“It’s worked…It’s been good, and we survived it. The change of seasons will survive…I think the state of Michigan will flourish with it.”
That’s the assessment of Farmington Public Schools’ athletic director Dennis Noe with regard to girls’ athletic season changes resulting from a Title IX lawsuit resolved last year. Still, at a recent school board meeting, he presented a veritable litany of problems and burdens and concerns from the first year of implementation. Space shortages have been resolved at North Farmington and Farmington, but still exist at Harrison, where he said they already had to turn a classroom into a wrestling room. Teachers and administrators have to juggle schedules and miss family time in order to cover all the games.
Noe commented that some of the initial impacts seem to defeat the purpose of the lawsuit. However, increasing participation in girls’ athletics or getting bigger crowds for girls’ games were only potential benefits. Parents sued because they believed school districts treated female athletes as “second class citizens” in the structuring of their seasons, in the availability of facilities and in the resources allotted to girls’ sports, among other areas (http://www.mi-gender-equity.com/maew_2.html).
The most publicized issue involved a disconnect between girls’ high school and college sports seasons, as well as seasons in other states. A story published by Womensenews.org during the trial explained the problem:
“In Michigan, for instance, boys play basketball in the winter and hold many games on Friday nights. However, Michigan girls’ basketball is a fall sport, and games are held on Thursday nights to accommodate boys’ football, which plays on Friday. Plaintiffs argued that it was more inconvenient for girls than for boys and that few if any college recruiters went around to see the girls during their out-of-sync seasons, and girls lost chances for sports scholarships.” (http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/669/context/archive)
The folks who presented this lawsuit have been portrayed as selfish prima donnas who put the needs of their athlete daughters above all else. But there’s a principle here, an idea lost in what we have grown accustomed to accepting in Michigan. When girls’ athletic season scheduling virtually bars them from consideration for high school athletic scholarships, that’s discrimination. When girls’ teams play games in inferior facilities, because the boys are in the “good gym,” that’s discrimination. When athletic programs make accomodations to shoehorn girls’ athletic events so they fit into the boys’ schedule, that’s discrimination.
And that’s what we’ve gotten used to in Michigan. Changing life as we know it is never easy, but it is necessary for progress to be made. Thanks to the hard work of Dennis Noe, of Farmington coaches and dedicated faculty who give of themselves for the benefit of our children, gender equity will work in Farmington. And it will work very well.
Let’s hope the same can be said for other communities.
–Joni Hubred-Golden
Michigan Woman Blogger
7 Comments
September 9, 2008 at 5:53 pm
What Joni misses are some of the critical issues.
1.) Participation in Michigan high school sports was down last year. Many school districts opted to drop freshman teams in basketball for lack of facilities, coaches and officials.
2.) The changed did not result in gender equity. There are a number of sports that are still played “out of season” for both sexes….golf, tennis, soccer, swimming, to mention a few.
3.) High school officiating in basketball, always questionable, set a all time standard for horrible last year, as the number of quality officials could not meet the demand.
4.) Spectator attendance/interest in girl’s basketball went from low to nearly non-existant as it now competes head-to-head with boy’s basketball.
5.) Anyone knowledgeable in high school sports is aware that when college seasons are the same time as high school seasons (as is now true in girl’s basketball and volleyball) the college coaches are less likely to see players during the season as they are involved with their own teams. Much of the recruiting for boy’s basketball is during the AAU season, not the high school season. Girl’s playing both volleyball and basketball would have more difficulty being recruited under the new schedule than under the old schedule. Actually, under the old system Michigan high school girls had an unfair advantage in the recruiting wars by playing when the college head coaches were free.
This is not to say that FPS did not do an adequate job with a bad situation that was forced upon them. However to try to paint this as anything other than a bad situation is to fail to understand high school sports.
September 9, 2008 at 6:31 pm
All interesting points, but still in the “boys come first” paradigm. If the MHSAA had integrated girls’ sports fairly all along, none of what has happened - which is inconveniencing everyone and costing a fortune - would be necessary. The MHSAA treated female athletes like second-class citizens. The organization is now being held accountable, only after its leaders wasted many years and many millions of dollars to avoid accountability.
