Minority Women Get Left Behind by Title IX

Alisa Carrillo has the resume, the grades, and perhaps most of all, the potential to play sports for a four-year college. There’s just one thing the best all-around female athlete from Santa Ana Saddleback High doesn’t have: a scholarship.

Few would argue that women athletes are treated better than ever by colleges and universities. Thanks to Title IX, which became law 30 years ago today, budgets for women’s sports have skyrocketed into the millions and participation seems to spike annually.

But critics say it fails young minority women such as Carrillo. While Title IX protects women from sex discrimination, statistics show it has done little to curb racial inequities.

“Title IX has really helped white women,” said Tina Sloan Green, a former national champion lacrosse coach who is executive director of the Black Women in Sport Foundation.

For example, only 3% of female college athletes are Hispanic and 1.8% are Asian. Outside of basketball and track, 2.7% are black--up only .7% in the last 25 years.

Minority leaders and critics of the statute bristle at those numbers. They say college administrators trying to comply with Title IX have selected poorly when adding sports such as crew, equestrian, golf, ice hockey, lacrosse and water polo.

“These are all sports in which minorities have not traditionally participated,” said Charles Whitcomb, former chairman of the NCAA Minority Opportunities Committee. “They’re traditionally very white, middle-class sports. They’re exclusive to people of color.”

James Shulman, a New York-based scholar and coauthor of a book on college sports, was even more blunt. “There aren’t too many equestrian fields in inner-city L.A., or a lot of 100-meter pools in the South Bronx,” he said.

But even critics note there is no simple solution. Title IX is a law based on percentages and colleges have struggled making the numbers add up. Most schools opt to conform to the statute by meeting a proportionality test; the ratio of male and female athletes must roughly match the ratio of male and female students in the college population at large.

The amount of scholarships and athletes on the men’s side is bolstered at many schools by football, a problem for administrators because no women’s sport single-handedly compares. To comply, many colleges have added women’s sports, cut smaller men’s sports, or both.

In just the last three years, women’s equestrian teams have been created at 40 colleges. For equestrian, a school can offer a maximum of 15 scholarships--as many as a women’s basketball team is allowed.

USC offers the NCAA maximum of 20 women’s rowing scholarships--more than any men’s sport except football.

Carrillo has never tried rowing, having seen it only on television during the Olympics. But she has been a top performer in just about every other sport she’s tried.

In basketball, she set nearly all of Saddleback’s scoring, rebounding and shot-blocking records and last season was Golden West League Player of the Year.

She also won four letters in volleyball, and one season “just for the fun of it,” she participated in swimming and softball.

Carrillo might be a top golfer, too, but that’s anyone’s guess based on reports from her father and brother about the way she launches shots deep into the local driving range. Saddleback didn’t have a golf team.

Carrillo, who is 6 feet tall, didn’t play basketball until high school but worked hard and quickly became a star player. She said she would have been willing to try rowing or another sport had she known it offered her a better chance than basketball at a college scholarship.

Years ago, a woman who loved sports but didn’t have the opportunity to play them in high school spotted a man carrying a row boat’s racing shell on the campus of Connecticut College.

She didn’t know what it was, so she asked him about it. The man was Connecticut’s rowing coach, Bart Gulong, and he encouraged Anita DeFrantz to come out and try the sport because, with an athletic 5-11 build, she’d “be perfect for it.”

Three years later, DeFrantz won a bronze medal in rowing at the Montreal Olympics. In 1986, she became the first African American and first American woman named to the International Olympic Committee.

All because of that chance meeting with Gulong.

Since then, DeFrantz has spent countless hours trying to ensure other women would need to rely only on their ability rather than luck.

“More work needs to be done in recruiting [minorities] and the institutions have failed if the sports are not representative of their student body,” DeFrantz said from her office in Los Angeles.

But many experts believe the breakdown comes long before college. They say resources should be invested in programs designed specifically to give urban and lower income youths exposure to more sports and better training.

“Just like Title IX brought gender diversity, we need to focus now on bringing opportunity to people of color,” Whitcomb said.

As a member of the NCAA’s Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee, Dan Guerrero, incoming athletic director at UCLA, helped create the NCAA Neighborhood Youth Sports Program. University athletic programs worked with Guerrero’s group to help diversify the pool of athletes in designated sports.

Such programs offer girls exposure to more sports, but they fail to provide the kind of sophisticated training that develops athletic skills to a college level.

“It doesn’t solve the problem long term,” Guerrero said. “Once the summer is over those kids don’t have an avenue to continue to grow and learn.”

The cost of training is another hurdle. Rowers in the juniors program at the Marina Aquatic Center in Marina del Rey pay about $1,300 in annual dues. Sloan Green of the Black Women in Sport Foundation, whose daughter played tennis for Florida, estimated that families of top-ranked junior tennis players annually spend around $30,000 for training and travel to tournaments.

“That’s the financial reality,” Sloan Green said. “Right now there’s an elitist system and those who are penalized are from a lower socio-economic level.”

College coaches are paid to win and are not judged by the diversity of their teams, so recruiters go to the top club and high school competitions and generally look for players who are already highly trained at their sport.

Amy Fuller, UCLA’s rowing coach, said she recruits only competitive rowers, but added, “I tell the coaches in other sports, ‘Hey, if you know a good athlete let me know about her’ even if she has never tried rowing.

“They just need to know there are opportunities and hopefully they have proactive people in their lives to tell them,” Fuller said.

Sloan Green is an example of that.

Her early academic success earned her the opportunity to attend Philadelphia’s Girls’ High School, for gifted students, where she was exposed to field hockey, lacrosse and other sports.

She was an athlete at West Chester (Pa.) University, and eventually ended up coaching field hockey and lacrosse at Temple University in her hometown. There, her lacrosse teams won three national titles before she left coaching in 1992 to focus on foundation work and teaching.

She was the only black women’s lacrosse coach in the NCAA Division I, and one of her proteges, Alison Williams, went on to coach at Georgetown, becoming only the second black woman to coach at a major college.

“It all comes down to access,” Sloan Green said. “I was blessed to have been exposed to those sports and turn it into a successful career. Others then saw they might be successful too. If you don’t have role models there is nothing to suggest to a young girl she might be successful in that sport too.”

Sloan Green is a Title IX proponent, having benefited from it early in her coaching career, when she was given lacrosse scholarships to award for the first time. But she believes the system could be better.

“If you are seriously interested in increasing the number of women involved in sports, do it across the board,” she said.

“Look at the urban areas, did they get better facilities behind Title IX? Has it changed for inner-city girls? I think we need to investigate why these girls aren’t playing these sports.”

Donna A. Lopiano, a Title IX watchdog as president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, said she considers gender equity and racial equality different issues.

“What sports can we add?” she said. “Unless we look at the pipeline and see where the problem is, we won’t be able to solve participation problem no matter what sport we add.”

Lopiano, who is a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Diversity Committee, is challenging national sports governing bodies to gather baseline data on gender and race participation and report it publicly.

“We really don’t have data on how many young kids are participating in these sports,” she said. “We don’t know their ages or where they come from. How can you solve the [diversity] problem without knowing these numbers?”

When or if the current problems are solved, it will probably be too late for Carrillo, much to the disappoint of her high school basketball coach, Rob Morgan.

“It’s too bad, because Alisa is the type of athlete who can play whatever she wants to,” he said. “You could put her in any sport and she’d succeed.”