My son is doing well in basketball, but generally speaking, basketball is the most competitive of the High School sports. It's the hardest team to make. They have fewer spots, and the kids are more competitive, early.
My son is energetic and athletic, and I can't imagine that he'd ever sit out the Winter sports season. So, if for some reason he doesn't make the basketball team in High School, he's got a couple of options. One would be swimming, which he shows some talent in. The other would be wrestling.
Wrestling is, in my opinion, the most under-rated of High School sports. You generally don't have to survive a cut to make the team, which automatically puts it in the bottom half of sports, prestiege-wise. Sports like baseball and basketball, where you have to be darned good just to make the team, always had a bit of an edge over sports like track and wrestling, where for the most part, if you want to be on the team, you will be allowed to.
(Whether you'll be competitive or earn a letter is another matter altogether.)
Where the kids in school may look at the QB of the football team as the school's resident badass, the reality is that the kid who earned a letter in wrestling, pound for pound, is probably the one more likely to put a hurt on you if things ever got violent.
As for conditioning, wrestling is hard to beat. It's a total body workout with an emphasis on strength per pound of body weight. A whole generation of modern exercise techniques (crossfit, P90X, etc.) are just pale imitations of the type of workout that wrestlers get on a daily basis.
I also think my boy would love it. The kid has loved to roughhouse since the day he was born. From the time he could toddle, all he ever wanted to do was wrestle. On the bed, on the floor, whatever. He just loves it.
So, I think this is a sport he could really enjoy. Basketball is still his first choice. Personally, I'll try to steer him towards swimming, because he'll spend a lot more time around girls in lycra rather than exclusively being around boys in lycra, but that's a small consideration.
I mentioned to him the other day that wrestling used to be a great way to get a college scholarship, but that Title IX ruined that. I said it matter-of-factly and off the cuff, as a simple statement of reality, the way I might say, "the sky is blue" or "my car has leather seats".
That did get me to thinking, though. Is there anything that can be done about this? Is this a fact that we need to accept?
Title IX did a lot of great things. In girl's sports, we're ahead of the entire rest of the world. Even in European countries like Germany, the opportunities for girls' soccer are considerably fewer than they are in the US.
In the days before Title IX, let's be frank, female athletes got hosed. My grandmother probably would have been an exceptional distance runner or baseball/softball player in her day. She never got the chance. Her youngest daughter, Marianne, who was in high school when I was a little boy, could only chose from a handful of club sports. It simply wasn't possible for a girl to get a varsity letter in 1970.
By the time her daughter, Erin, came along, she was earning letters in Softball, Basketball and Volleyball. (I think there might even have been a Track letter in there, somewhere.)
Perhaps more importantly, scholarship opportunities for women in college have expanded monumentally.
We've done well by our daughters.
The sad fact is that, unfortunately, there are now fewer scholarships available for men. So, we haven't done very well by our sons.
The first question should be, "is that a problem?"
I'll say that yes, it is. I have a personal belief that many of the things we've done to tilt the scales towards encouraging women have had the effect of making young men feel excluded.
Colleges are now nearly 60% female. It isn't just sports, but in every area, girls are told from the youngest ages that they've got opportunities in, say, science and engineering. There are outreach programs, special scholarships, etc.
You simply don't see that for young men. They're expected to find their own way in the world. Reasonable enough if you're talking about young adults, but we're talking about small children and the conditioning they're getting.
Second, there's a clear political agenda, here. Cheerleading requires just as much athleticism as, say, gymanstics. Yet, there are groups that are determined to make sure that it never gets classified as a sport. Why? Because then scholarships for cheerleading would detract from the number of scholarships required for other sports.
Still, the boys are doing pretty well, right? I mean, look at all those football, baseball and basketball scholarships out there.
Let's look at baseball as an example. Guess how many scholarships the top Division I teams get. I mean when you think of perennial powerhouses like University of Texas, they must have a few dozen scholarships to bring in all those talented players, right?
