OT: USA Today “article” about Title IX Manipulation
I don’t pay for USA Today so I couldn’t access the article, apologies. Here’s a link to their Twitter story about it. https://twitter.com/usatodaysports/status/1529787068825620482?s=21&t=BnvA0sc1ACS2VC79pMnOyg
Their graphics list Alabama and Michigan as two of the highest offenders.
So basically Michigan has an extra 36 female rowers instead of adding a new women's sport. Sounds like an opportunity for improvement but hardly the crime of the decade. Besides, wouldn't fixing that hurt the women that are vying for spots on the row team?
What are some women's sports that Michigan doesn't already have? I'm curious about what other sports could be added.
Is there a varsity-level women's ice hockey team? I know there's a big push in USA Hockey to support the women's programs, but youth girls teams can be difficult to find.
That would be cool and the costs would be mitigated as they wouldn't need to build new facilities. I just looked it up and there is an OSU team - can't let them have an edge on us :)
Just as important of a question: does Stanford have a women's ice hockey team that could give them an advantage in the Director's Cup standings?
Not only is there an OSU Women's hockey team but they just won the National Championship. So OSU has a hockey national championship more recently that Michigan. Bleh.
Unfortunately the losses related to women's hockey are massive. Trust me, I used to work in the operations department for the athletic department at the University of North Dakota when they still had women's hockey. I had to go through all of the invoices that the program accrued and reconcile the accounts.
The women also played in The Ralph so there was no need for additional facilities and that program still lost millions on an annual basis. Hockey is one of the most expensive sports there is and like it or not the women bring in revenue next to zero. Its a very difficult space where you have to scratch and claw with a simple goal of trying to turn massive losses into acceptable losses.
Is that because of insurance? I could imagine that being pretty costly. I guess the travel would also be expensive.
I don't know for certain, but:
1) Ice time is expensive. Ice not used by the team could be sold for tournaments and other events.
2) Equipment is expensive, although I am assuming that we can work out some kind of sponsorships?
3) Travel is expensive, likely exacerbated by the fact that there are not many women's teams at this point. As the number increases (e.g. if places like MSU also add teams), then this cost might decrease somewhat.
Like I said below, however, money is a poor excuse at a place like Michigan (no offense to North Dakota). For a place that prides itself on being leaders and best, and being progressive on things like equality, it could raise enough money in a heartbeat. Hell, you could probably finance the program for years for less than TAMU is paying to get one football recruit on campus.
Hopefully not the amount that TAMU is going to offer Dante Moore :)
Hockey is expensive, but travel, scholarships and coaches’ salaries are the major costs. Those 3 items are not hockey exclusive. My niece played for the UofM club team this season. She paid $2K. I’m guessing the marginal cost for hockey relative to other sports due to equipment and facilities is $100K annually. The thing is, a 36 player rowing team only requires one coaching staff. An 18 player rowing team and an 18 player hockey team requires 2 coaching staffs, so the athletic department is incentivized to have fewer, larger teams as opposed to many smaller teams.
I'm not sure any women's sports that are added at this point are going to be revenue positive.....M has the resources to support a hockey team if they want to, even if it might be more expensive.
"Sorry ladies, you only get cheap sports" isn't really a look I relish for the AD or University.
If there isn’t still there used to be. Maybe it’s a club now instead of a varsity sport? I know there is a Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives episode that featured a women’s hockey player doing a cheeseburger challenge.
The entire problem is football having 85 scholarship players, nothing else comes close to that.
There are currently 15 women's sports and 14 men's sports. I don't really see the problem of trying to even out the overall athlete number problem caused by football in 1 or 2 sports.
How is football, a sport at Michigan that generates positive cash flow, the problem? Isn’t the problem that the “non-revenue sports” are uh…non-revenue?
