Staurowsky Cheers NCAA's New Title IX Compliance Guide

Recently, the NCAA published Equity and Title IX in Intercollegiate Athletics: A Practical Guide --- available here and now permanently added to our blog's resource links. The authors of this guide are attorneys Janet Judge and Tim O'Brien.

As Professor Ellen Staurowsky humorously notes in a column at College Sports Business News, this is what sports fans are waiting for in March -- the opportunity to pour not over brackets, but over a step-by-step compliance guide addressing all three prongs, the entire laundry list, pregnancy, harassment, retaliation, and equal pay. Well, she admits, announcement of this new compliance manual probably did not invoke spontaneous applause, but it is something worth cheering about. As Staurowsky explains,

This generation of young professionals coming soon to an athletic department near you as future employees will not have the latitude as their predecessors once did to wave off responsibility to affirmatively comply with Title IX... The hand of the ticking clock of Title IX compliance has struck the hour of “no more excuses”.

Staurowsky encourages college athletic departments not to deterred from tackling their compliance responsibilities, now clearly laid out before them, by claiming other priorities or lack of funds. Indeed, she surmises, an internal review of Title IX compliance might be "the opportunity to devise and adopt financially sustainable college sport budgets responsive to those enduring problems associated with the financial arms race." It's the Title IX-avoidance mentality that creates the bad spending habits that eventually, after costly litigation, result in "facial cutting of programs that did not result in an interruption in the spending patterns that created problems to begin with but were traumatic nonetheless." By getting out ahead of Title IX compliance, schools can implement balanced priorities that take women's and men's athletics into account and do right by student-athletes for whose sake college sports exist in the first place.

How Diverse Are Women's College Sports?

Recently, the NCAA published the most recent school-year's participation data, which includes breakdowns by sex, race, sport, division, and conference. Because this data set goes back to the 1999-2000 school year, I decided to use it to look for trends in racial diversity in women's college athletics over the last decade. Several hours and few Excel spreadsheets later, I have the some questions and answers to report.

My first question was whether athletic opportunities for women in general increased during the time period in question.

• The answer, not surprisingly, is yes. Athletic opportunities for women at NCAA member institutions has increased by 31% -- from 147,683 in 1999-2000 to 193,207 in 2010-2011.
  
• Half of that overall increase is due to gains in three women's sports: indoor track, outdoor track, and soccer.
  
• Participation rates within most other women's sports increased as well. In addition to two emerging sports that were discontinued during the time frame in question -- archery and badminton -- only fencing, rifle, skiing, and synchronized swimming showed declining participation rates. All other sports gained some.
  

Next, I wondered whether opportunities for female athletes of color have increased during this time period as well.

• Again, the answer is yes. Opportunities for women of all minority races (Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latina) increased by percentages higher than the mean 31%. For instance, opportunities for Black female athletes increased from 14,001 to 21,615, or 54%. In comparison, opportunities for white female athletes increased from 117,244 to 144,598, or 23%.
• However, these gains for female athletes of color were not enough to significantly change the overall racial distribution of female athletic opportunities. In 1999-2000, 79% of female athletic opportunities went to white athletes, compared to 75% last year -- a change of only four percentage points. Meanwhile, the percentage of female athletic opportunities that went to Black women rose from 9 to 11 percent.

I then wondered whether the present distribution of female athletic opportunities by race is proportionate to racial demographics of the undergraduate population.

• The best data I could find suggests that about 8% of female college undergraduates are black (13.5% of college students are black; 59.3% of black college students are female).
  
• A total of 14,001 athletic opportunities received by Black women constitutes 11% of women's athletic opportunities, so Black women are not underrepresented in the distribution of women's athletic opportunities.
  
• Yet when you take into account the general underrepresentation of women in college athletics, the percentage of athletic opportunities for Black women is disproportionately low, since a total of 14,001 athletic opportunities received by black women constitutes only 3% of all athletic opportunities.
  

Last, I wondered if racial diversity within particular sports has changed over time.

• In 1999-2000, there were 14,001 athletic opportunities for black female athletes. 25% of these opportunities were in outdoor track, 21% in indoor track, and 23% in basketball. This not surprising, as reporters, scholars, and advocates have noted for years about this manner of racial segregation within athletics.
  