Nope. Not at all. The NCAA limits the number of full-ride scholarships to 11.7. The school can then divide these up into slices as small as a 1/4 ride.
Baseball is a money loser at every school. The facilities required are considerable. The ticket revenue is minimal or non-existant.
Men's Basketball pretty much breaks even, which is why basketball teams get 13 scholarships. Sometimes this boils down to pure economics.
Football? Football gets a whopping 85 scholarships. Football is the only sport that makes money and even then, only at the very largest of Division I schools. Most Div I schools lose money even on their football programs.
Now, if we considered only football, baseball and basketball, with their combined 109 scholarships, what is wrong with giving out 109 scholarships to women's sports?
The first is that women don't play football. For the life of me, I don't understand why colleges don't have women's football. It probably could draw spectators. If the games won't draw people on a stand-alone basis, have the games just prior to the men's games.
I honestly think the time has come for women's football at all levels. Maybe even a professional league. (Professional women's leagues are problematic and a subject that might be too broad for discussion here.)
The fact that men play football and women don't totally destroys the scholarship equation. The fact that football is basically the only college sport that makes money means that it won't be going away.
The second big problem is that even if a school offers 109 scholarships to women, that's not good enough.
The legalities are a bit intricate, but to comply with Title IX, there are 3 different criteria you can try to meet.
This criteria: "Full and effective accommodation of the interest and ability of underrepresented sex" is never, ever used because any woman in any college, at any time, could sue the school because she felt that they weren't fully and effectively accomodating her. Try disproving that one in court.
The next criteria, which is commonly used by schools is, "Demonstrate a continual expansion of athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex". Generally, this means adding a women's team. Doing so keeps the courts off your ass for about 5 years, at which point you need to add another women's team or meet the third criteria:
"Providing athletic participation opportunities that are substantially proportionate to the student enrollment".
That's why 109 scholarships for women isn't enough. If you're giving 109 scholarships to men and your student body is 60% female, you need to give 20% more to women. Basically, to meet this test, you'd need to give out about 133 scholarships to women.
Which is why, for instance, there are only 13 basketball scholarships for men in division I, but there are 15 for women.
Which is why so many colleges and universities have either disbanded their men's wrestling team or have gutted the number of scholarships it gets.
Personally, I think the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction. The odds of a boy getting an athletic scholarship to a Div I school is almost statistically impossible. However, frankly, the odds of a girl who joins a rowing team of getting a full-ride are astounding.
What? Rowing? Yes, rowing. This is an example of a distorted beast Title IX has created. There are currently about 1,700 male rowers in colleges across the country. So, there must be, what, maybe 1,700 women? Maybe 2,000 if we account for the fact that colleges are 60% female?
Nope... there are almost 7,000 female rowers in colleges across the country.
Nope, not a misprint. 1,700 male collegiate rowers. 7,000 females.
The NCAA allows 20 rowing scholarships. In most schools they almost all go to women.
How do they find 7,000 rowers given that nearly no High Schools have girls rowing teams?
A substantial number of women's collegiate rowers never touched an oar before they got a full-ride for it.
Lest you think I'm making this up, do your own google search and you'll find dozens of articles just like this one:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/sports/othersports/28xrowing.html
As this article points out, the reason is obvious: in order to have a football team, they need to give scholarships to as many women as they can.
In the best of all worlds, talented women would get scholarships. Also, men's sports wouldn't be gutted.
Unfortunately, Title IX is turning out to be a little too good at its intended purpose of increasing girls sports participation relative to participation by boys. Trouble is, you can work that equation from both sides. You can increase girls participation (a good thing, IMHO), or you can decrease boy's participation (a bad thing, IMHO). Unfortunately, working both sides yields the fastest results.
I'm not sure what sort of tweak would bring things back in line. However, I fear things won't get better, anytime soon.
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