As institutions strive to comply with Title IX standards, the concept of roster management has become a popular gender-balancing strategy.

On the surface, roster management appears goal-oriented since the challenge often is to balance male and female athletics participation in mirrored proportion to the institution's undergraduate student population. The application of roster management requires restricting (that is, capping) the number of men allowed to participate in the athletics program and establishing minimum numbers of women who must be team members, thereby controlling participant ratios. Based on this manipulation, it appears reasonable to assume that planned player assignments will produce highly desirable results.

Need fewer male athlete participants? Lower the maximum number permitted per team. Need more female athlete participants? Increase the minimum number required per team. The roster management process appears straightforward. Target the undergraduate male/female rate and engineer the desired student-athlete results by opening or closing specific gender roster(s). What once appeared to be unmanageable now seems as basic as handling a personal savings account, where maintaining solvency means ensuring that deposits outweigh withdrawals. Keeping the male/female ratio in a favorable position means adjusting participant counts.

While a roster management approach is mathematically explicit, the reality is that gender-equity results have proven illusive and uncontrollable. If results are that easy to obtain, why don't more Division I institutions find themselves in compliance?

The fact is that roster management, even when it works, benefits neither gender. It often leads to the eventual elimination of a sports team or two when it becomes apparent that equitable proportionality is difficult to obtain. The recipe for roster management doesn't include competitive success, participant satisfaction, diversity or any other student-athlete welfare ingredients. Simply stated, roster management is quantitatively driven and inherently flawed. It enjoys unwarranted confidence in its ability to solve the gender-balancing puzzle.

Critics of gender equity typically point to the overwhelming number of male athletes involved in a Division I football program and argue that there is no offsetting female sport team of comparable size. This is true. It may take several women's teams to compensate for a football team of 90 or more players. But despite that argument, and the unrealistic dream some may hold for deleting football from the equation, there are other less publicized shortcomings of roster management. Those issues relate to cooperative spirit and fairness, or the fact that all student-athletes may experience tension when the genders are divided and asked to compete for scarce roster slots, or when select teams are forced to take more participants than reasonable, knowing that some participants are not likely to be afforded a competitive opportunity.

Consider the situation in which an institution employs one men's cross country coach and one women's cross country coach and assigns roster management numbers to each team. Assume the men's team is capped at 12 runners and the women's team is expected to carry a minimum of 22 runners. While such limitations may adhere to targeted proportionality standards, which gender is more likely to have the better player/coach experience? It seems that the male athletes should have a better athletics experience than their female counterparts given the coach/player ratio. The men's team is likely to enjoy more productive practice sessions. Each male participant is more likely to run in a competitive event, and the men's team should be more talented across its ranks since only the better male athletes remain on the roster. The sheer number of female team members required, which may result in crowded or multiple practice sessions, and the correspondingly few competitive opportunities may render fielding a properly sized women's team more difficult and a less satisfying experience.

Every campus classroom has limited seating capacity that governs the number of students who can register for a course. This fact illustrates how capacity management can lead to successful enrollment restriction. Given this reality, why then doesn't roster management produce a similarly beneficial outcome in balancing male and female student-athlete participation rates?

One reason may be that classroom capacities are fixed and do not change from semester to semester. They create a definable metric or end point. Such is not the case for roster management because it is subject to fluctuation based on annual overall undergraduate enrollment and nonscholarship athletics team appeal. At many Division I institutions, the desired male/female ratio is a moving target. This lack of stability in desired outcome discounts the transferability of a capacity management concept to a roster management approach.

In addition, the official interpretation of an acceptable range of variance between enrollment and athletics participation rates has been modified during the past several years. This updated interpretation has led some institutions to massage earlier roster management target numbers while others have found it mandatory to drop some varsity sports.

Successful roster management is likely to occur only when there is concern for student-athlete welfare and more stability in enrollment rates.

Michael L. Kasavana is the faculty athletics representative at Michigan State University.