|
|
The recent NCAA Women's Basketball Final Four Tournament here in Minneapolis has reignited the gender equity debate as it relates to college athletics. The proponents of gender equity argue that women should have the same access to college sports as men. However, if the goal of gender equity is to give all outstanding high school athletes an opportunity to play at the highest college levels, then the current notions of gender equity in college need to be reexamined. Do college women necessarily deserve an equal number of scholarships as men? Despite the fact that the Minnesota State High School League officially sanctions more sports for girls than boys and that the MSHSL requires all member schools to offer at least as many sports for girls as boys, only 40% of high school athletes are girls. In other words, despite more opportunities to play sports than boys, girls do not participate as often. With 50% more high school participants, it would seem reasonable that more boys would be awarded scholarships more frequently than girls. In reality, the gender equity debates now needs to move beyond a simple numbers game because the issue is more important than just the number of scholarships offered. A well-balanced approach to the issue would ask more fundamental questions. Are the sports with a large base of potential high school recruits being offered or is any significant group of athletes being excluded from participation at the Division 1 level? Are those sports that are offered given adequate funding to ensure success and is the revenue potential of all sports being developed? For example, one should not ask whether each sex is allotted a certain percentage of scholarships but whether each team has enough scholarships to field a competitive team. Fairness for all groups of athletes would mean that widely played sports should not be excluded nor obscure sports added simply to make the books balance. For example, in Minnesota there are 10 sports offered to girls and 11 offered to boys that draw at least 1200 high school participants, a large enough number of participants to provide a significant pool of talent from which to draw recruits. If offering each of these sports and providing each with an adequate number of scholarships results in an unequal division of athletes between men and women that is not necessarily unfair. Soccer stands out as a sport where gender equity has led to a true miscarriage of justice. Based on the number of participants, soccer is the seventh most popular high school sport among boys and the sixth most popular among girls in Minnesota. However, despite the fact that 35% more boys than girls participate in soccer at the high school level in our state, next fall six Minnesota colleges or universities will play Division 1 or Division 2 women's soccer while no schools will field a men's soccer team at the same level. All six of these women's teams have been added in the last two years in an attempt to raise the number of women's scholarships or participants in the athletic program. In other areas of the nation the situation is even worse for the boys. Due to gender equity considerations, North Texas University last year completely dropped its men's soccer team and added a new women's soccer team in its place. How can one argue that taking a successful team right out from under a group of student-athletes promotes fairness in athletics? Those who want to play the numbers game would argue that the men at North Texas have plenty of other opportunities to play in other sports. However, none of this is consolation for those men who have had their scholarships pulled out from under them as they cannot simply now choose to become football players instead. Athletes are not simply interchangeable pieces of a puzzle, and you can't make a soccer player into a football player simply by designating scholarships for one sport or the other. It is outstanding that colleges in Minnesota have finally recognized the pool of talent that we have in our female soccer players, but it is unfortunate that gender equity leads them to ignore the other half of the sport. The rigid pursuit of gender equity by the numbers can only mean that
individuals in certain sports get discriminated against solely due to
their sex, the exact injustice that gender equity attempts to address. For
boys soccer, a sport with 3,200 high school and 25,000 competitive youth
players in Minnesota, the current pursuit of gender equity means that
these athletes will never have a place to play Division 1 college ball in
their own state, and that is a true injustice.
|