Greg Sandoval of the Washington Post had a piece in Friday's paper that's uncovered a disturbing trend in recruitment in women's college basketball:
As women's college basketball has grown -- attendance for a single season recently passed 9 million -- so too has negative recruiting, a practice previously associated with the men's game. By implying that a rival coach is gay, opposing schools are preying on what Helen Carroll, athletic diversity specialist for the San Francisco-based National Center for Lesbian Rights, calls the fear of a gay "boogeywoman" who will make their daughters choose a lesbian sexual orientation.
First of all, let's give the Post's Sports section some deserved applause for running this story. The section has never shied away from stories that deal with tricky issues, and this is just another example. Credit Sports Editor George Solomon for fostering an atmosphere that allows reporting like this to go on.
But as in many other cases, there's a story behind the story -- one that you need to keep reading deeper into the piece in order to find. A few paragraphs later, you do:
The NCAA, the governing body for intercollegiate athletics, is studying whether homophobia is a reason for the shrinking number of female coaches, according to Rosie Stallman, the NCAA's director of education outreach. According to figures released by the NCAA, 79 percent of women's basketball head coaches were female in 1977, compared with 63 percent in 2002. For all women's sports, female coaches are at an all-time low, holding only 44 percent of head coaching positions."We are looking into whether homophobia is a reason causing women not to go into the coaching profession," Stallman said. "It's a real concern for us."
As ridiculous as this new aspect of negative recruiting may be, we should think twice before accepting this second claim at face value. Here's an alternate theory: As women's college basketball has gotten more popular, coaching in the women's game has become a more attractive alternative for male coaches. In turn, these coaches have begun to apply for jobs in the women's game in higher numbers -- something which has inevitably swelled their numbers.
Which brings us to a back story in the gender wars in college athletics that doesn't get quite so much attention. Because while most of the ink spilled about Title IX has concerned the ratio between male and female athletes, we need to remember that they only pass through the system once.
The folks who draw a paycheck working in college athletics are a different story.
If anything, what this piece tells me is that Title IX was seen as much as a way to increase the numbers of female coaches and administrators as it was ever about creating equal opportunity for female athletes. Now, that the numbers are showing that those pesky men are finding their way into coaching positions that were once seen as the exclusive domain of women, it's time to raise the alarm.
I think this story is just the first indication of a push we're going to see in college athletic departments to make sure that coaching positions are equally split between men and women. And the easiest way to acheive this balance will be to reserve coaching slots in men's sports for men, and coaching slots in women's sports for women.
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