Title IX requires universities to not discriminate based on sex, which affects how universities award athletic financial aid and the number of sports each university can offer to men and women.
According to the NCAA, there are three basic parts of Title IX as it applies to athletics: participation, scholarships and other benefits. Institutions must have participation opportunities that are proportionate to their respective rates of full-time undergraduate students or show a history and continued practice of program expansion for the underrepresented sex.
In 2014-2015, males made up 53 percent of the undergraduate student body at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and 61 percent of athletes, according to UNL’s 2015 NCAA financial report. The 356 male athletes were divided among 10 sports, while the 228 female athletes were divided among 14.
So how is this considered “equal”?
“You’re obviously still moving forward toward the ultimate goal of having equal opportunities,” Griesch said, “but football definitely causes some issues there because there’s not a similar sport on the women’s side (with as many players).”
Last academic year, the football team had 138 participants, more than the top four female sports combined.
Jeff Griesch, the UNL athletic department director of communications operations, said this makes it difficult to compensate for the amount of players in female athletics.
Along with proportionate participation opportunities, institutions must also provide financial aid proportionate to female and male participation. Because NCAA places a limit on how many scholarships can be awarded, this causes schools to be limited in the number of sports they can offer.
There are two different ways scholarships can be limited. Head-count sports, FBS football, men’s and women’s basketball, women’s gymnastics, women’s tennis and women’s volleyball, are limited by the number of athletes that can receive scholarships. All other Division I sports are considered equivalency sports, and are limited by the amount of financial aid they can provide, although that aid can be divided among more athletes.
John Jentz, the executive associate athletic director and chief financial officer for UNL athletics, said UNL follows the scholarship limits set by the NCAA, and athletics provide the maximum number of scholarships allowed by the NCAA in all sports programs.
Students who are receiving financial aid, but aren’t participating due to extended medical leave or exhausted eligibility, are not counted in the scholarship limits.
“NCAA rules allow you to have five years to complete four years of eligibility,” Jentz said. “Medical leave is when a doctor signs off that they are either injured for the year or have a potentially career-ending injury. That’s why you can’t look at the dollar amount. You can have people that don’t count that get slotted in there.”
According to a 2012 ESPN article, scholarship limits were originally based in part by the amount of money a sport brings in.
“For men’s sports in Division I, the NCAA membership determined in 1974 to separate football and basketball financial aid from other sports,” NCAA spokesman Cameron Schuh said in the article. “The move was predicted on the ability of those sports at that time to generate revenue for the institutions as compared to the other sports the institutions fielded.”
But according to UNL’s 2015 NCAA financial report, football, men’s basketball and volleyball are the only sports at UNL that bring in money. Football earned a net revenue of more than $30 million, men’s basketball finished with a gain of more than $2.3 million and volleyball finished with a net revenue of more than $450,000. Women’s basketball created the largest deficit at $2.6 million, because resources used toward the women’s team must match those of the men’s.
“Title IX is not saying, if it doesn’t make money you don’t have to keep it,” Griesch said. “Part of what it’s saying is if you have ‘x’ facilities, ‘x’ scholarships, ‘x’ commitment to men’s basketball then you need to have a similar commitment to women’s basketball and if you have this commitment to baseball you need to have a similar commitment to softball.”
The numbers of participation opportunities and dollars spent aren’t the only way to determine if equality exists between male and female athletes, Griesch said.
“Our female athletes eat in the same location as our male athletes,” Griesch said. “For men’s and women’s basketball, we have basically identical practice gyms right next to each other and they both play on the same home court. It’s not like at Nebraska you have the men’s team playing in the gym and having a practice facility and the women’s team playing in the old practice gym.”
As UNL looks to add more athletic programs in the future, Title IX will be taken into account, Griesch said. He said he hears from people wondering why UNL doesn’t have a men’s soccer team, even though it has had a women’s soccer team since 1994.
“The honest answer is, it might be because of Title IX,” he said.
But Title IX is about more than the amount of sports or participation opportunities a school has, Griesch said.
“Would you be compliant with Title IX if you had 15 women’s basketball scholarships and 15 men’s basketball scholarships, but the women wore t-shirts and the men had uniforms, and the women had to eat sack lunches every day after practice and the men went to the training table?” Griesch said. “Quality means a lot so long as you’re showing progress and as long as you show a commitment – that can be more important than the actual overall participation.”