The recent thread on the Big Ten's consideration of a "40% female
athletes" rule is interesting.
One observation I can't resist offering is that comments along the
line of "find out how many students attending are interested in playing
X sport" and "use the percentage of female undergraduates as a basis
for any quotas" strike me as, shall we say, amusing?
Do we seriously believe that intercollegiate athletics, PARTICULARLY
in Division I of the NC$$, but in reality, at any level, reflects in
the proportion of student-athlete "types" its overall student body?
Get real!--at least when talking about the bigger-time spectator
sports, i.e. football, basketball, baseball, hockey, even track and
field in most cases. Walk-ons are a romantic notion at best in nearly
all "revenue" and many non-revenue sports. Coaches spend most of
their off-season time, and some of the on-season, scouting and recruit-
ing prospects. The prowess of Notre Dame's football team, Las Vegas'
basketball team, and (just to show I'm even-handed in this) Northern
Michigan's hockey team reflects the overall talent for and interest
in playing these sports on the part of the general student bodies as
--well, I don't know what, but there just isn't any connection.
(It's really ironic that for many schools the athletic recruiting
phenomenon provides the only source of diversity in the student
body. Ever ponder the scene when the Nebraska football team runs
out on the field at Norman? I heard one year that Nebraska had 50
black students enrolled, and 48 of them were on the football team.)
The point the women athletes are making is that equality of access to
competition--and most importantly the financial support athletic
scholarships provide--has not existed and still does not.
Now, it might be very reasonable to develop a "quota" (such an unpop-
ular word--how about "principle"?) based on the % of high school
athletes of both genders in the nation. (I'd rather say "in the
school's 'service area'," but as noted above, when it comes to
most sports and especially the big-time spectator ones, no institution
sticks to its "service area" when recruiting athletes.)
The one half-way reasonable objection, IMHO, which some have raised
concerning proposals like the Big Ten's is the problem created by
football. As John H. notes, a) football is a male sport (for the most
part, anyway), and b) as currently played it "consumes" 100 players
in Div I-A. Thus for "equality" between the genders in terms of number
of athletes and/or scholarships, to balance the huge number of men
involved in football (or huge number of $$), we sometimes see "minor"
women's sports better funded than their male counterparts', which of
course drives the men's coaches and sportswriters mad (e.g. track and
field). It occurs to me that if this is truly an inequity of another
kind, we COULD change our approach to football.
Oh sacrilege!? But when I first started attending collegiate football
games in 1959, I seem to recall that there were about 40 players on a
team. Then something called unlimited substitution came along and all
of a sudden you had to have at least three-deep offensive AND separate
defensive teams, as well as the usual complement of specialists (kick-
ers, quarterbacks, etc.). Suddenly some Division I teams had well
over 100 players. The funny thing is, our ultimate football competition
level, the NFL, has unlimited substitution and yet teams get along with
only 48 (I think) players dressed for each game. (And the "taxi squads"
aren't that big, either.)
In both Washington and Michigan I have observed an extremely large
degree of interest in both participating in and "spectating" women's
sports, especially volleyball and basketball. Why shouldn't talented
female athletes have as many options as talented male athletes?
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* Steve Christopher, NMU *
* "Go 'Cats!''Goin' for it again in *
* '93--With a little less "O" *
* and a lot more "D"! *
* [log in to unmask] *
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