Friday, April 16, 1999
Miami stuck in Title IX quagmire
BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
He has done all he can. Look at all those petitions, a foot-tall stack, signed by 3,500 students asking Miami University to meet Title IX rules by adding women's sports, not subtracting men's.
He says an alumni group, Friends of Miami Wrestling, plans to tell the school's board of trustees today that it can endow the wrestling program for the next five years.
“We're starving,” he says, “but we ain't dead yet.”
Chuck Angello has coached wrestling at Miami for 18 years. Because of Miami's struggle to comply with Title IX, he's down to the last bullet in his gun. One of the options for the trustees today is to kill Angello's program. Also, men's tennis, soccer and golf.
Angello has a plan. Sort of.
“If I win, I may tell them to take the job and shove it,” Angello says. “I got no plan for losing.”
That's what it's about in Oxford today. Winning and losing. And bottom lines and a federal law that seems to provide opportunity for one group of people (women) by taking it away from another (men).
In the name of fairness, of course.
In an alternate universe ...
What Title IX is supposed to do is provide more chances for women to play sports, not create an illusion of greater women's participation by whacking men's programs.
Because its athletic department is $1 million in debt — blame football, The Program That Eats Budgets — Miami can't comply with Title IX by adding women's sports. Its alternative is to cut men's sports.
If this sounds boring, it is. Until it involves one of your kids.
“The kids are getting screwed,” is Angello's way of putting it. In February the trustees gave the four sports on death row a reprieve. Come up with a plan to raise $13 million, they said, and we'll let you live. Angello calls that “extortion.”
“I don't tend to negotiate with terrorists,” he says. “I ain't paying no ransom.”
As we can see, Title IX is a mess. A well-intended mess, sure. But a typically wrong-headed, government-as-nanny jumble. More a quota than an equalizer. And right now, nobody's happy but football and basketball.
As Angello says: “I feel like I'm Gandhi. The sacred cows can't be slimmed down. But the less important people are being told to hit the road.”
What a mess. Miami Athletic Director Joel Maturi says he has letters from women requesting his department add equestrian, women's golf and the wildly popular synchronized swimming to its roster of sports getting money.
Under Title IX, it's possible for a school to have intercollegiate synchronized swimming, but not soccer. Equestrian, but not wrestling or men's golf. This makes sense. Somewhere.
Maturi figures no matter what happens today or down the road, the school will be in court, defending itself. “This university will probably get sued (by wrestlers, golfers and the like) if we eliminate sports and will probably get sued (by the dreaded equestrian crowd) if we don't move toward proportionality.”
Possibly, this isn't what the law intended.
... this almost makes sense
The athletic department has raised more than $3 million since the February trustees meeting. It's a heroic amount, but it's not $13 million. Meanwhile, the varsity precision skating team has been to Europe twice in the last three months. Twenty-four women went to Italy for six days in February — three days after the trustees met to discuss the debt-plagued athletic department — and to Sweden two weeks ago.
“We went to Iowa this year,” says Angello, “and Florida. We drove.”
His program's entire budget is $146,000, less than 2 percent of Miami's athletic outlay. He has fewer scholarships (four) than any of his foes in the Mid-American Conference.
He's hoping not to get his head chopped off today. In the name of fairness, of course. “It's the Titanic,” says Chuck Angello. “Get the boats.”
Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at 768-8454.