Quotas Kill Young Men’s Dreams

There are few scenes more heartbreaking in sports than a college coach having to tell his players that their team has been eliminated so that the school can comply with Title IX, the federal law applied to gender and athletics. It is a cheerless drama that has played out each year as tens of thousands of young men have been stripped of their programs, scholarships and competitive hopes. Even the fabled Mighty Casey has nothing on these student-athletes who have lost not simply a game but their dreams.

There has long been an outcry to examine and, yes, reform the dubious way Title IX is enforced; schools everywhere fear that only by adhering to quotas making their rosters “proportional” to their enrollment can they be safe from the federal government and plaintiffs’ attorneys.

But until earlier this year, those earnest pleas were usually confined to the soon-to-be vacated locker rooms of teams that had been cut. Now, a broad group of coaches from many different sports is sticking up for the male athletes; the lawsuit they filed in federal court in January is bringing this long-overdue discussion to the national fore.

Eight major sports associations have signed on to the reform effort. And, at a Senate hearing on Title IX last month, Secretary of Education Rod Paige announced the formation of a commission to study how the law was being enforced, warts and all.

Having an open discussion is crucial, and if the commission does its job fairly, it will hear from people like Coach Sterling Martin at Bowling Green State University, who saw his track team cut just weeks ago, replaced by a women’s rowing team. In that swift stroke, the school chopped badly needed scholarships to minority athletes in favor of a sport that has, safe to say, a scant following in disadvantaged communities--or for that matter, most communities. Beverly Brandon’s son, Barrett, lost out when Nebraska eliminated its men’s swim team last year; she too would like to say a few words. Turned away by the school, she traveled to Washington a few weeks ago with Barrett’s sister, Brooke, hoping in vain to tell lawmakers face to face that here were two women who thought Title IX should mean fairness for everyone.

Brandon has organized other moms too--women like Deb Downey, whose son lost his track team, and Gina Iamatteo, whose son was a quota casualty at Oklahoma.

Their stories give witness to the wreckage scattered at schools across the country. UCLA’s swim team, with scores of Olympic medalists, gone. Howard University’s decades-old baseball team, cut at the end of last semester. Kent State hockey, no more. U-Mass gymnastics, goodbye.

And, no, those macho football guys are not to blame. The cuts take place just as frequently at schools that don’t even have football, like Marquette University, where the athletic director had the integrity to admit to the wrestling team that he was cutting their program to achieve proportionality. At other schools, like Bucknell and Yale, teams are axed even when alumni step forward offering to fund an entire program.

But Downey and Martin and the young men they champion will never get the chance to tell their stories if the National Women’s Law Center gets its way. Marcia Greenberger, the head of that activist group, which helped the Department of Education craft the quota provision, declared recently that the Title IX Commission was “unwarranted” and that “this law and its policies must not be changed and there is no reason to reopen them.”

In the thinking of radical feminist groups, the coaches, students, moms and alums are not concerned or caring voices that merit attention. They are misguided or, worse, trying to return women to a long-abandoned era of subservience.

They are wrong, and their condescension has only made a determined mother and a fired-up coach that much more focused. When Downey and Martin finally get their hearing, listen closely and you will notice in their voices an absence of stridence. They are not professional ideologues but just average folks who have been steamrolled by the kind of preference policy that we would tolerate nowhere else in American life.

They will say the same thing that the coaches do in their lawsuit: Title IX is a terrific law that has been turned on its head by the addition of a bureaucratic quota provision. Get rid of that one dreadful element and restore the law to its original intent.

No one is trying to deny women and girls the chance to compete. Their growing legacy in sports is one that everybody applauds. Instead ask: How could a law built to protect students from discrimination become, with the addition of a few sentences, warped into an instrument of that very purpose?

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Sam Bell, president of the U.S. Track Coaches Assn., served as a coach for the 1976 U.S. Olympic track team.