I’ve actually become quite well-versed in girls athletics, which as this lawsuit has shown, is quite different from what boys experience. Here is information about the impacts of season scheduling directly from materials included in the lawsuit:
“MHSAA has placed six girls’ sports in non-traditional or disadvantageous seasons, but does not require boys to play any sports in non-traditional seasons. As a result, girls are harmed in ways that boys are not, including:
* Less recruitment opportunities as a result of NCAA recruiting restrictions that limit the ability of women’s college basketball coaches to recruit during the fall, but not the winter. This means that colleges outside Michigan cannot evaluate or contact Michigan girls during much of the fall season even though Michigan girls are virtually the only ones playing basketball at that time;
* Less scholarship opportunities, due to the fact that the National Letter of Intent dates for high school athletes to sign for their college scholarships, occur before Michigan girls even start their senior seasons in volleyball and soccer;
* Less national attention and recognition. Girl athletes in Michigan miss the opportunity to be named to the All-American teams and their schools aren’t in the national rankings because their sports are scheduled in different seasons;
* Limited opportunities to play club, USA, AAU, USSF, AYSO, or Olympic Development Programs because they are geared around the seasons in which other states play.”
Until this lawsuit was settled, Michigan high school sports were perfectly aligned to funnel boys into national college and professional athletics. Girls did not have the same advantage. If this was a bad situation, it was created by the people who were scheduling high school sports seasons.
September 10, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Joni,
“but does not require boys to play any sports in non-traditional seasons.”
I’m at a loss. I thought that soccer and tennis were sports. Boys STILL play these sport “out of season”. To be well versed in girl’s athletics is not to be knowledgeable about the subject of gender equity in sports.
If, as claimed, the volleyball players must sign letters of intent before their senior seasons, then that means that the girl’s basketball players formerly enjoyed a distinct advantage in scholarships as their senior season would have been completed before that date, while in the rest of the nation they had not. (I won’t even bother trying to explain to you the NCAA contact rules and how they do not limit watching and evaluating players….that argument is so far out in left field as to be a joke). Soccer is traditionally played in the spring (boys were/are out of season) so your whole paragraph on when letters of intent can be signed is just a smoke-screen.
Any person who has followed the effects of Title IX knows that the net result has not been so much an increase in women’s sports in colleges, but the reduction of men’s sports. Colleges have evened the numbers of men’s vs women’s sports not so much by increasing the numbers of sports for women, but by reducing the number of men’s teams. The net result, just like gender-equity here in Michigan, is a decrease in total participation.
Mostly you miss the big picture. The intent of high school sports is participation, not the college scholarships. College scholarships should be earned in the classrooms. Under the old system Michigan ranked near the top of the nation in participation, while much further down the list in number of students. Sports should be an bonus to the high school experience not the reason for high school. Gender-Equity has cause undue expense to the schools that could have been much better spent in the classrooms. High schools should be academic institutions not sports academys.
The cost of possibly a very few additional SPORTS scholarships for girls statewide, balanced against the reduction of money available for academics at nearly every high school in the state, and balanced against the overall decrease in high school sports participation statewide, seems to me be be an extreme example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
September 11, 2008 at 1:59 am
Terry, high school sports used to be about “participation,” but to set aside the amount of money involved and the tremendous opportunities for students to earn a college education and move on to professional athletics is simply naive. High school programs pride themselves on grooming the next generation of collegiate and professional athletes. Good high school coaches draw kids to a particular school the same way good college coaches do. “Participation” is the real smoke screen, used to hide the true big picture: high schools routinely offering girls inferior facilities and opportunities.
Whether people like Title IX or don’t think it’s fair or don’t think it’s effective doesn’t really matter. If MHSAA officials didn’t know they were violating Title IX, they should have. And when they most certainly did know, they continued to spend millions of dollars fighting in court to continue discriminating.
