Sports Corner: Title IX In Need of Strengthening

After eight years of skeptical treatment of Title IX by the Bush Administration, President Obama just may be joining the team of advocates for women's equal access to sports.

During the campaign, Obama released a statement promising to strengthen Title IX enforcement. He promised to support the High School Sports Information Collection Act, which would require high schools to collect and share information demonstrating that their athletic programs serve both sexes equally, as colleges are currently required to do.  Though Title IX claims to cover all federally funded education systems, much less attention has been paid to high school compliance.  While colleges are required to report information such as male/female sports involvement ratios and funding specifics, the Department of Education doesn't yet have any regulations requiring high schools to report the same statistics.

A similar bill was introduced in 2007 by Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Patty Murray (D-WA), but was ultimately neglected. It is expected to be reintroduced this year, which is welcome news to those hoping to remedy the gender disparity in high school sports programs.

According to the National Women's Law Center, high school girls still receive 1.3 million fewer participation opportunities than do high school boys.  Meanwhile, the Women's Sports Foundation reports that high school girls who do get the opportunity to play sports not only are more likely to get better grades in school and more likely to graduate high school than girls who do not, but also report higher levels of confidence and self-esteem and lower levels of depression.

It seems counterintuitive that reporting requirements would be instituted at the college level, but ignored at the high school level.  We need to be encouraging girls to get involved in athletics at an early age and make sure that we provide them with the opportunities to do so because any effort we make to enforce these requirements at the college level, where the competition level is higher, seems like an afterthought.  If the greatest numbers of girls are to benefit from Title IX, its enforcement needs to begin at the high school level, when more girls are likely to participate.  These girls then have the opportunity to develop their talents, and we may even see higher levels of collegiate female athletic participation as a result.  Even those girls who don't go on to compete at the college level will have gained invaluable lessons in leadership, teambuilding, fitness and confidence that many girls today are missing out on.

There are 1.3 million reasons to level the so-called playing field so that high school girls nationwide can reap the lifetime benefits of involvement in sports. Here's to hoping that Obama- a basketball-playing father of two young girls himself- will keep to his word.