Back in Ohio, my junior high history teacher was also the wrestling coach. In seventh-grade, he questioned me relentlessly when I went out for basketball instead of wrestling. Every day after class, he’d catch me in the hall and say, “Grocott, when are you going to quit basketball and go out for wrestling?” I am thankful he did. Wrestling grew to be a passion and I have remained involved with it from those days long ago until now, both as a competitor and coach.
Around the same time Mr. Montequilla was twisting my arm to wrestle, another event was brewing in Washington, D.C. It would eventually have a major impact on my life. It started rather innocuously with legislation co-authored by Sen. Birch Bayh in the U.S. Senate and in the House by U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink. Passed in both chambers, the law was signed into law by President Nixon, June 23, 1972. While technically part of the Education Amendments of 1972, it became more commonly known as the “sports-equity law.”
Interestingly, no wording in the law’s text mentions sports. In fact, what the president signed simply reads: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
In the spring of 1977, I was busy applying to colleges. Despite having a decent but not stellar career as a high school wrestler, I was determined to go on to the collegiate level. Each of the schools I applied to had wrestling. It is not surprising. More than 150 NCAA Division I schools had programs.
The school I chose to attend was the University of Florida. It was there that Title IX reared its head. After my sophomore season, our coach gathered us together in our brand-new wrestling room that still smelled of new mats and announced the university was cutting the team because of Title IX.
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That spring, my teammates and I were scattered to the winds. Not one of us ended up on a squad together. Some simply quit. Ironically, the school I chose, Clemson, and the school my closest teammate chose, The University of California, Davis, also dropped their programs after we graduated. After the University of Florida dropped its program, the rest of the South Eastern Conference schools followed suit. Today, only 76 schools have NCAA Division I programs.
This decimation has happened not only to men’s wrestling but to many other minority sports as well. How did it happen? One might argue it was the result of a complete misinterpretation of what was written. A well-meaning law to eliminate discrimination in education instead became a quota system for college athletics. It came to mean that a college or university that received federal funding must offer an equal number of women’s sport scholarships as it does to men.
For schools with large, successful football programs, like the two I attended, the quota system has played havoc. The NCAA permits football to give out a maximum of 85 scholarships. To comply, these schools must automatically give out 85 women’s scholarships. Therefore, adding any other sport to the men’s side of the ledger means equally adding to the women’s, regardless of interest or participation. In fact, if participation and interest does not exist for the women, it cannot exist for the men. The two must be equal.
Title IX’s quota system is in fact so harsh, it offers no relief to schools that may prefer to offer “equal opportunity” sports. In other words, rather than abandon the quota system for sports such as archery, rifle, soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball or, for that matter … wrestling, the quota remains strictly in place. It should be that, if these sports are offered and scholarships made available, then the actual numbers can be whatever they happen to be, based solely upon student athlete interest and participation.
While there can be no denying women’s sports have grown since Title IX was interpreted as it was, there is also no denying it has damaged certain sports like wrestling. One of the fastest growing sports across the country is women’s wrestling. Empirical evidence is the Daily Journal’s article of Feb. 19, 2019: “M-A girls’ wrestling three-peats” by Terry Bernal. Ten years ago, it is doubtful that article would have been written. However, despite the growth in girls’ wrestling, the opportunity for Fola Akinola and her fellow seniors to matriculate to a college program has been diminished. Wrestling teams continue to be cut by the Title IX axe. It is past time for the interpretation of this law to be challenged and reviewed for its misapplication.
A former member of the San Carlos City Council and mayor, Matt Grocott has been involved in political policy on the Peninsula for 17 years. He can be reached by email at mattgrocott@comcast.net.
Matt, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree here. Over the years, I believe, Title IX has given our young women many more opportunities than it has taken away from men.
As you wrote, Title IX is interpreted to apply to scholarships and facilities, but most interpretations I’ve read indicate it does not directly address the overall money spent on sports programs (hence why the State of California’s highest-paid employee is UCLA’s football coach (whose salary is paid by boosters, not taxpayers). Therefore, my opinion is that the real problem is in how the NCAA allocates scholarships, setting artificially high levels for sports such as football and artificially low for sports like wrestling and volleyball (both men’s and women’s).
Schools should have more freedom to allocate a set, proportional-to-enrollment-by-gender number of scholarships within their athletic programs as they see fit. You went to Florida and eventually to Clemson, two schools where the football programs basically fund themselves -- which is the case in many top-tier programs, especially the SEC and ACC. Those schools will probably have sufficient football recruits regardless of how many scholarships they can offer. If the NCAA allowed it, they could choose to allocate some of those 85 scholarship slots to wrestling or other sports, but they have chosen football as their golden children and fund via scholarship the equivalent of almost four starting football teams.
Ideally, programs at schools that could self-fund their own teams and scholarships (such as football and probably men’s basketball) would be allowed to do so and excluded from Title IX as activities not “receiving federal assistance.” Then, scholarships for activities funded by public money could be allocated equitably across the board. In that case, even top-tier women’s programs that can support themselves (e.g. basketball at Stanford or UCONN) could potentially offer scholarships that are self-funding, allowing those schools to divert money and fund even more women’s scholarships.
Maybe you should wrestle with the problem of segregation as it exits today especially in housing. The basic white population on the Peninsula does not represent what's happening in many other parts of the country.
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Matt, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree here. Over the years, I believe, Title IX has given our young women many more opportunities than it has taken away from men.
As you wrote, Title IX is interpreted to apply to scholarships and facilities, but most interpretations I’ve read indicate it does not directly address the overall money spent on sports programs (hence why the State of California’s highest-paid employee is UCLA’s football coach (whose salary is paid by boosters, not taxpayers). Therefore, my opinion is that the real problem is in how the NCAA allocates scholarships, setting artificially high levels for sports such as football and artificially low for sports like wrestling and volleyball (both men’s and women’s).
Schools should have more freedom to allocate a set, proportional-to-enrollment-by-gender number of scholarships within their athletic programs as they see fit. You went to Florida and eventually to Clemson, two schools where the football programs basically fund themselves -- which is the case in many top-tier programs, especially the SEC and ACC. Those schools will probably have sufficient football recruits regardless of how many scholarships they can offer. If the NCAA allowed it, they could choose to allocate some of those 85 scholarship slots to wrestling or other sports, but they have chosen football as their golden children and fund via scholarship the equivalent of almost four starting football teams.
Ideally, programs at schools that could self-fund their own teams and scholarships (such as football and probably men’s basketball) would be allowed to do so and excluded from Title IX as activities not “receiving federal assistance.” Then, scholarships for activities funded by public money could be allocated equitably across the board. In that case, even top-tier women’s programs that can support themselves (e.g. basketball at Stanford or UCONN) could potentially offer scholarships that are self-funding, allowing those schools to divert money and fund even more women’s scholarships.
My two cents...
Hey John, you still owe me an apology for calling me a white supremacist the other day. When can I expect that.
Maybe you should wrestle with the problem of segregation as it exits today especially in housing. The basic white population on the Peninsula does not represent what's happening in many other parts of the country.
Living in .
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PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.
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