By Karen Eknaian
Until the 1990s, the athletic department at Northeastern was represented by a cold steel chain and thick padlock wrapped around the handles of a prestigious varsity clubroom, meant to keep the women from entering.
Before 1991, the genders were set against one another. Men were stationed at the Cabot Gymnasium, while the women were down the street at Matthews Arena.
It wasn’t just distance that set them apart, but the chain and padlock attached to the door leading to the lounge from the women’s athletics office.
During the 1991-1992 season, all of that changed. The departments were merged and the chain was cut.
“All of a sudden it wasn’t a fight anymore, all of a sudden the resources that we weren’t entitled to became available to us,” field hockey head coach Cheryl Murtagh said. “We became one department, the athletic director moved over to Matthews Arena and the lock came off the door. We were now welcome to [the lounge].”
Those resources came as a result of a change that swept women’s athletic departments across the country. Title IX, an education law passed in 1972, mandated men’s and women’s programs in all facets of education, including sports, must have equal funding and participation levels equal to the male-female ratio of the university as a whole.
By the end of the 1980s, universities were putting pressure on athletic directors to include sports on the list of activities that required equal funding. As a result, women’s sports finally had the bolstering it needed to make it feel welcome in the sports world.
Well, not entirely welcome.
Northeastern didn’t make a move for full equality until the 1995-1996 season while looking to expand its program, athletic department officials said.
“We [the United States] are not even close [to equality],” said Donna Lopiano, CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation. “When you look at participation numbers, when you look at budgets, when you look at any of it, the promise of Title IX has not been realized and my guess is that 80 percent of the athletic programs in this country are still out of compliance of Title IX, 33 years after it was passed.”
According to the NCAA Gender Equity Report of 2002-2003, female athletes received 25 percent fewer scholarship dollars and about 80 percent fewer operating budget dollars.
Northeastern Athletics Director Dave O’Brien said that whether you are investigating participation rates, budgets or opportunities for women to compete, Northeastern’s athletic department runs down the middle of the road.
‘Full compliance’
“We are in full compliance with the law,” O’Brien said. “If there was ever a lawsuit brought against us, we would win.”
The current national equality resulted from a long process that began when Congress passed Title IX in 1972. The law required that all colleges offer an equal number of opportunities in all extracurricular activities.
Before the law was passed, there were only 16,000 female athletes competing at the collegiate level across the country. The were as few as two female teams per university, according to the 2004 Acosta and Carpenter Study.
Now, universities average close to eight teams per school. Soccer has shown the greatest amount of growth than any other female sport with a jump from two percent of universities with a team to a colossal 89 percent. But this growth didn’t come without some resistance.
Like most colleges, Northeastern puts much of its sports funding into scholarships. As the law dictates, the men’s and women’s program must have an equal number of scholarships, which is 87 for each program.
According to data provided by the university, Northeastern gives out between 56 to 63 I-AA football scholarships per year, including the maximum number of men’s scholarships allowed by the NCAA in men’s basketball (13) and men’s ice hockey scholarships (18).
The university provides the maximum number of scholarships allowed in the women’s ice hockey (18), field hockey (12), basketball (15) and volleyball (12) programs as well.
Northeastern comes close to fully funding a number of other women’s sports, including soccer, for which the NCAA allows a maximum of 18 scholarships; crew, which is allowed 20 scholarships; and track, with a maximum of 18 scholarships. The male counterparts in each of these sports are not as close to receiving full funding, and these departments receive less than half of the maximum number of scholarships per year, the data said.
It only takes three fully-funded men’s programs to provide the same number of scholarships offered to eight women’s teams.
The magic number, 87, is reached by counting only the fully funded programs for men and counting the fully funded programs for women. Then, there are an additional 10 scholarships for each fully funded women’s program.
Problems in the past
In the early and mid-80’s, lawsuits began to spring up against universities on the basis of Title IX, but the need to comply came only after a very publicized lawsuit brought against Brown University in 1992.
After Brown cut its women’s gymnastics and volleyball teams, nine female students sued the university for being discriminatory toward women and for not providing enough opportunities, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Since Brown wanted to keep all of its men’s sports, it placed participation caps on male teams and required its existing female teams to recruit more players. It also added more women’s junior varsity teams.
U.S. District Court Judge for Rhode Island Raymond J. Pettine ruled the actions were not enough to comply with Title IX.
“Institutions respond to two things really well: bad press and lawsuits,” Lopiano said. “They usually bring about change, whether it brings about enough change I’m not sure, but they are mechanisms that work.”
Brown was left with no choice but to cut some of its men’s sports. Soon, teams were not only being cut at Brown, but all around the country.
O’Brien is no stranger to Title IX controversy. In 1991, he became the athletic director at Long Beach State University, at a time when the institution first implemented its plan to comply with Title IX.
“I became the Athletic Director in 1991,” O’Brien said. “We were very aware in the 80’s and early 90’s about Title IX, and one of the first things that I did when I became athletic director was I dropped a Division 1-A football program.
“Given our resources, it was going to be impossible for us to comply with Title IX. We were not in a position to expand women’s opportunities without finding the resources, which came from football. It was one of many reasons that factored into the decision.”
As O’Brien’s experience demonstrates, Title IX may result in fair funding for women, but many athletic directors in tightly-funded sports programs are forced to make difficult decisions they may not view as helping the program as a whole.
Former Northeastern women’s swimming coach Janet Swanson said it was never the goal of Title IX to cut men’s teams, only to add women’s sports and enhance the number of opportunities for women.
