Search Results

This chapter examines Title IX's equal treatment framework and its progress toward equalizing the treatment and benefits given to male and female athletes, along with its limitations. The biggest success story of Title IX has been the use of its three-part test to add women's sports, which have also made great strides in gaining increased support and resources. As with other aspects of gender equality in sports, however, Title IX's baseline of sex separation affects how the equal treatment standards apply. This chapter discusses the development of Title IX's equal treatment standards, the strong side of its liberal feminism, the requirement for proving intentional discrimination, and Title IX's coverage of privately financed inequality. It also considers Title IX's sensitivity to the harms of discrimination and its coverage of athletic scholarships.

This chapter examines Title IX's equal treatment framework and its progress toward equalizing the treatment and benefits given to male and female athletes, along with its limitations. The biggest success story of Title IX has been the use of its three-part test to add women's sports, which have also made great strides in gaining increased support and resources. As with other aspects of gender equality in sports, however, Title IX's baseline of sex separation affects how the equal treatment standards apply. This chapter discusses the development of Title IX's equal treatment standards, the strong side of its liberal feminism, the requirement for proving intentional discrimination, and Title IX's coverage of privately financed inequality. It also considers Title IX's sensitivity to the harms of discrimination and its coverage of athletic scholarships.

This chapter details the regularization of athletic scholarships and establishment of the NCAA as the principal arbiter of the college sports establishment. It describes the NCAA's Sanity Code of 1949, which sought to enforce the principle that college athletes were amateurs who played sports as an “avocation” and should not be differentiated from other students. It discusses the evolution of intercollegiate sports between 1950 and 1956, which resulted in athletics and athletes becoming virtually separate from the rest of the institution in which they resided. After 1956, an athletic scholarship and the time demands of competition often forced many “student athletes” to make their academic commitments secondary to their athletic ones.

This chapter discusses the Atlantic Coast Conference, which was founded in significant part to establish academic integrity and enforce academic standards among its members. One eventual result of those goals was that the ACC decided in 1964 that football and basketball prospects had to score at least 800 on the SAT to qualify for an athletic scholarship. In 1966, it extended this policy to athletes who participated, with or without financial aid, in any intercollegiate sport. During the late 1960s, the 800 rule generated what the Raleigh News and Observer called the “biggest, most controversial, technicality-filled issue in recent league history.” The controversy divided the ACC and threatened to cause its dissolution. After much turmoil, the conference decided to keep the 800 requirement even at the cost of losing one of its charter members, and, consequently, the University of South Carolina withdrew in 1971.

This chapter discusses the racial integration of college sports starting in the 1950s. The racial integration of teams, accelerating in the North and beginning in the South, altered the quality of games as well as the composition of rosters. By the 1970s, football and track squads contained two dozen or more black athletes, and on some basketball teams blacks constituted a majority. To a considerable extent, the opening up of these rosters spelled the decline—or at least inability to compete at the highest levels—of historically black college teams. Meanwhile, coaches, though they lost some of the battles against assertive black athletes, and though their sensitivities on race matters were raised, most often emerged with their authority not only intact but enhanced by control of scholarships and by increasingly independent athletic departments. The college athletic enterprise was opening a new playbook in which money and media would be involved as never before.