The varsity swimming pool at a Midwestern university has been turned over for purely recreational use and the diving boards have been dismantled. The wrestling mats at a high-profile Eastern university have been donated to a local high school and the facility is now being used for dancing. Varsity track and field equipment at a Southern college has been handed down to the physical education department. And the men's gymnastics apparatus in a large West Coast university has been sold to a local gymnastics club.

And so it goes.

The erosion of nonrevenue intercollegiate sports has been going on since the mid-1990s and to date, about 350 men's programs have been eliminated. The reasons most frequently given are the escalating costs of operating collegiate athletics and related Title IX issues.

No one disputes that Title IX is a much-needed law, but due to strict enforcement and compliance coupled with high athletics budgets, there has been a continual elimination of nonrevenue and endangered Olympic sports on college campuses.

Even after those sports were dropped, student-athletes did not give up trying to save them. Efforts were made to raise money to retain the sports, but such private rescue efforts often are a last resort. With the exception of a very few institutions that reinstated programs after a national alumni letter-writing campaign, most formal efforts such as pleas to the university chief executive officer, alumni involvement, media exposure and even lobbying the state legislature have failed to restore lower-tier and various Olympic sports.

Is it possible that athletics directors and presidents involved in those terminations failed to note that Title IX does not require identical programs for men and women, nor does it require the same number of teams? It's also possible that athletics administrators feel a need to balance the quotas (that is, percentages of men and women), and the lower-tiered sports are sacrificed because of the disproportionate number of males involved. By using this method, institutions come into compliance with Title IX and at the same time channel the eliminated teams' budgets into other sports.

In 1994, the NCAA tried to stem the tide of diminishing sport programs by establishing the USOC/
NCAA Task Force, whose goal was to "stop the bleeding." The result has not been notable -- in fact it looks like there may need to be a transfusion in order to maintain several Olympic sports.

Have we reached a wall of apathy because the problems seem insurmountable? There are some efforts to consider, some of which have yet to enjoy much discussion:

There are more than 125 committees and subcommittees that enforce and support NCAA rules that are written in the Manual. Additionally, the NCAA is committed to focusing on such issues as student-athlete welfare, gender equity, compliance, homophobia, amateurism and gambling.

Yet, there is not a single group or committee devoted to the examination of how to keep nonrevenue or low-visibility sports from being dropped.

That sends a telling message that needs to be corrected.

Richard Aronson is the executive director of the College Gymnastics Association.