Yeah... and that football team (with a little bit on MBB and occasionally hockey depending on the reports one believes) PAYS for the other 27 varsity sports, allows the AD (non-COVID) to operate in the black and not take taxpayer dollars (which is about 1 of 10 D-1 schools in the country), and reimburses the university for the cost of aid-in-kind.
It astounds me that 14 people gave that post a thumbs up. It’s like they have no idea about which sports is critical to the existence of the others.
Football makes those other sports possible.
College football was building 90,000 seat stadiums in the 1920’s. It has long been a central feature of intercollegiate athletics. Without football there is no NCAA, Big Ten, PAC 12, etc. That’s how important the sport has been and is to college athletics.
The “problem” is mandating universities fund same amount of scholarships for sports that generally attract little interest or attention(the point of intercollegiate athletics) to the university.
From MGoBlue, here's the list of women's sports on their site:
- Basketball
- Cross Country
- Field Hockey
- Golf
- Gymnastics
- Lacrosse
- Rowing
- Soccer
- Softball
- Swimming/Diving
- Tennis
- Track and Field
- Volleyball
- Water Polo
When you compare it to the list of NCAA women's sports, the only one that jumps out as a possible add would be Ice Hockey.
Penn State, Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Minnesota all sponsor women's teams, so it's not like we would be the first B1G team, but I don't see us adding women's hockey unless new facilites were built.
Beat the Bucknuts!
Why? The men and women's basketball team share Crisler, why can't hockey share Yost?
They can share the ice, of course, but the rest of the Yost facilities would have to be upgraded and modernized to support two home teams. You can't just throw a women's team in the visitor's locker rooms or some of the changing rooms under the stands. There would have to be some renovations made.
The “visiting locker rooms” at Yost aren’t even used by visiting teams. They’re SO small* that they’re just used by the officials and as an interview room for B1G televised games. Visiting teams actually get dressed behind a large curtain near the Zamboni entrance at the far end of the arena.
So that’s certainly not an option for the women’s team unless they somehow knocked down the wall between the two dressing rooms to make one larger room. But then that would cut into revenue generated by youth hockey and mens leagues using the ice since there would then be no available locker rooms.
*to put it into perspective, my 13 member men’s league team couldn’t fit in the locker room. It is TINY
Used it when playing IM hockey back in the day. I wasn't aware that that was the visiting team's locker room. Just big enough for mites after all the parents tying skates leave.
Well it’s not the “visiting team locker room” because nobody uses it as such. It used to be the visiting team locker rooms but they’d end up using 2-3 to fit their whole team. Today, one is for the refs, one is typically used for media purposes.
But those two locker rooms are the only locker rooms except for the Michigan locker room up the stairs which get used. The two remaining small locker rooms are typically used by the little kids that play during intermission. Which is why I call them the “visiting locker rooms.” Visiting teams get dressed behind a curtain on some benches at the far end of the arena. I believe they’ve updated the area to more of a “locker room” but I haven’t been back there to see it since they moved visiting teams out of the small locker rooms.
At any rate, it would still take a fairly significant investment to knock out the block wall between two of the locker rooms and add in the necessary updates. And would leave just two tiny dressing rooms for youth teams and mens league games. Which would eliminate the possibility for teams to play immediately after one another, thus reducing revenue for the arena.
A) Seth has a good breakdown on twitter of why the article misrepresents women's sports opportunities
B) I'm still totally down with adding women's ice hockey
C) It's not NCAA yet but I think women's wrestling can be added, wouldn't be costly, and would help Team USA at the olympics as much if not more than women's ice hockey
D) I'd be down with it if we add both, too. But if rowing is a better way to open opportunities for women athletes, I'll stand down.
Thumbs up for adding women's wrestling. It's growing in popularity at the HS level, it's an Olympic sport, it should not be as expensive as many of the alternatives, and it's a great sport.
I've asked the hockey question ten times. I think it comes down to Red not wanting it and Kim not wanting it.
KBA? She doesn't wanna compete for eyeballs?