“There is a problem with Title IX, because football has so many men,” Swanson said. “That team is taking up all the numbers. You gotta count the football team, but there is a much more equal ratio after football. And you are not going to cut the football program, so Title IX gets a bad reputation for hurting men’s programs.”
Tough decisions at home
Northeastern was the victim of such a tough decision after the 1995-1996 season.
Despite winning a pair of American East Conference championships in its final two years, the men’s swimming program was cut from the athletics department after the 1995-1996 season.
Former men’s swimming coach Roy Coats, who was able to keep coaching at the university with the women’s swimming team, said the decision came down to politics rather than performance.
“I think it was a choice between the least politically-powerful sports. You couldn’t cut football, basketball or hockey because they pulled in a lot of money from alumni,” he said.
“I think it came down to baseball or swimming. [Swimming] alumni were only 40 years old and baseball had alumni who were in their 60s, so they cut men’s swimming. But in fairness, they had to do something – I just wish that they hadn’t done what they did.”
But the swim team was not the only one to lose a home on Huntington Avenue that year. The women’s gymnastics squad, the men’s and women’s tennis teams and the men’s golf team were all cut in the same year to make way for the women’s soccer team.
The men’s and women’s tennis teams and the men’s golf team were targets for being cut from varsity status because they never recruited states. The lack of tennis courts and a steady home course also added to the decision, Associate Athletic Director Jack Grinold said.
The women’s gymnastics team, which used to practice in what is now the weight room on the bottom level of Cabot Gym, was also cut due to the lack of space, money and participation, Grinold said.
Not all universities have had to make the decisions athletic programs like Northeastern had to make.
Across the river, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been fortunate enough that it was not only able to keep all of its men’s programs, but also expand on its athletics program over the years.
Even since Title IX was passed, MIT was able to add a football program to go along with its other 40 varsity sports.
The primary reason for the growth is that, as a Division-III school, MIT does not worry about scholarships for any of its sports, except women’s crew, which it considers as a Division-I sport, Royer said.
Royer said that the use of endowments, the annual gift campaign, memberships to its Zesigner Fitness Center and rental fees for its facilities does MIT acquire enough money to not only to sustain, but improve on its current athletics department.
At Northeastern, with its many scholarships and student activity fees that jump back into the university’s operating budget, it would take many changes to implement a similar funding model for the athletics department.
Rather than funding athletic programs directly, most donated money will likely go toward building a new athletic stadium on Columbus Avenue the university has made a goal of building over the next few years.
In fact, the Northeastern athletic department, which is combating newly stretched budgets and the move to the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA), Northeastern is going to struggle to fund the sports it already has, O’Brien said.
“Clearly we jumped off the cliff [into the CAA],” he said. “We are hoping that we have a parachute, but we’re not positive. It was a gutsy decision by the university and I think it was the right decision [to switch conferences], but for the next few years we are going to struggle to compete, and struggle to afford the money to get the bus all the way to the game or get the plane all the way to the game. We may have to stop one city short and walk the rest of the way.”
Northeastern’s funding ranked in the bottom four of its old conference, the America East, and is now in the bottom two of the CAA.
But, the hope is that the more competitive atmosphere in the CAA will boost the Husky athletic programs into the national arena and bring more publicity, more money and stronger athletes to the university, O’Brien said.
Progress, but not equality
For others, Title IX has left demands of more equal opportunity in athletics.
Lopiano said a major issue now is assuring coaches are hired under equal-opportunity policies.
“While great strides are being made for women to participate in sports, their coaches that lead the teams and provide role models for these female athletes are still mostly male,” Lopiano said.
Nationally, the difference in the number of coaches and athletics directors between men and women are greatly out of proportion. Only 18.5 percent of athletic directors are women, and 44.1 percent of head coaches of female teams are women. Only two percent of head coaches of male teams are women, according to a 2004 Acosta and Carpenter study, named after two women who were instrumental in fighting for equality in sport.
For Northeastern, which has three female coaches, Lopiano suspects that drastic steps need to be taken.
“Talk about sex discrimination on the part of the institution in its hiring practices,” Lopiano said. “As the next generation of athletics directors comes in and becomes less likely to prefer males as coaches and recognizes that having only three coaches as women for 19 sports is wrong.
“You cannot legislate morality or ethics, just because you have a civil rights law doesn’t mean that it erases discrimination,” Lopiano said. “It all comes down to individuals doing the right thing and if they are not doing the right thing, other individuals who are interested in social justice, standing up and bringing lawsuits or doing a public condemnation of that kind of behavior.”
Sex discrimination couldn’t be further from the hiring practices at Northeastern, O’Brien said.
“For someone to make a determination like that by looking at numbers is unwise and quite frankly inflammatory,” O’Brien said. “Title IX requires that we have the best coaching available. Making decisions regardless of gender to provide the women with the best coaching we can as we do with the men. Title IX itself needs us to be gender neutral.”
“At the end of the day, you want to be able to look at the administrators and staff you have working for you and see that all students have role models to look up to. Whether it be by race or gender and we feel comfortable that at Northeastern we have achieved that.”
Royer said that Title IX hurts the chance of current trends being reversed.
In fact, she said she has encountered fewer female coaches to choose from when she is seeking to fill a new position. Royer said MIT did not have equality in coaching, either.
“The old route is that you played and you loved it. You decided that you would coach and you loved it and then as you aged a little bit, you would think maybe you could do something for the sport beyond coaching, ” she said.”What is missing now is that so few women seem to be going into coaching. There are so many doors and opportunities that have been unlocked through Title IX.”