• Unfortunately, though participation rates are rising in almost every sport, including two new emerging sports that have been added in the last ten years -- bowling and rugby -- opportunities for black female athletes are still concentrated in track and basketball in percentages nearly identical to those ten years ago.
  
• Other minority races, though receiving fewer athletic opportunities than black women, were more evenly distributed throughout various sports. Latina/Hispanic women have 7747 athletic opportunities -- 17% in soccer, 14% in softball, 10% in track. Asian women have 3999 athletic opportunities -- 12% in soccer, 11% in tennis, and 10% in track. Finally, just 716 Native American/Alaska Native women have athletic opportunities at NCAA institutions, 18% of these are in softball, followed by 13 and 12% in outdoor and indoor track, respectively.

In sum, this year's NCAA participation data suggest there's been no drastic change in the diversity of women's college sports over the last ten years. Thanks to Title IX, opportunities for women to participate in college athletics continue to increase and close the gap between participation rates for women and men. Yet even though these increases produce opportunities for Black women that are proportion to their demographic rates on campus, their opportunities still remain clustered in track and basketball. With only two sports accounting for most athletic opportunities for Black women, questions must be raised about the accessibility of other sports to athletes of color.

DI Stipends Headed for Override

Christine Brennan doesn't mince words in her column in USA Today. The NCAA's new plan allowing Division I schools to pay full-scholarship athletes a $2000 cost-of-living stipend was "bad from the beginning, a ramshackle idea that saddled already-strapped athletic departments with another financial burden while also asking them to do something that appeared to be against the law." Brennan explains how the stipend proposal was hastily passed after it emerged from a working group lead by none other than disgraced Penn State President Graham Spanier. There is no indication that the NCAA took into consideration the financial implications on athletic departments that are desperate to cut costs in this economy, not add them -- as Brennan points out, only 22 universities out of the 331 in Division I actually have a profitable athletic program. Nor does it appear that the NCAA gave any consideration to the gender equity implications of this proposal; Brennan echoes our concern that limiting the eligibility to for the stipend to full-scholarship athletes creates an inherently inequitable situation because there are twice as many full-scholarship male athletes than female. (Citing AD Tom Osborne's objections along these lines, which we blogged about Tuesday, Brennan says, "When a crusty warrior such as Osborne has to teach the NCAA about the law [Title IX], it's downright embarrassing.")

The good news, Brennan reports, is that this plan appears to be headed for a rare override vote by the Division I membership, as 97 institutions have petitioned the NCAA to reconsider the stipend-authorizing legislation. Come January, the plan could be overhauled or even scrapped.

Division I Cost-of-Living Stipends Draw Objection from Faculty

When we blogged last month about the NCAA's vote to allow Division I institutions to provide athletes who receive full athletic scholarships with $2000 spending money stipends, we speculated that this proposal could exacerbate existing disparities in scholarship funds awarded to men and women, causing and contributing to member institutions' compliance problems under Title IX.

Reading a letter sent today to the NCAA from the Faculty Athletics Representatives, I came to understand why the problem is even worse from a Title IX perspective than I initially understood. The new rule only authorizes the cost-of-living stipends to athletes in so-called "head count" sports who receive full scholarships or the equivalent of a full scholarship when combined with other financial aid. Athletes in "equivalency sports" who receive receive partial athletics scholarships are not eligible for the stipend. While Division I allows up to 98 full scholarships in the men's head-count sports (football and men's baseball), there are only 47 possible female head count student-athletes (basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, and tennis). So there is no way an institution could fully fund its cost-of-living stipends and still comply with Title IX. FAR has requested that the NCAA amend the proposal to allow cost-of-living stipends in equivalency sports as well, which could theoretically allow institutions to spread smaller awards over more athletes in a way that could balance out the total dollars awarded overall.

We'll have to wait and see how NCAA responds to this proposal, and generally to the Title IX objections that have been raised.