Okay, I thought that the point was that they're padding the number of women to justify having more male athletes.
Some serious "lede" burying here... people PAY FOR USA Today stories?? Will wonders never cease?
Do people actually pay for USA Today? To me it will always be that free rag you pick up at the airport.
It wasn't supposed to be free. It always used to cost $0.50
There was a particular section of the USA Today that I used to like back in the day, but I can't remember what.
The life section had the funnies and puzzles
I was an avid newspaper reader until everything went online, but I never read USA Today unless it was shoved under my hotel door.
I've paid for it before. It was in 2008, I was at a bus station, and forgot to bring a book. I remember the crossword being suspiciously easy.
Naw, the vast majority of the hundreds of free USA Todays I picked up were from hotels. Same with the WSJ (had a free 2 year subscription at one point when I had some expiring orphan American Airlines miles, but I let that lapse)
No need to shit on USA Today when they were first to break the Martin McFly Jr. robbery arrest back in '15.
They used to have real reporting in their stories. In the ‘90s I read an article which put Krazy Jim’s at #5 on a list of the top 10 places in the USA to get a hamburger.
Statistics never lie & statisticians always do.
Go Blue.
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
statistics can often be twisted to push a narrative that isn't really there.
source? lots of "peer reviewed" publications out there (I am on the review board of a few journals)
Are as many female athletes receiving scholarships as male athletes? If so, I’m not sure where the issue is.
Letter of the law v. spirit of the law. If the only women's sport was rowing, and it had the same number of scholarships as all of the men's sports combined, would we be complying with Title IX? Maybe. Would be really be trying to equalize the opportunities for women to participate in sports at the college level? Not really.
Would it be better for female athletes in Michigan if the women's rowing team had a standard number of scholarships and we instead helped grow the sport of women's hockey? I would argue yes due to the diversification of opportunities. But that would take an investment from the school and some balls from the AD. It could happen, but I won't hold my breath.
With regard to hockey, money/facilities is the worst excuse at a place like Michigan. We can afford to have women's hockey, but choose not to. Not exactly leaders and best in that regard.
You might be right, but it's not as easy as a flick of a pen. Yost is an ancient building and the men's hockey team is already crammed into an upstairs space over the north entrance. There is not a lot of space, if any, left to expand in that building. And coming up with a new space is a complicated undertaking. Worthwhile despite the challenges? Likely. And yet, it will likely take a wealthy alum willing to front the money to make such an undertaking possible before the will to get it done grows to a critical mass.
The issue is that Title IX requires more than equal numbers of scholarships.
- Participation: Title IX requires that women and men be provided equitable opportunities to participate in sports. Title IX does not require institutions to offer identical sports but an equal opportunity to play;
- Scholarships: Title IX requires that female and male student-athletes receive athletics scholarship dollars proportional to their participation; and
- Other benefits: Title IX requires the equal treatment of female and male student-athletes in the provisions of: (a) equipment and supplies; (b) scheduling of games and practice times; (c) travel and daily allowance/per diem; (d) access to tutoring; (e) coaching, (f) locker rooms, practice and competitive facilities; (g) medical and training facilities and services; (h) housing and dining facilities and services; (i) publicity and promotions; (j) support services and (k) recruitment of student-athletes.
Here is another USA Today article that provides some more free info - but not everything.
EDIT: They try to lure you in with $1 for 6 months! Then $9.99/month thereafter. Yikes.
Teach me your secret. How do you share similar stories and get upvoted? Have a become an MGoVillain?
Invalid article. NCAA considers cross country, indoor and outdoor track to be one sport with 12.6 scholarships total. Not three sports.
Football should be excluded from title 9 scholarship count. There is no comparable sport to Football. Men's basketball is comparable to Women's basketball. Baseball is comparable to Softball and so on. Including football in the title 9 equation actually murts men's non-revenue sports count.
Not so fast my friend, the Lingerie Football League says hi!
That is a college sport we can all get behind.