The NCAA News - News and Features

May 26, 1997

Title IX progress: Attitude is everything, administrators contend

BY SALLY HUGGINS
STAFF WRITER

Altering attitudes toward women's athletics and creating a new culture receptive to women's sports are the keys to bringing female athletes the opportunities mandated by federal law.

"People will make the difference," said Robert E. Frederick, athletics director at the University of Kansas. He spoke May 13 at an NCAA Title IX seminar in Kansas City, Missouri.

Frederick said that administrators should not become distracted by matters such as amount of office space or locker rooms allotted to each sport. Instead, he said the focus should be on building an equitable attitude from which good decisions will emerge.

"This is not about square footage," he said. "Those things will all happen if people have the right attitude and we can create the correct culture."

To change the culture and the attitude, NCAA Executive Director Cedric W. Dempsey said pressure should continue to be brought against institutions that are resistant to change. As an example, he cited the publication of statistics in USA Today that showed which schools are closest to -- and which are farthest from -- substantial proportionality between their athletics enrollment and their undergraduate enrollment.

"There are many who still need a nudge," Dempsey said. "We don't need 10 years more to accomplish our goal."

He was referring to the recently published NCAA gender-equity study, which showed that it would take the NCAA membership 10 to 12 more years to reach substantial proportionality at the current pace.

Christine Grant, director of women's athletics at the University of Iowa, said that while there is reason for optimism, studies such as the NCAA's illustrate how far women's programs must go to reach parity with men's programs.

"The decisions we make today will drastically affect intercollegiate athletics in the next century," Grant said.

Grant expressed concern that schools may gravitate toward decreasing the number of sports for men and women in response to budget constraints.

"It's possible in the 21st century that sports offerings will be reduced to two or three for men and five or six for women," she said. "We will have selected more money to be spent on fewer athletes."

She said an NCAA blue-ribbon committee created to recommend true cost-reduction reforms would be a huge step in the right direction.

"We can't do it alone," she said. "And reforms in the past haven't worked."

Universities need to concentrate on reducing deficit spending, maintaining opportunities for men and providing equal opportunities for women, Grant said. Possible means to accomplish those goals include tuition waivers, direct state support or matching state support.

"We are at a crossroads," Grant said. "There is no question women will achieve equal opportunity in sports. The question is how we will accomplish that. Will it be by reforming or by pouring more money into fewer sports? I trust it will not be the latter."

Efforts to increase women's programming have been met with resistance by some athletics department boosters who are interested mostly in football and men's basketball, Frederick said. He added that many have been older male donors who are not interested in contributing to the nonrevenue sports and that often, the wives of the potential donors have felt the same as their husbands.

At Kansas, Frederick began a communication effort to change that attitude.

"I thought it was important that we change that culture," he said. "We communicated the message that academic achievement was important, that the nonrevenue sports were important, how student-athletes conduct themselves on and off the field was important."

In 10 years as AD at Kansas, Frederick has seen the attitude and the culture change, and he now believes that Division I athletics directors should be in the forefront of the effort nationally.

However, he noted that few Division I ADs have attended the Title IX seminars.

"It's those people who need to step up and make the commitment to changing the attitude, to changing the culture," he said.

Grant said Division I missed an important opportunity to show support for women's athletics and women in athletics when none of the six most powerful bodies in the NCAA's new Division I structure -- the Board of Directors, Management Council and the four cabinets -- appointed a woman as chair.

"It was a golden opportunity for the NCAA to send a message, and it was lost," Grant said.

Dempsey said three events in 1997 have been significant for the movement toward gender equity: