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Growing Pains

Local schools have more women's teams than ever, but sometimes have trouble filling rosters.

By Kevin Kilbane of The News-Sentinel



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Still growing?Kelley Hartley, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne women's volleyball coach, has seen Title IX transform women's athletics at the high school and college levels. But is the playing field really level?

Kelley Hartley was 9 years old when she discovered that girl athletes were not treated the same as boy athletes.

Hartley, now head women's volleyball coach at IPFW, paid the same $3.50 fee to play girls softball as her twin brother paid to play baseball. But girls played only six games, while boys played 14 games.

Girls didn't make up rainouts or get to keep their team T-shirt. Boys did.

"Why do boys and girls pay the same amount of money but don't get the same things?" an angry young Hartley wrote 25 years ago in a letter to the editor that was printed in her hometown newspaper.

Even though the federal Title IX law requires schools to treat young men and women equally, Hartley would be well into college before she would begin to feel its impact.

"Now I get to make a living at something I love to do, and I am paid fairly for it," said Hartley, who recently was named one of IPFW's associate athletic directors.

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How women benefit

Title IX has done much of what it was supposed to do at Fort Wayne-area universities -- more women have equal opportunity to participate in sports.

More than 600 women played sports at seven northeast Indiana universities during the 2000-2001 year, school reports show. At some schools, women's participation has more than quadrupled in the last decade.

Nationally, the number of women athletes at National Collegiate Athletic Association schools soared by 63 percent during the past decade, to 150,916 athletes.

Still, only half as many women take part in sports at area colleges as men. The schools also spend substantially more money on men's programs.

IPFW's Hartley still remembers the slights she and her teammates endured a dozen years ago while playing on the women's volleyball team at the University of Toledo.

Although things improved greatly by her senior year, Hartley remembers the women's team initially cramming 12-14 players, two or three coaches, an athletic trainer, and everyone's luggage into a 15-passenger van to travel to road games. While on the road, women's players received $8-$10 a day to buy both lunch and dinner.

Each player also was issued only one uniform. If the team played more than one match in a day, players had to wear the same sweaty uniform all day.

However, the men's football team stayed in nice hotels and ate steak dinners the night before home games, she said.

Today, her IPFW women's volleyball team gets treated the same as the men's team, Hartley said. They travel by charter bus or plane. They get $20 a day in meal money. Team members also receive a change of uniforms, practice clothes and two or three pairs of sneakers a year.

Players have no complaints.

"Anything else would be excess," said Janelle Pollard, a junior outside hitter who played locally at South Side High School.

The only difference seems to be the men's volleyball program receives wider promotion, Pollard and sophomore teammate Mo Meinhart said. But they agree the publicity could result from the men's success. IPFW's men reached the NCAA volleyball Final Four championship four times during the 1990s.

"We have to make a name for ourselves, I guess," Meinhart said.

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Adding teams

A variety of factors have influenced the expansion of women's sports at area colleges.

One is demand. As opportunities to play sports have expanded at the youth and high-school level, more young women want to continue playing in college.

At Manchester College in North Manchester, for example, student interest led the school to add women's soccer and golf teams in 1994, said Martha Judge, the softball coach and senior woman administrator for athletics. Another factor is school enrollment.

Ten years ago, three quarters of Indiana Institute of Technology students were men, athletic director Dan Kline said. The engineering school wanted to boost female enrollment because a more balanced student body makes for better campus life, said Kline, who also is vice president of student life.

Since 1990, adding women's soccer and softball to the one women's sport offered previously -- basketball -- has helped boost female enrollment to nearly a third of the student body, said Beth Regedanz, vice president of development.

The threat of lawsuits also has prompted universities to work harder to comply with Title IX, IPFW's Hartley said.

"If you look at some of the case law in the last three years, people have been awarded damages," she said. "I think that scares (college) administors."

* * *

Not enough players

Providing athletic opportunities for women doesn't mean they will be used, however, as some area colleges have found. Manchester College offers eight women's sports. But the school has had trouble recruiting women athletes, Judge said.

To comply with Title IX, larger colleges have been offering scholarships to women athletes they wouldn't have recruited in the past, she said.

That pulls away women who otherwise would have played sports for smaller colleges.

Taylor University-Fort Wayne occasionally also has had difficulty filling rosters for the two sports it offers for women -- volleyball and basketball, athletic director Bud Hamilton said.

"Some years, we have had to beg a few women to play varsity to make a team," Hamilton said.

Taylor does not offer athletic scholarships to athletes, Hamilton said. That is one reason it often loses women players to slightly larger schools that offer more generous tuition-assistance packages, he said. Taylor and other universities also have found that some women who played high school sports would rather devote their time to clubs or other activities at college, Hamilton said.

"We have a very difficult time getting women even to participate in intramurals," he noted.

* * *

The future

Athletic officials at area colleges said more can be done to bring about full gender equity at their schools. Looking at her own program, IPFW's Hartley sees a need for more money to recruit women's players from outside the Midwest.

If the school remains an independent -- a college that does not belong to any athletic conference -- her team also will need a larger travel budget so it can play top teams elsewhere.

"It is hard to get home games when we are not in a conference," she said.

What pleases Hartley, though, is that gender equity has advanced enough that her players take for granted the meal money, charter bus and airline travel, and free practice and game clothing that she dreamed of having only a decade ago.

"I don't think that necessarily is a bad thing," she added. "I think it is where it is supposed to be."

Staff writer Dave Benson contributed to this report.

History lessons

What today's college athletes know about Title IX

"The size and budget of women's and men's teams have to be equal. They usually cut men's sports before women's. That's about it."

-- Janae Langhorne, senior thrower, Ball State

"We basically talked about it in the sports teams I was on. It's about equality for men and women when it comes to sports as far as how much money they should get. Everything should be equal."

-- Rholonda Ash, sophomore

middle distance runner, Butler

"I just know that women couldn't do anything. Everything was run by men. It came up in history class in high school, government."

-- Thyoshi Chambers, sophomore basketball player, Indiana Tech

"The scholarship part I became aware of when I came here. I asked about scholarships. I wanted to know how many we had. Then I started to think about how many football had."

-- Shannon Kelley, sophomore track athlete, Purdue

Female athletes

Here is how the number of player slots in women's sports have changed at area colleges over the last decade:

Huntington College

Women athletes 1990-91: 47

2000-2001: 92

Change: 96 percent

Indiana Institute

of Technology

Women athletes 1990-91: 11

2000-2001: 82

Change: 645 percent

IPFW

Women athletes 1990-91: 68

2000-2001: 82

Change: 20 percent

Manchester College

Women athletes 1990-91: 93

2000-2001: 130

Change: 40 percent

Taylor University-Fort Wayne *

Women athletes 1990-91: 22

2000-2001: 17 (team slots available for 22)

Change: 23 percent (loss).

Tri-State University

Women athletes 1990-91: 98

2000-2001: 111

Change: 13 percent

University of Saint Francis

Women athletes 1990-91: 29**

2000-2001: 109

Change: 276 percent

** Figure includes only scholarship athletes.

Source: Area Colleges Equity in Athletics

Disclosure Act forms and U.S. Department of

Education's Office of Post-Secondary Education.

*Taylor-Fort Wayne was known as Summit Christian in 1990-91.