NCAA Division I Votes to Increase Athletes Financial Aid

Last week, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors voted to allow conferences to increase athletic scholarships by $2,000 so that athletes can have spending money. With this plan, the NCAA acknowledges that student-athletes have little time to work due to the professional-like demands on their time. To many, athletes' uncompensated labor seems like exploitation, especially when universities reap revenue, and a small handful, actual profit, from that labor. While I am sympathetic to the argument about exploited labor, I'm disappointed that the remedy isn't instead to reduce the professional-like demands on student-athletes time. That, of course, would require putting an end to the commercialization of college sports and returning it to its truly amateur status. This new policy seems to suggest that ship has sailed.

But more on topic for this forum, the new policy also raises some Title IX issues that schools who increase their scholarships will have to address. Title IX regulations require schools to distribute athletic financial aid in the same proportion as the percentage of male and female athletic opportunities that it provides. 34 C.F.R. 106.37(c). For example, at the University of Michigan, 51% of athletic opportunities go to men. Men should receive around 51% of athletic financial aid, but they already receive a higher percentage -- 55% -- so technically they already do not comply. If they added $2000 to every full ride scholarship for the teams that are most likely candidates for this argument about exploited labor, i.e., football and men's basketball, they would be even more out of compliance. Could Michigan afford to provide comparable financial aid to female athletes? I don't know. But I certainly question why, if they can, they haven't done so already. In total, male athletes receive almost $176 million more annually in athletic financial aid than female athletes, suggesting that Michigan is far from the only university already in the hole.

Alternatively, I wonder if these spending money stipends could be considered as something other than financial aid. Unlike existing athletic scholarships and grants-in-aid, this additional $2000 is not a discount from money that would otherwise be paid to the institution; it conceptually different in that it is money that the student can spend on whatever. That being the case, we wouldn't measure compliance by requiring proportional distribution under the financial aid regulation cited above. Instead, I think, schools would have to treat these stipends like any other perq or amenity that comes with playing sports, like medical training, access to facilities and equipment, tutoring, etc., which the Title IX regulations require be equitably distributed among male and female athletes. 34 C.F.R. 106.41(c)(2)-(10).

But whether we conceive of these stipends as financial aid or some other kind of perq or amenity, the bottom line is still the same -- schools can't legally limit these to men's sports, even if those are the ones that produce the most revenue. In world where already many (most?) Division I schools are out of compliance with the requirement to proportionally distribute athletic financial aid, I tend to view this new policy pessimistically, as likely to exacerbate Title IX violations rather than providing benefits to women's sports.

NCAA Adopts Policy for Including Transgender Athletes

The NCAA has approved a policy to govern athletics participation by transgender athletes who have transitioned to another sex. The new rule, which takes immediate effect, allows a transgender athlete who has transitioned from male to female to participate in women's sports after one year of hormone treatment that includes female hormones (estrogen) and agents that suppress the effects of male hormones in the body (testosterone blockers). The rule also clarifies that athletes who transition from female to male by taking testosterone are not eligible for women's sports, but may receive a therapeutic use exception* and be eligible for men's sports. A transgender athlete who transitions socially but not physically is still eligible for the sport that matches their birth sex. For example, Kye Allums plays women's basketball for George Washington, even though he goes by "he" as has not undergone any physical transition that involves testosterone.

The NCAA's new policy incorporates the recommendations of the report issued issued last year by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Women's Sports Foundation. It is receiving praise from advocates for equality and inclusion because it avoids many of the restrictions, such as genital surgery and legal sex change which do not affect athletic ability -- both of which are required, in addition to a 2 year period of hormone treatment, by the International Olympic Committee and other sport associations. The policy recognizes that in an educational setting, one in which one's opportunity to participate is limited to a short period of time, it is important to have requirements that do not go beyond what is necessary to promote equity on the field. There is no medical evidence that shows athletes who have transitioned with hormones compete at an advantage relative when competing in their transitioned sex. Medicine also suggests that it takes one year for physical changes in response to hormone treatment to be complete. Therefore, it makes sense to impose just a one-year requirement for hormone treatment, rather than the two-year period, plus surgery and legal sex change, that IOC requires.

*Therapeutic use exceptions are already granted to male athletes with conditions that result in lower-than-normal amounts of testosterone in their bodies. It is an "exception" because otherwise exogenous testosterone is a banned, performance-enhancing substance.

