July 29th, 2004
Myles Brand’s Peculiar Plans for Men’s Olympic Sports
I like college athletics. A lot. They extol the highest virtues in amateur competition and nowhere is that more true than in the Olympic sports. An elite selection of those splendid Americans will represent us before the world in a few weeks.
That
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I practiced with the soccer team at my college the summer before school started at a divison 2 school. It was one of the few programs with scholarships, but making the team would have been near impossible.
I was hoping I could join the wrestling squad after wresting for 2 years in jr high, and 4 in high school, but the wrestling program was cancelled two years prior.
As a freshman both tennis teams were cancelled and replaced by quasi-official school related club teams. But the athletes had to pay all the fees.
I ended up playing intramural soccer for 4 years while working at a tennis club. Title 9 was good in theory, but it pretty much created a fire sale at my campus.
Woops, forgive the typo in that first sentence.
Jim, I hope you pay this much attention to the lesser-known men’s Olympic sports when they’re not part of a drawn-out political discussion. I can only assume you therefore read my work every day, even if you skip over the parts concerning women.
Hey! I read your stuff, Beau — though, like everything else, it’s as catch can. Give us a heads up in the comments if something’s coming up on topic.
And, for the record, I am a big fan of women’s sports. I have an Abby Wambach jersey, I follow Rosie Jones every weekend and I’ll be on the edge of my seat for Stacy Dragila. It’s feminst politics that has infected sports, not the other way around. And one awful symptom of that (among many) is the idea that criticism of women’s sports or Title IX is ipso facto sexist.
Great, but you do have to admit that Title IX had something to do with Wambach being able to do what she does. That doesn’t mean you have to accept the system exactly the way it is (again, I’d like to see some flexibility from Foudy and company here), but neither are the people who defend it rabidly anti-male.
I’m sure if we looked around, we’d find plenty of female Olympic-sports athletes married to male Olympic-sports athletes, not just the Dragilas.
Now if only Vicki Goetze-Ackerman (from my high school) could get a little more distance on her drives …
The villain in all this aren’t women’s sports, but big-time football and men’s basketball — where money is often ridiculously wasted in order to compete with the Joneses, Smiths, etc. No one has the cojones to halt this particular arms race, and so non-revenue men’s sports get the shaft.
I attended the University of Maryland, which for decades dominated the ACC in sports such as wrestling, track and soccer. Recently Maryland’s men’s soccer program has revived to become a national power, but the university hasn’t won an ACC wrestling title since the 1970s and has similarly faded in track.
And once upon a time, the Terrapins actually won a few ACC baseball titles; today, it’s a miracle when they don’t finish last, especially since they only have a few scholarships to give against the likes of fully-funded Georgia Tech, Florida State and now Miami. (Why Eric Milton, now with the Phillies, went there is in retrospect impossible to explain.)
Myles Brand and his minions may talk the talk on this topic, but they don’t dare walk the walk. Now there is discussion about extending eligibility for five years (which in itself isn’t a bad idea, since most students today — whether athletes or not — need more than four years to fulfill graduation requirements), but apparently this would be restricted to football and men’s and women’s basketball players. If I wrestle or play volleyball or softball, I’m essentially being told I don’t count.
Vincent,
The argument for big time football being THE cause for the elimination of men’s Olympic sports teams just doesn’t hold up under examination. If you define “big time football” as the Bowl Coalition Schools, then the 60 some teams in the BCS represent a little over 5% of the over 1200 total schools in the NCAA. Even if you extend the definition to include all 117 Div. IA schools with football teams that would still represent less than 10% of schools in the NCAA. That leaves 90% of NCAA schools out of the equation.
However, the federal requirement for gender proportionality does apply to 100% of those schools and is the main factor for the elimination of men’s sports teams.