Title IX to cost BG 4 men's teams
3/21/2002BOWLING GREEN - Bowling Green State University will eliminate four of its men's intercollegiate athletic programs in a dramatic attempt to move closer to compliance with the mandates of Title IX.
BGSU athletic director Paul Krebs informed the coaches and athletes associated with the men's swimming, tennis, and indoor and outdoor track teams yesterday that those programs will be dropped.
The move will leave BGSU with seven men's athletic programs - football, basketball, hockey, baseball, soccer, golf and cross country.
In the past, Bowling Green had dropped its men's teams in wrestling and lacrosse as early casualties of Title IX.
The university currently supports 11 teams in women's intercollegiate athletics - softball, volleyball, basketball, cross country, indoor and outdoor track, tennis, golf, soccer, swimming and gymnastics - but the participant numbers have been significantly less than in men's sports due to the high numbers of individuals involved in football.
“This has been an extremely difficult and heart-wrenching decision for the university to make,” Krebs said. “Bowling Green State University has supported the largest athletic program in the MAC [now 22, still tied for the most with Ball State] with one of the smallest budgets.”
Title IX, passed by Congress in 1972, is a federal law that bars sex discrimination by schools that receive federal money.
In its latest interpretations, schools must offer scholarship opportunities to men and women roughly equal to the school's overall male and female populations.
At Bowling Green the student population is approximately 56 percent female.