Title IX in Sports

By: Olivia Aragon

In recent years the NCAA has faced backlash over the treatment of female athletes. George Fox University (GFU) has similarly been involved in controversy over potential Title IX violations. 

The University of Oregon came under fire after a TikTok of the female Basketball Athletes’ weight room.  This Tik Tok gained so much attention that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand tweeted “This is outrageous – but it’s not just about the weight room. From their facilities to their food, to giving them less reliable COVID tests, the women’s NCAA basketball teams are being shortchanged.”

This last year the NCAA has faced scrutiny for how they run the softball World Series in comparison to the Baseball World Series. Where the Baseball World Series in 2021 took place over two weeks with no doubleheaders, the softball World Series happened over only one-week, forcing teams to play doubleheaders. 

Oklahoma softball coach Patty Gasso raised awareness of this problem, claiming that it was causing a health risk for her players to play so many games in such a short period of time. 

In April the NCAA made the decision to not allow Grand Canyon University Volleyball teams to have any spectators. This is despite the fact that just a week earlier in the same state the NCAA allowed the Crimson Tide Football team to have spectators, which brought a crowd of 47,000. 

This treatment has been said to violate Title IX, which is a civil rights law that prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. But unlike many organizations in the US, the NCAA doesn’t have to follow Title IX. This is due to NCAA v. Smith in 1999, in which the Supreme Court determined the NCAA doesn’t receive enough money from the federal government to be bound to Title IX. Even if NCAA teams and their administrations are violating Title IX, they cannot be held legally accountable, making it harder for female athletes to fight against sex discrimination in college sports. 

GFU has also recently dealt with Title IX violation accusations. In 2017 George Fox’s lacrosse coach, Natalie Harrington resigned and sued a year later, claiming the school had violated Title IX. Harrington stated that GFU had pushed to promote male coaches to full time while failing to promote female coaches. The Oregon Bureau of Labour and Industries dismissed Harrington's case due to a lack of evidence. 

GFU senior lacrosse player, Julia Quist, said that she has often felt unfairly treated as a female athlete. “My team has had other male teams laugh at us for some of [the] workout movements that we do,” Quist recalled. She hopes that in the future GFU will make more of an effort to highlight women’s sports teams’ accomplishments. 

Sophomore basketball player Jordan Ryan has not had the same experience. She does not believe she has been unfairly treated by GFU as a female athlete: “I have [been unfairly treated] in high school days, I'll have you know. The football team got this massive hierarchy over every other sport, and that's very annoying, but here I haven't had that sense at all.” She continued, “If anything, I think that the women's basketball team is favored. And I think, honestly, [...] you should reward winning, and they [GFU] seem to do that.”

What may come as a surprise to many is that cheerleading is not recognized as a sport by the NCAA and is therefore not seen as a sport at GFU, despite the time and dedication it takes many of the cheerleaders. Instead, GFU considers cheerleading a club. 

Freshman Elee Calhoun said that she had to pay $600 in order to participate in cheerleading because the club does not get the same amount of funding sports receive. This is despite the fact that the amount of work that cheerleaders do often involves more than six hours of practice and participation per week, both as a team and individually. Cheerleading has club status, and therefore less funding, but its participants put in similar time and effort as other GFU athletes.

Calhoun said she wishes cheer would get the recognition that other sports teams get when they do well in competition. 

The NCAA must continue to improve in regards to equality in women’s sports, but it remains unclear whether GFU must also change the way it treats and recognizes its female athletes.