NCAA Gender Equity Issues Forum

Greetings from Bethesda, where I'm attending the NCAA's Gender Equity Issues Conference. This is a great annual event that brings together gender equity experts and athletic department staff from colleges around the country to talk about Title IX and gender equity issues. Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating on a panel about how to count participation opportunities for the purposes of demonstrating proportionality. My co-presenter Tim O'Brien and I used the court's decision in the Quinnipiac case as the starting point for a discussion about the importance about looking past the numbers and assessing whether those numbers reflect actual, meaningful athletic opportunities. We also talked about some of the egregious examples of reporting violations and roster manipulation that the New York Times wrote about last week. We definitely addressed those issues as well. David Moltz covered the presentation for Inside Higher Education, so even if you couldn't attend, you can read all about it!

Other panels have addressed such hot topics as pay equity, prongs two and three compliance, diversity and inclusion, retaliation, and emerging sports. We also had a brilliant keynote address by Mariah Burton Nelson on the importance of implementing and enforcing policies against sexual abuse by coaches. And I had the pleasure of learning about the Athlete Ally initiative to eliminate the use of sexist and homophobic language in sport, and meeting its founder, a former student-athlete and All-American wrestler, Hudson Taylor. All in all it's been a great conference!

NCAA Gender Equity and Issues Forum: Part 2

Yesterday the Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights, Russlyn Ali, addressed the NCAA Gender Equity and Issues Forum as the keynote speaker. It was great to be in an audience consisting of mostly of college athletic department officials as we cheered the Department of Education for rescinding the Model Survey policy last week and for promising to get tough with schools that are not in compliance with Title IX. I teach administrative law, and usually don't come across many examples of regulated entities embracing the regulator for strengthening and enforcing regulations. But the fact that they were speaks well of college athletic administrators and the NCAA. Their commitment to Title IX and their support for strong regulations and enforcement demonstrates that they are truly educators, looking out for what's best for students, even if that means their institutions have to work a little harder (or a lot harder, in some cases) to stay out of trouble with the law.

Here are some highlights from Assistant Secretary Ali's speech:

• In response to those who have complained about the past administration's "slippage" in enforcement of Title IX, Ali promised, "those days are over." Ali reports that her staff is "happy to be doing civil rights again."

• A wave of vigorous enforcement is already underway. OCR is being more responsive to complaints that are filed, and is planning to launch a number of investigations of its own in the next couple of months.

• Specifically, OCR is planning to kick off 12 investigations of colleges, universities, or secondary schools by fiscal-year's end, half of these addressing athletics issues and the other half addressing sex discrimination in other aspects of the institution.

• OCR's enforcement priorities in athletics relate to participation rates, financial aid, and the "laundry list" of factors used to determine if men's and women's athletic programs are receiving comparable treatment. The agency will target institutions with reported disparities (such as lack of proportionality, expenditures that favor men's athletics and men's scholarships) and will use the investigation phase to determine if those disparities are the result of discrimination.
  

• OCR will also be examining institutions' compliance with existing monitoring agreements-- making sure that schools are doing what they said they would do in response to a complaint brought against them.

• When it comes to enforcement remedies, "we will use all the tools at our disposal, including withholding of federal funds" if necessary to attain compliance.
  

• Ali mentioned that OCR is also working on other issues, such as STEM education, bullying and harassment, and pregnancy. Regarding pregnancy, the agency plans to release a brochure --possibly a precursor to official guidance -- by fall.

• Is OCR not responding to inquiries and complaints in a prompt and sufficient manner? The Assistant Secretary said, "email me: russlyn.ali@ed.gov."
  

NCAA Gender Equity Issues Forum: Part I

Greetings from Oak Brook, Illinois, where the NCAA is holding its annual Gender Equity Issues Forum. Tomorrow, I will co-present with Barbara Osborne of UNC about institutional liability for athlete abuse, sexual and nonsexual. But today I had the pleasure of attending very informative plenary sessions.

