| The Year of the Women's Game (March 2003) |
By Jim Sheldon
“Crossroad” may be too strong of a term, but this will be an interesting, if not pivotal, year for women’s soccer in this country. Three major challenges to the continued growth of the women’s game are on the horizon.
First up will be the Department of Education’s review of Title IX. As this is written at the end of January, the commission appointed by President Bush has forwarded several recommendations to the department. A final report is expected by the end of February.
Several of those recommendations may lead to a watering down of Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination at schools receiving federal funds. The most discussed target in those recommendations was the proportionality test.
Until now, schools have been expected to offer athletic opportunities in proportion with their overall enrollment. For example, if a school is 50 percent female, 50 percent of the athletic opportunities should be for women. This is a test – one of three developed by the Office of Civil Rights – that the courts have consistently upheld, but it is now under attack.
Opponents have maintained that the proportionality test, which is the only one that is really quantifiable, has had an unintended negative impact on men’s sports. The list of men’s sports that have been dropped in the last 10 years is lengthy. Sports like wrestling and men’s gymnastics have been particularly hard hit, but men’s soccer has not been exempt either. We’ve seen men’s programs terminated at North Texas, Miami of Ohio, Central Michigan, Illinois State, Arkansas-Little Rock, South Alabama and elsewhere.
However, it’s not always clear that the gender-equity required by Title IX is the culprit. A case in point is the recent situation at Florida International, where the men’s soccer program was axed, only to be reinstated for two more years after an outpouring of support from student-athletes and alumni.
Gender-equity never was cited in FIU’s original decision to drop the sport. Instead, it was stated that the program’s $320,000 budget would be reallocated to other programs. What was unsaid was that FIU recently has launched a Division I football program, one already wallowing in debt after drawing about 8,000 fans per game.
Title IX proponents argue the commission’s recommendations to count opportunities rather than participants, to not count walk-ons at all and to survey the student body to determine interest open the door for the Department of Education to further dilute the law. We won’t know if that is the case or not until after the final report, maybe well after that.
What was largely missing from the commission’s dialogue and was nowhere to be found in its recommendations was any meaningful action on the imbalance – both in terms of numbers and dollars – caused by football. Why Division I-A football needs 85 full scholarships, head coaching salaries in excess of $1 million, a phalanx of assistant coaches and an overall budget that dwarfs other sports’ didn’t seem to be on the table. That is particularly curious when one considers only about 40 schools have profitable football programs and, by and large, those are not the schools that are dropping men’s non-revenue sports.
Then again, maybe it’s not curious when one considers that 10 of the 15 members on the commission had ties to Division I football schools. There was no representation from the Division II, III or high school levels.
The second hurdle facing women’s soccer this year will be the WUSA’s third season. A not-unexpected sophomore slump in attendance and the economic downturn that affected the league’s corporate investors have led to further belt tightening. The league is about as lean as it can get right now.
The good news is the league remains the pre-eminent women’s soccer league in the world, its star players remain hugely popular, sponsors still seem committed and there are prospects for new investors. If attendance improves this summer and the league can attract new money, there is every hope that the WUSA will move forward.
The WUSA certainly deserves the support of the soccer community. Attend as many games as you can this year. When you can’t attend, watch the matches on television. We all have a stake in the league’s future.
No doubt, that future will be enhanced if the third challenge is met, namely defending our FIFA Women’s World Cup title.
Winning this fall in China probably won’t create the same media frenzy we saw in 1999, when we won on home soil. And, it certainly won’t be easy. A number of countries have taken great strides since 1999, as evidenced in the 2000 Olympics when we fell short of the gold medal.
This World Cup will likely be the international swan song for many of the stars we’ve followed for the last decade – Chastain, Hamm, Foudy, Fawcett, Lilly, etc. Coach April Heinrichs will need one more peak performance from those veterans while blending in a new generation, who hopefully will be up to the task.
Let’s hope that bringing home another world championship will be the crowning achievement in an all-around successful year for the women’s game. |
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