The Initial and Continuing Role of Men in Making Title IX Work

Men have received less credit than they deserve for the return of school-sponsored competitive athletics for girls during the past 50 years, just as they received more blame than they deserved for the lack of competitive athletic programs for girls during the 50 years before that.

A concern that had been circulating in many locations since the early 1900s became a nationwide drumbeat from the late 1920s to the start of World War II to curtail highly competitive athletic programs for girls in our nation’s schools. Among the more influential drum majors were the predominantly female spokespersons for the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the Women’s Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation, and both the Society of State Directors and the National Section on Women’s Athletics of the American Association of Health, Physical Education and Recreation (AAHPER).

The message of these organizations was that existing programs for boys should cease being the model for girls sports. They argued that girls programs should have reduced schedules and modified rules to allow play by more participants but with less physical exertion and emphasis on winning. The “success” of these efforts to stifle competitive athletics for girls was more obvious in public schools of the nation’s more populous areas than in programs sponsored by parochial schools and in school sports programs of rural communities across America.

When the pendulum made its inevitable swing back three dozen years later, physical educators and their professional associations were no longer shaping school sports policies and procedures, and the newer and mostly male profession of “athletic administrator” – distinct and separate from “physical educator” – was in charge. These administrators listened, learned and led the return of competitive sports for girls in schools all across the country.

The period in the middle of the swings of this pendulum – the mid-1950s – is sometimes referred to as the “golden age” of high school athletics. Bleachers were packed at high school football and basketball games. It was not unusual that local radio stations broadcast every game – home and away. The sports sections of local newspapers were filled with photos, stories and stats of every game. It was a time when most homes lacked televisions and major college and professional sports provided no competition to high school sports for fan attention.

The problem with this picture is that the high school athletic program was mostly if not exclusively for boys; and it focused on football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and track & field in the spring. Baseball was then a non-school summer activity in most communities; and while cross country, golf, swimming, tennis and wrestling were sponsored in some schools, in the 1950s it was truer that students either played football, basketball and track & field or they cheered for those who did. If it was a “golden age,” it was so for boys only…in fact, for only some boys only.

Less than 20 years later, many spectators and news outlets looked away toward other levels of sports and to non-sports distractions; and in doing so, they missed the start of what became a much more authentic “golden age” for school sports than any previous era. Boys of all different sizes, shapes and interests began participating in all kinds of different sports. And the number of sports teams that schools sponsored almost doubled as programs for girls were inaugurated and then grew. The backstory to that growth is what this article is about.

Inception
Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments says nothing about sports. Not a single word. It was actually the proposed implementing regulations published in 1974 that placed competitive athletics within the purview of Title IX. And then it was the coaches and athletic administrators of the nation’s schools and colleges and their respective associations – and at the time, of course, they were mostly males – who made sure that the revised regulations of 1975, which were finally adopted into law in 1978, would not actually work against the worthy objective of equalizing opportunity for boys and girls in competitive school and college athletic programs.

For colleges, the major sticking point was football. The NCAA and its member institutions argued that intercollegiate athletics for women had nothing like football. Using the most prominent football coaches from high profile major universities, and some female administrators for “window dressing,” they lobbied to remove football from the Title IX compliance calculations because football involved so many athletes at such a high cost per participant that equity seemed like an impossibility. Football alone involved more men and money than all other sponsored sports for men; and football alone involved more males and money than the entire number of female athletes and the entire budget for the women’s intercollegiate athletic program of most institutions.

They also argued – not altogether accurately – that the football program should be left unregulated by the law because football programs needed to generate revenue to support all the other intercollegiate athletic programs for men and women alike. “If football needs to spend more money to make more money, then so be it,” they said, “That will help subsidize all the other programs.”

Their argument was something like, “A rising tide for football” – no limits either on participants or spending – “would lift all boats”….that is, enhance all other sports for men and women alike. They said, “Make sure participation numbers and all forms of support are equal for everything else, and ignore everything about football.”

The colleges’ hands-off position regarding football was one that coaches and administrators of high school athletics were sympathetic to, but it was not their primary concern. What high schools wanted – the bottom, uncompromising line – was to assure that Title IX’s implementing regulations would not abolish gender specific programs of competitive athletics.