One of the topics that has been addressed so far is Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) reporting. Today's presentation highlighted some very important differences between gender equity disclosures that colleges and universities make to the government under the EADA and gender equity disclosures they make to the NCAA. Because EADA data is public (NCAA's is not), I rely on EADA data all the time as the starting point of an analysis of an institution's compliance with Title IX. However, as today's session highlighted, there are many reasons why EADA may not be providing as clear a picture on maters of compliance as we sometimes like to think. Here are some things that I learned today that will cause me to take EADA data with extra grains of salt from now on.

• Male Practice Players Included in Counts for Women's Teams: EADA instructions on what counts as a participation opportunity encourage institutions to include male practice players in their total count of how many athletes are on a given team. There is the expectation that an institution will explain in the "comments" section of the disclosure form whether and how many athletes that are included in the count are male practice players, but universities don't always (a) include the practice players and (b) address it in the comments. So, we don't always know if the total number of opportunities in women's athletics programs includes some men.

• Competitive Cheer Can Be Counted: OCR has told institutions that competitive cheer can be counted in the total count for women's opportunities, as long as the institution has a letter of approval from OCR. The approval requirement is a good idea -- as long as institutions are complying with it -- because OCR can make sure that institutions aren't trying to count sideline cheer or competitive programs that are not being treated like other athletic teams.

• Allocated and Generated Revenue: Here's one we already knew, but I'm happy to have the opportunity to grouse about it again. OCR lets institutions report allocated revenue, i.e., money received from the institution itself, in addition to revenue generated from gate receipts, camps, and other sources. In fact, OCR requires the reported expenses and revenues to match. This is problematic because it allows institutions to send the misleading impression that athletic departments or certain programs are self-funding. It also normalizes the expectation that they are. In fact, colleges and universities ought to subsidize athletic opportunities, which, after all, are supposed to be educational opportunities. But there ought to be transparency about it.
  

• Start-up Costs Excluded. OCR does not require institutions to report expenditures made for a given team prior to actually adding the team. This could allow universities to hide or underreport the true cost of a program.
  

• Harmony with NCAA Reporting. Reporting would likely be more accurate if institutions did not have to prepare one set of numbers for the NCAA and another for the EADA purposes. It would be favorable for OCR to harmonize its requirements with the NCAA's for that reason as well.
  

OCR is ramping up Title IX enforcement efforts lately, and purports to have more in store. OCR director Russlyn Ali is speaking at this conference tomorrow. I expect she will address, or else be asked by conference participants, whether part of that effort will include EADA reform to address some of these issues.

More posts from Oak Brook to follow!

NCAA happenings

The annual NCAA meeting concluded this weekend after a great deal of business was conducted--or at least it seemed that way from press coverage; I wasn't there. I just wanted to quickly mention two decisions.
The first is in regards to sand volleyball. Despite objections from many universities over the presence of sand volleyball on the list of emerging sports, the vote to remove it did not receive the necessary two-thirds majority.
And second, Division II is continuing its "Life in the Balance" initiative by cutting back the number of games for certain sports, starting practices later, and instituting a moratorium on games, practices, and any on-campus training for winter sports during the week between December 20-26. The initiative is, in part, a response to the fact that 30 percent of DII athletes leave without graduating.

Sand volleyball: In or out?

The NCAA, which is meeting in Atlanta, Georgia this week, is voting today on whether to keep sand volleyball (for women) or to nix it from the list of emerging sports.
When it was added I recall a little concern on my part on how it would be implemented and apparently others have similar concerns. The concerned/not concerned line has been largely based on geographic region, though cold-weather schools including Nebraska are in support of sand volleyball. But this is not necessarily surprising because Nebraska typically has a very strong indoor women's program. And this leads to other concerns that sand volleyball isn't presenting new opportunities but more formal off-season training for current indoor players.
The override vote is the result of objections from 63 NCAA schools. But a 2/3 majority (of whoever shows) is necessary to take sand volleyball off the list.

