The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- December 6, 1999

Women's sports enter NCAA arena

After long, difficult debate, Association broadens its role

BY KAY HAWES
STAFF WRITER

When the NCAA was created in 1906, football -- and the young men who played it -- was the focus of the organization. As the Association broadened its reach throughout the years to include many more championships, the NCAA never included women.

A few times early on in the Association's history, the subject of women was raised, but Association leaders always came to the conclusion that women's sports didn't belong in the NCAA.

All that changed in the 1980s, when women's sports became a part of the Association. With the passage of Title IX in 1972 and the addition of women's championships to the NCAA in 1981 and 1982, women were at the forefront of a decade of change.

As far back as 1922, the NCAA discussed women in sport at its annual Convention. D.W. Morehouse, acting president of Drake University and an NCAA delegate, had studied women's participation in his NCAA district and pointed out that more women were participating in college sports.

"Considerable agitation has been developed over the possibility of athletics for women," Morehouse said. "A large number of schools are giving this branch of physical education very serious attention."

But Morehouse's comments did not stir any action at the Convention or elsewhere.

In 1965, the Association appointed a Special Committee on Women's Competition to serve as a liaison with interested groups, and a few years later, the NCAA Council appointed a committee to study the feasibility of including women's sports in the NCAA.

With Congress' adoption of Title IX in 1972 -- a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education -- many institutions, both in college and on the high-school level, began to add women's sports.

In 1973, on the advice of legal counsel, the NCAA rescinded its rule prohibiting female student-athletes from competing for NCAA championships. That same year, Dacia Schileru, a diver from Wayne State University (Michigan), became the first female to compete in an NCAA championship when she entered the College Division Swimming and Diving Championships.

A collision waiting to happen

While the NCAA continued to study the issue of women's sports, a new group was formed in 1971 to oversee women's intercollegiate athletics. The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was established that year with 280 member institutions.

The AIAW was run for women, by women, and its rules -- especially regarding financial aid, transferal and recruiting -- were far different than the NCAA's.

Begun as an educational association with close ties to physical education departments, the AIAW sought to avoid what its members thought were many of the problems in men's athletics. It permitted women to transfer and play immediately at their new school, reasoning that someone could transfer and immediately play in the band or participate in forensics, so why not athletics? For several years, the AIAW did not permit schools to offer athletics scholarships, and it also did not permit off-campus recruiting.

By 1980, women's athletics budgets had risen from just 1 percent of men's budgets to nearly 16 percent. Membership in the AIAW grew to 971 institutions, and the association had begun permitting athletics scholarships.

By 1980, the AIAW also had created 41 national championships for women in 19 sports and had signed a four-year television contract with NBC. And the NCAA had begun to seriously consider offering women's championships, a move that would likely destroy the AIAW.

At the AIAW's January 1980 convention, its members requested a five-year moratorium on the debate of who should govern women's athletics, asking both the NCAA and the NAIA to respect the moratorium.

But later that month at the NCAA's annual Convention, institutional members in Division II and III voted to hold women's championships in five sports -- basketball, field hockey, swimming, tennis and volleyball -- in 1981-82.

At its 1981 Convention, the NCAA debated a full "governance plan" that would expand the NCAA Council and allocate four slots to women; create the necessary women's sports committees to conduct women's championships; allow member institutions to be eligible for NCAA championships if they used either NCAA or another governing body's rules; and stipulate that institutions had until August 1, 1985, to choose whether to affiliate their women's programs with the NCAA and abide by only NCAA rules.

After a spirited debate in which many women athletics administrators rejected the NCAA's involvement in women's athletics, the governance plan passed. But the proposal to initiate women's championships in Division I failed -- by only one vote. Later, the membership voted to consider the issue again, and the Division I championships proposal passed, 137-117.

A new day had dawned in NCAA history, and the quick decline of the AIAW had begun. The AIAW membership dwindled, and NBC canceled its television contract. The AIAW closed its doors and filed suit against the Association in 1982, stating that the NCAA had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by attempting to create an athletics monopoly. The AIAW lost, and many of its most prominent supporters found themselves serving on NCAA committees a few years later. (See related story, page A2).