They were convinced that a program that was blind to participants’ gender, while less expensive to operate than separate athletic programs for males and females, would do female athletes more harm than good.

At the time that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was finalizing the Title IX regulations during the mid- 1970s, the National Federation of State High School Associations was providing HEW with data from its member associations’ state tournaments to demonstrate the dangers of prohibiting separate programs of athletics for boys and girls. The NFHS provided actual tournament results showing, for example, that the fastest female runners and swimmers would not place in the high school championship of their respective state track and swimming meets for boys. The NFHS provided comparative statistics on average height, weight and strength of high school-age boys and girls and the effect those factors have on opportunities to earn roster spots and awards if athletic programs could not be separated by gender.

The conclusion was obvious: except in athletic activities like diving and gymnastics, where balance and flexibility are emphasized over strength and speed, boys would dominate competitive single-gender teams and would tend to relegate girls to junior varsity squads or eliminate girls’ opportunities altogether, if schools were not permitted to designate and sponsor female-only competitive sports teams.

HEW accepted this thinking and memorialized in its final Title IX regulations not only that schools would be in compliance if they conducted programs separated by gender, but also that schools would not be in compliance if they conducted a single program for both genders that failed to accommodate the interests and abilities of girls as well as it did for boys.

Males led the effort to enshrine this policy in Federal law; and for five decades now, high school female student-athletes have been the beneficiaries of this effort.

Implementation
The delivery vehicle intended to accelerate equal opportunity for boys and girls in competitive school sports programs arrived with an empty trunk. Title IX was without any resources in the luggage compartment to help deliver a single thing necessary to accomplish the noble objective. No staff, no uniforms or supplies, no money. Success in achieving the objective of equal opportunity in competitive athletics depended almost entirely on already underfunded schools with already overworked coaches and administrators.

Of course, in the 1970s, the vast majority of the coaches and athletic administrators at the vast majority of high schools across the country were men. But, deliver they did!

Actually, they began to deliver long before the Title IX regulations became law in 1978, even before most learned in 1974 that the Title IX regulations might cover competitive athletics, even before anybody heard of something called “Title IX.” These people were not mandated by a federal law so much as they were motivated by growing numbers of girls themselves who wanted to compete, and an increasing number of Dads and Moms who wanted the same school sports experiences for their daughters that their sons were enjoying.

During no comparable length period has there been greater growth in the actual number of female participants (nearly 1.8 million, counting a student once for each sport in which that student participates) or faster percentage growth (more than 600 percent) than during the seven years before the Title IX regulations became the law of the land. No other period comes close to matching the explosion of participation by girls in high school sports that occurred from the 1970-71 school year through the 1977-78 school year.

Schools didn’t do everything perfectly, and the decision-makers – at that time, much more often male than female, of course – took significant grief that was not entirely unjustified. They didn’t always provide girls teams the best practice and game facilities and schedules, or the newest uniforms and equipment. Like prospectors to a gold rush, they sometimes hurried to do too much with too little planning and support, launching programs before they had everything – or even some essential things – in place.

In the short term and for small items they had to fundraise. In the longer term and for big ticket items they had to get communities to pass bond issues to build new facilities. With good intentions and bad execution, they often tried to add incompletely supported programs for girls without reducing programs and amenities for boys; and sometimes they were clumsy or callous in making choices.

And, yes, inequalities remain today, in too many places. However, the difference in recent years is that, much more often than not, there are both men and women at the table, involved in needs assessment, making decisions and implementing improvements in the experience both boys and girls receive in educational athletics.

And today, much more often than not, there is built-in radar within both female and male coaches and athletic administrators, just as there is in little children who are playing a board game or game of cards or an all-too-rare back-yard pickup game of baseball, basketball, football or soccer. They shout, “That’s not fair!” when they see something that shouldn’t go unchallenged. Fifty years after the introduction of Title IX, we don’t need federal agencies, lawyers or even referees to shout, “That’s not fair!” Women and men alike know inequality when they see it, call it out, and know how to remedy it in competitive athletic programs sponsored in the name of education.

Title IX gave us a way to measure equal opportunities in interscholastic athletics. Female and male coaches and administrators together have given us the might to get it done.