Annual NCAA convention addresses arms race

The NCAA is holding its annual meeting this week down in warm, sunny Georgia--well it was supposed to b warm and sunny, anyway.
Of course more important things are on the agenda which should distract from the cold snap down south, including the athletics "arms race" which has many a university president, according to a recent report from the Knight Commission, very worried. And it's not just the small schools who are worried about where to find the money to remain competitive as the costs of recruiting, travel, and especially coaches' salaries are on the rise.
The arms race was on the agenda Tuesday where worries seemed to outweigh potential solutions such as some oversight entity that would (finally) mandate a uniform accounting system within athletic departments and perhaps even spending and salary guidelines across the board. But even the money-making schools have presidents who recognize that even successful programs will not continue indefinitely and are less-than-hopeful that viable solutions are forthcoming.
Also of concern, of course, is the more-than-likely cutting of teams that will occur if things are not reined in quickly. And with team cuts we get Title IX blame, according to Nancy Hogshead-Makar: "Undoubtedly Title IX will be seen as the cause of all the costs. This makes it very difficult for women to participate in athletics."

Lapchick weighs in on new NCAA president

In a recent issue of Sport Business Journal (which, unfortunately, is only available to subscribers), Dr. Richard Lapchick, who is notable for his many reports on gender and racial diversity in sport and the experiences of collegiate student athletes, has an editorial about the passing of NCAA president Myles Brand and who should take the reins.
Lapchick calls for what he believed Brand would seek in a pool of candidates for his replacement: diversity. Because the essay is not widely available, I am going to excerpt pieces of it here.

This is not to say that I hope that the NCAA will choose an African-American, Hispanic, Asian or American Indian president, or a female one, but I hope it will include the best pool of candidates, including people of color and women.
This would be a tribute to Myles Brand and an important statement to our student athletes on campus, and especially to the student athletes of color in revenue-producing sports.
[...]
The racial composition of conference and athletic department leaders does not reflect the diversity of our student athletes. In addition to having this process be inclusive from start to finish, we also encourage those on college campuses to hold open hiring practices for coaches, athletic directors and other important positions in college sport. The current racial makeup of those positions of leadership tells a one-sided story (see chart). Thus, a diverse pool of candidates for the new NCAA president would be extremely important.

Lapchick also endorses someone for the position, though. He believes Bernard Franklin, currently the executive vice-president of the NCAA is an excellent candidate to take over and continue Myles Brand's vision. Franklin is notable for being the go-to person in the organization on the NCAA's Native American mascot policies.
Other than Lapchick's endorsement of Franklin, I myself have not heard many other rumblings about potential or desirable candidates.

[many thanks for JB for sending me the editorial]

In case you didn't believe us...

...it's true that most athletic departments do not make money and many are not even breaking even these days. The NCAA released the results of a study this week that looked at the numbers from 2004-2008. In DI, the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) consists of 119 schools. Only 15 reported a profit in 2008.
This was not surprising, but I have to say I was shocked (even though I shouldn't have been) by these numbers:
Median salary of FBS football coach: $1.095 million
Median salary of FBS men's b-ball coach: $822,000
Median salary of FBS women's b-ball coach: $277,000

Myles Brand, 1942-2009

Sadly, NCAA president Myles Brand died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. Christine Brennan has a nice tribute to him. Brand will hopefully be remembered for ensuring academic standards and civil and gender rights in intercollegiate athletics. He pressured schools to get rid of their Native American mascots and recently Brand publicly stated that Title IX should not be blamed--in these tough economic times--for cuts to men's sports.
We will miss his tough stance on tough issues and hope he has set a precedent for his successors.

Florida case and thoughts on cheerleading

The Florida Parents for Athletic Equity have indeed filed a lawsuit against the Florida High School Athletic Association as they promised they would if FHSAA did not make moves toward ensuring equitable competitive opportunities.
This case and the Quinnipiac University case which is now in mediation have brought up, seemingly on the side but maybe not, the issue of competitive cheerleading. In Florida, FHSAA said it would not cut the athletic contests for football and cheerleading. At QU competitive cheer was elevated to varsity status when the university announced the demise of three varsity sports, including women's volleyball.
But the goal and performance of cheerleading is at the center of a lot of debates. It is not, at the intercollegiate level, a recognized NCAA sport with its own championship. OCR has said it is generally considered a support activity unless it meets certain criteria, including NOT doing any sideline cheerleading. The intercollegiate teams that do achieve varsity status meet that criteria but whether high schools in Florida do is a little more uncertain.
This article that ties the two cases together outlines some of the issues from administrators, coaches of cheering and other teams, and cheerleaders themselves. (It would have been nice to hear from other female athletes, though.)
It is pretty certain, though, that this issue is not going to remain on the periphery. Whether it comes from below--athletes themselves; or from above--the NCAA or OCR; someone will press the issue a little more and we will have a version of cheerleading that is a little less amorphous.