You could change the word “any sports in non-traditional seasons” to “major sports”, and the point remains the same. Girls’ seasons were far more egregiously misaligned that boys’, the question that was settled in court. What you seem to be advocating is “outcome-based” decision making. In other words, because this lawsuit had negative consequences, it’s a bad decision. The MHSAA created and fostered disparate conditions for Michigan’s female athletes over a period of years. That’s against the law. Yes, there will be negative impacts. There will also be improvements. And if the MHSAA hadn’t doggedly pursued this losing battle for so many years, perhaps we would already be well on the way to finding solutions fair to everyone concerned.
That is, after all, the hallmark of any high school sports program: fair play.
September 11, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Joni,
Naive is believeing that high school sports leads to the big-time professional money. The number of athletes that actually make a living at their sport is such a small percentage of the participants that you probably have a better chance of winning the lottery. I can’t tell you the number of parents I run into that believe their grade school kid is college scholarship material, yet the kid never even makes the high school team.
College academic scholarships outnumber athletic ones about 6 or 7 to 1. Students who go to college on athletic scholarships are far more likely to drop out than ones on academic scholarships, in fact are far more likely to drop out than students not on scholarship at all. What’s the point of going to college?
High school programs do not groom athletes for college programs. While there are some excellent high school coaches, they are few and far between. The XC coach at a local D-1 school says that his biggest problem is that most high school coaches are more interested in participation than results, and that in fact, they are not qualified to coach talented athletes. In girl’s basketball under gender-equity this has become even more of a problem as many of the better coaches used to coach both sexes and now, due to being the same season, have elected to coach only the boy’s teams.
The bigger private schools that to well in sports, do not draw athletes by promising collegiate athletic scholarships. Most of them draw the athletes by promising a better education for free. (Remember, the kids could go to thier local public school for free).
You end up arguing against yourself when you try to make a destinction between “major” sports and other sports. There are far more collegiate athletic scholarships available in the other sports like track, scoccer, cross-country, swimming, tennis, etc. than in the “major” sports.
You are hypocritical if you even try to use the word “descrimination”, unless you demand it for ALL high school athletes in ALL sports. Otherwise, you are being discriminatory, yourself.
I know you speak from experience, as you were a highly recruited high school athlete, have kids that attended college on scholarship, and have coached in the high school ranks?
September 12, 2008 at 12:58 am
Terry, if your rules of engagement include those requirements, then I think my work here is done. I’m assuming that you fit at least one of those criteria, and of course, one can only have experienced something directly to have a legitimate opinion about it. Speaking with the mother of a female athlete who had to dress for games in the girls’ rest room because there was no girls’ locker room probably won’t hold much sway with you.
I will say this: I gather your accusation that I am the hypocrite stems from your belief that there is an unfairness in Title IX and this lawsuit, because boys are suffering negative consequences, while girls benefit.
To me, the greatest hypocrisy of all comes from those who now cry “foul” over Title IX, but never gave one second’s thought about whether conditions in their school district or state were “fair” to everyone, until someone pointed out they weren’t.
That’s it for me. Feel free to respond, and enjoy the season.
September 12, 2008 at 12:06 pm
It’s easy to have an opinion, but without any experience the validity of that opinion is open to question.
How many athletes from FPS do you know who made the pros? The four year stretch that Harrison won the state football championship, how many pros? Stanton is with the Lions (which is questionable whether that constitutes the pros) and Roberson is on the taxi squad with Atlanta (I think). Yet your “opinion” was “High school programs pride themselves on grooming the next generation of collegiate and professional athletes.”
I don’t argue that Title IX is fair or not, the result is an overall decrease in sports opportunities for both sexes. As a rule colleges did not add women’s sports but cut men’s sports to comply. Do you really think that that was a “good” result?
In all honesty “EQUALITY” would be non-sexist. There would be one basketball team open to both sexes, one volleyball team open to both sexes, one swimming team, one cross country team. That would be fair.
You are hypocritical in lauding the gender-equity lawsuit, when it really only changed the season for two girl’s sports not all sports for both sexes. The overwhelming majority of coaches and parents (after one year) agree that there were more adverse effects than positive ones. But what the heck……it’s “fair”.
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