Title IX impact

While current NCAA policy supports Title IX, the Association actively sought in the 1970s and 1980s a conservative application of how the law should apply to college athletics.

In 1974, the NCAA asked Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, to propose an amendment that would have excluded intercollegiate athletics from the legislation. The amendment failed. The next year the Association's president, John Fuzak of Michigan State University, wrote to President Ford, stating that "The Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) concepts of Title IX as expressed could seriously damage, if not destroy, the major men's intercollegiate athletic programs."

The NCAA continued to lobby Washington throughout the 1970s and 1980s, seeking to limit the jurisdiction and scope of Title IX.

The NCAA sued the HEW in 1976, arguing that HEW was exceeding its sphere of influence by venturing into intercollegiate athletics. The court dismissed the case in 1978, deciding that the NCAA did not have sufficient legal standing to sue on its members' behalf on this issue.

In 1978, the NCAA, supported the efforts of Grove City College, a private college. Grove City sued HEW, claiming that because the school did not accept federal funds, it should not be required to comply with Title IX.

In 1984, those who wanted to limit the scope of Title IX won a major victory when the Supreme Court ruled that Title IX did apply to Grove City (through its students receiving federal aid) but that Title IX only applied to those departments that actually received the funds. That narrow interpretation effectively denied the application of Title IX to non-federally funded programs such as college athletics departments.

But the debate was not over. In 1988, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Restoration Act, requiring that all educational institutions that receive either direct or indirect federal funds to be subject to Title IX. That act restored the power of Title IX and caused the Association, as well as its member institutions, to rethink Title IX and its impact yet again.

Death penalty

The 1980s also were a time of scandals ranging from providing blatantly illegal recruiting incentives to providing extra benefits to enrolled student-athletes to fudging on academic records or requirements. The scandals seriously damaged the reputation of college sports.

One of the most widely known cases was that of Southern Methodist University, which involved the systematic payoffs of athletes made with the knowledge of the university's board and even the involvement of Bill Clements, the governor of Texas.

Those infractions led to the Association giving the program its "death penalty," which brought Southern Methodist's football program to a halt for two years. (That penalty had never before been used, nor has it since.)

By 1988, 18 intercollegiate programs were on probation for NCAA violations, and numerous schools were banned from postseason play in sports ranging from men's and women's track to football, basketball and soccer.

The need to do something about abuses in intercollegiate athletics was clearly articulated in March 1989 when a national poll released by the Association Press showed overwhelmingly that Americans widely doubted the integrity of top college athletics programs.

Those polled said they believed colleges commonly gave secret payments and inflated grades to student-athletes, and two-thirds of those polled said colleges overemphasized athletics and neglected academic standards for athletes.

The stirrings of reform had begun in the Association in 1983, when the Select Committee on Athletic Problems and Concerns in Higher Education was appointed by the NCAA Council to develop new and revised policies to deal with the most pressing problems in intercollegiate athletics.

In addition to other recommendations regarding academic issues, financial aid and recruiting, the committee recommended the establishment of a council or board of presidents that would have authority to review Association activities, advise the NCAA Council, commission studies and propose legislation to the NCAA Convention.

This action was probably the first serious move toward presidential involvement and accountability in Association activities.

The next year, the NCAA established a body of 44 chief executive officers called the NCAA Presidents Commission. It was an important step in the Association's move toward greater presidential control.

In 1989, Sen. Bill Bradley, D-New Jersey and a former student-athlete, introduced a bill to require colleges to make their graduation rates a matter of public record, primarily so student-athletes would have access to that information.

Also that same year, the NCAA took notice of student-athlete opinion and created the first NCAA Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, which was authorized to meet and recommend NCAA legislation.

In October 1989, the trustees of the Knight Foundation created a Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and expressed their concern that "abuses in athletics had reached proportions threatening the very integrity of higher education." The Knight Foundation's Report, released in 1991, was the beginning of calls for presidents to be directly in charge of intercollegiate athletics, both on the campus level and on the national level in the NCAA. Significant reforms were on the way.

Part IV of The NCAA Century Series will examine the Association from 1990 to the present.