Flip-flops, Part II

The news that the NCAA has named sand volleyball has created some discussion--and concerns. With the economy in the toilet and so many athletic departments struggling, some are wondering how sand volleyball is going to get started. And it's true that discussions such as facilities and scholarships need to happen. But they need to happen whenever there is the possibility of adding a team--men's or women's. Discussions about building multi-million dollar stadiums are happening right now as many schools consider adding football in an attempt to raise revenues.
And we have to remember that this new designation is not a requirement. All it means is if schools are considering adding a sport, this is one of the options.
I also discovered that sand volleyball is going to be played in the spring. This opens the door to indoor players transitioning to outdoor in the spring as well as coaching staffs if a school does not want to seek out new coaches. But the hitch to this is that indoor coaches do their recruiting in the spring. So there may be some scheduling issues.
Also sand volleyball will be like professional and Olympic beach volleyball in that it will be played in teams of two. This still leaves open the issue of scoring. Will it be like wrestling and tennis in which there are individual (or duo in this case) contests and these wins contribute to an overall team score.
Still unresolved--uniforms. Good to see others have concerns over this:
...it remains to be seen how a game that banked on sex appeal will translate to the collegiate sports world.

Break out the flip-flops!

The NCAA has approved "sand volleyball" as an emerging sport. (That's beach volleyball for all you with quizzical looks on your faces; they are calling it sand volleyball to appeal to landlocked institutions.) Competition is slated to begin in the 2010-11 school year.

I did not see anything on the format (2-person as in the Olympics? or more?). What season will they play in? Same as indoor volleyball? Will there be a lot of overlap between indoor and sand players?

Or the uniforms. Are bikinis going to be the norm? Are they going to be required? Female beach volleyball players are probably one of the most sexualized groups of female athletes out there in part because they don't have to go out of their way to pose in skimpy outfits, they play in skimpy outfits.

A few years ago I heard a good presentation about indoor volleyball uniforms worn by women (the short shorts and tight tops) and I am sure this will be a popular topic of inquiry at future academic conferences.

NCAA addresses pay-for-play questions

The NCAA has added to its website a piece that addresses frequently asked questions and frequently unasked for opinions on the issue of paying student-athletes.
And Dr. Boyce Watkins of Syracuse University provides his own response to the NCAA's responses over at The Black Athlete Sports Network. Dr. Watkins makes a connection between the exploitation of athletes and that of slaves in 19th century America. It's a bold comparison and I am not sure I see as clearly as he does the same pedantic tone in the NCAA's response as existed in the rhetoric from slave owners. But in the end he's right on the mark when he points out how others--individuals mostly--are getting rich off of these athletes. And when he notes that it just doesn't seem right that coaches are getting millions when their own athletic departments are operating in the red.
He does rebut the NCAA's contention that there would be Title IX issues invoked if student-athletes started receiving salaries, though I'm not quite sure why Watkins believes it would not be an issue unless he sees athletes being compensated by entities other than their respective institutions--though even if say NBC was the one doling out the cash there still might be equity issues.
In the end, I agree with a lot of what Watkins has to say regarding the NCAA's arguments. But I would rather see reform in some of these areas like coaching contracts and television deals rather than adding student-athletes to the payroll. I know it's like trying to close Pandora's box (and stuff everything back in at the same time) but I'll keep advocating for that approach.

News from Myles Brand

The NCAA concluded its meetings in Maryland the other day, but Myles Brand was not on hand to deliver the state-of-the-NCAA address. Earlier in the week it had been announced that Brand would miss most of the meetings because of an undisclosed illness. But the other day brand himself let the organization know that he has pancreatic cancer with a prognosis that is "not good." He has been undergoing chemotherapy this week. He does not plan to step down at this time, though others in the organization are expected to take on additional responsibilities. The NCAA is not looking for a new head.
Our thoughts are with Brand at this time.