Athletics

Yesterday I got to see how local government can provide tools to help fight for a level playing field in athletics. Together with the Sankofa Project, the Center was proud to be recognized for their work on a bill introduced by D.C. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie with unanimous Council support.

The proposed legislation would require D.C. public schools to disclose certain key athletics equity data by gender on an annual basis, such as

• enrollment and sports participation numbers by gender and race;
• coach-to-athlete ratios;
• compensation, qualifications and duties of coaches;
• funding sources and spending;
• scheduling and post-season play;
• training and academic support; and
• quality of facilities and equipment.

Under the bill, all of this information would be required to be publicly available on the city’s website. Read more »

Yesterday ESPN aired the first of nine films celebrating Title IX in its “Nine for IX” series. The first one, “Venus Vs.,” is about Venus Williams’ fight for equal pay for women at Wimbledon. While it is a triumphant story in many ways, I couldn’t help but be struck (and frustrated), as I always am, at the slow pace of progress.

The fight for equal pay at Wimbledon, much like the fight for equal pay for women in general, has been going on for decades. In tennis, Billie Jean King started the effort that Venus helped bring to fruition.

Similarly, on the playing fields of our nation’s schools, the battle for gender equity rages on. Over forty years after Title IX was passed, girls are still not receiving equal chances to play or equal benefits when they do. Read more »

Girls in the District of Columbia are being shortchanged when it comes to opportunities to play sports and benefits such as coaching, facilities and equipment, in violation of Title IX. That's what we said in a complaint filed yesterday with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR). 

Information provided by DCPS pursuant to a FOIA request shows disparities of over 10 percentage points and as high as 26 percentage points between girls' enrollment and the share of athletic participation opportunities provided to them in the majority of the district's 15 public high schools. These gaps mean that DCPS would need to provide almost 700 additional athletic opportunities to girls to provide parity. The Center's complaint requests that OCR investigate all District public high schools and require them to treat girls fairly. 

Check out the following snippets from the Washington Post, which published a story about the NWLC complaint: 

• Daja Dorsey, who graduated from Ballou in June and played basketball, volleyball, softball and ran track, said the boys' football and basketball teams got more intensive coaching, more attention from recruiters and scouts and more college scholarships than the girls' teams. "It was a whole different approach for the boys," she said. "I wouldn't have minded that." 

Happy 41st birthday, Title IX! Title IX, the federal law banning discrimination based on sex in federally-funded educational programs, turned 41 this past Sunday, June 23. Around this time last year, we were gearing up for the 2012 Olympics, widely hailed as the “Title IX Olympics” for the success of women athletes. Yet, the stories about girls and sports in the news this week show us how much more work needs to be done before the promise of Title IX can be fully realized. 

Last week, Abby Wambach — a member of the 2012 Olympic Gold-winning American women’s soccer team — scored her 160th international goal in a game against South Korea. In breaking Mia Hamm's previous record of 159 career international goals, Wambach became the world leader, for both men and women, in international goals. One might expect such an achievement to be splashed across the sports headlines of major newspapers, right? Wrong. Her story has been relegated to secondary status, when it has been covered at all. I was lucky to watch an ESPN documentary about Abby’s career, and her commitment to women’s professional soccer opportunities in the U.S. is remarkable. Even if major newspapers aren’t #chasingabby, I’ve been inspired to follow her career more closely. 

Next up to bat: Madison Baxter of Georgia. Madison, 12, has been playing football for years as a starting defensive tackle. She was looking forward to going out for the team when she enters the seventh grade next year, but her school told her that she would no longer be allowed on the team, because her male teammates “would begin lusting after her.” Madison had a separate locker room and changing facility, but the school’s decision has cut short her dream of becoming one of the first college-level female football players. She is fighting back via a Facebook page, “Let Her Play.” 

Of course, while these examples are disappointing to say the least, Title IX covers much more than sports. Read more »

Source: IMDb

There may be no crying in baseball, but the lack of athletic opportunities available to girls in secondary schools across the country is definitely something you should be upset about. Just yesterday, the National Women's Law Center filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit in Ollier v. Sweetwater, a case brought by high school girls challenging their school's failure to provide them with equal athletic opportunities and the retaliation they faced after lodging a complaint. The brief supports the district court's ruling that the school failed to meet any part of Title IX's three-part participation test and that it retaliated against the class of girls when it fired their coach among other actions. The school district appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit.  Read more »

After four years and five wins in the courts, the female volleyball players who sued Quinnipiac University for trying to eliminate their team and replace it with competitive cheerleading have secured a settlement that will help the entire women’s sports program. The settlement, announced today, requires Quinnipiac University to, among other things:

• retain the volleyball team and all other women’s teams (the University added women’s golf and rugby recently and will help rugby evolve to the same competitive level as other sports);
• increase scholarships for various women’s teams;
• spend at least $5 million improving women’s athletic facilities, including locker rooms;
• spend about $450,000 annually improving women’s coaching salaries, increasing coaches and academic support staff, and providing more athletic training services; and
• allocate $175,000 during each of the next three years to a fund for additional improvements for women’s sports.

This case was very important in terms of setting precedent and providing guidance to schools across the country on several issues. First, there was a lot of fuzzy math that the court said was inappropriate. For example, the school double- and triple-counted students who were listed as members of the women’s cross-country, indoor track, and outdoor track teams, even though many of the women did not receive genuine participation opportunities on more than one of the teams. The law allows multi-sport athletes to be counted for each sport they play, but only if they are really playing. Read more »

I often regret not being involved in high school athletics. Granted, I was very busy with musical theatre. It’s kind of ironic that I could perform a strenuous swing dance routine while singing with no problem, but could barely run one mile for the Presidential Fitness Test each spring.

About a year ago, I decided to confront my lack of athletic ability head-on and take up running. I started out with couch to 5k, a 9-week training program for non-runners (that’s the couch part!) to learn to run 3.1 miles. After my first race, I was hooked, and I’m planning to run my first half-marathon this Saturday.

Long-distance running is no joke – I’ve had to reform my sleeping, nutrition, social habits, all in the name of having better runs. I’ve also become one of those runners who talks about fun physical ailments (blisters, anyone?) in casual conversation. Mostly, though, it’s made me more disciplined. At least half of the challenge of running a half-marathon is mentally pushing yourself through to the end. The combination of physical and mental challenges, along with the commitment necessary to maintain my training around an already-packed schedule, has given me an opportunity for enormous personal growth. Read more »

The District Court that first told Quinnipiac University it violated Title IX when it dropped the women’s volleyball team and claimed its cheer squad counted as a sport has once again told the university that it is not in compliance with the law. In an almost 100-page opinion issued yesterday, the Court instructed QU to continue to sponsor volleyball and said that QU needs to make more progress before the Court will let it out from under its watch. Maybe this time the University will finally get the message.

The latest decision comes after QU asked the court to lift the order instructing it to keep volleyball and devise a plan to provide equal opportunities for female students. QU claims that it has added golf and rugby for women and made changes to cheer that should make it count under Title IX; so they once again want to drop the volleyball team (they seem to have a volleyball vendetta). Read more »

The title of this post is the message we conveyed to the Department of Education in response to their request for public input regarding the collection of Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) data. If you’re not familiar with the EADA, check out our one-pager here that explains what the law requires of colleges and universities (for example, the numbers of men and women playing sports and expenses allocated to each team). The Department helpfully puts all of this info on a website where anyone can look up any institution and print out a few pages with all the information that schools are required to disclose. Read more »

National Girls and Women’s Sports Day is a day to celebrate all the successes that girls and women have had so far, but it’s also a day to think about the obstacles we face. One of those is the lack of data surrounding girls in high school athletics – so I sat down with our own Title IX expert, Neena Chaudry, and our data whiz, Kate Gallagher Robbins, to get a better understanding about what we’­­­­­re missing.

Becka: When I e-mailed Kate to talk about sitting together to chat, she joked, “I could do the interview right now – in short, we need more data!” What is the number one aspect you each wish you had more data on?

Neena: I have a list! But the number one thing I wish we had was data for each individual school. Only some schools have data available from the U.S. Department of Education, but many don’t. I’d love to get participation rates broken down by sub= groups – particularly to see the numbers of girls of color on high school teams.

Kate: I would really love to dive even deeper and get some individual-level data. The school has the numbers – how many girls who are playing sports are also taking AP Classes, et cetera. More detail would help us determine some interesting correlations and where the gaps are.

Neena: Could we get that? Aren’t there privacy concerns?

Kate: There’s a way to do it while respecting privacy – it would be a different data set. Information about the individual, but without any specifics – for example, Becka would be student number 379 in this region of the country, and I would know that she played lacrosse and took AP Literature, but if I met Becka, I would have no idea she was student number 379.

Becka: Gotcha – so a deep level of anonymous detail.