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Sunday, October 06, 2002

By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Only once before had Tim Wittman felt as terrible as he did on a May day in 2001, when he gathered the members of the Bucknell wrestling team together and told them that the university was eliminating their sport from the athletic program.

"I compare it to my last match in wrestling," said Wittman, a former Penn State All-American who coached the Bucknell team from 2000-02. "It was this recurring dream that was like, 'Wrestling is really over.' You worked so hard and long to try to achieve what you wanted to do, and then it slipped out from underneath you and it's over."

Still, Wittman's last career wrestling match happened because he, personally, had decided it was time to move on. The Bucknell wrestlers' athletic careers -- and his coaching career -- ended because of a numbers game that he still can't quite understand.

When the Title IX Education Amendment was passed in 1972, it said only that institutions that receive federal funds cannot discriminate between men and women. How, exactly, to determine if men's and women's programs are being treated equally was not spelled out, and it wasn't until seven years later that the Office of Civil Rights spelled out criteria.

Since then, the courts have focused on one aspect of what became known as the three-pronged test -- proportionality. The number of female athletes at a university must be proportionate to the number of female undergraduate students.

At Bucknell in 2001, 41.9 percent of its athletes were women. Of its undergraduates, however, 48.7 percent were female. It didn't matter that the university sponsored 28 varsity sports, 14 each for men and women. It didn't matter that the university added women's golf and women's water polo in 1998. It mattered only that the percentages didn't match, and as a result, the school decided it needed to have fewer male athletes.

So it dropped wrestling and men's crew, although men's crew has remained as a "club varsity" program, which doesn't count against the percentages. Because there isn't any club competition for collegiate wrestlers, the wrestling team was eliminated.

"That's absurd," Wittman said. "It's so freaking absurd. They alienated so many people, and I mean alumni that were not wrestlers. So many people wrote in."

Bucknell is one of a growing number of schools that have decided to comply with Title IX by eliminating men's teams. Gary Abbott of USA Wrestling, the sport's national governing body, said more than 400 teams -- at the NCAA, junior college and NAIA levels -- have been dropped since Title IX was passed.

The phenomenon is so widespread that it has a name. The elimination of men's teams is universally known as the "unintended consequence" of Title IX.

After years of watching women's sports advocates win in the courts, the wrestling community decided to try its luck. In January, the National Wrestling Coaches Association filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, seeking not to overturn Title IX but to overturn the proportionality requirement.

Bucknell is one of the plaintiffs. And the NWCA is receiving support from other targeted sports, such as swimming and track.

Women's sports advocates are unyielding. They say Title IX must be enforced.

But gradually, as compliance has taken its toll on men's non-revenue sports, more people are speaking out on the other side.

"Gender quotas do not belong in athletics," said Mike Moyer, executive director of the NWCA. "Actually, gender quotas do not belong anywhere in society. To our knowledge, gender quotas do not apply to our society anywhere to the degree they are being applied in athletics."

Such statements are having an effect, but solutions are still elusive.

For instance, Bucknell was unable to accept an offer from an alumnus who offered $500,000 to support women's sports so the wrestling team could continue to compete.

"The sad fact is that an endowment of $500,000 would not generate the amount of funds necessary to start up and maintain a new women's program that could provide the level of proportionality needed in our athletics program," the school's statement said.

Wittman, with support from the NWCA and other organizations, tried to save his team. He did everything from circulating petitions to devising his own proposal for bringing Bucknell into Title IX compliance. Everything went for naught.

Now living in New Jersey and employed by a stone, tile and masonry company, Wittman holds out hope that eventually things will turn around.

He hears more people asking why the number of men and women in the band, the newspaper staff or the history department aren't being counted and tracked as they are in athletics. Like many in his position, he believes the Bush administration is more sympathetic to the male athletes' plight than the Clinton administration was, and he thinks the current hearings on Title IX held by the Commission on Opportunities in Athletics are shedding more light on the subject.

That's why on the day Wittman had to tell his 19 wrestlers that they would no longer be a varsity team, he went beyond telling them the specifics of the situation.

"I said that this is one of the reasons you guys need to be leaders when you leave Bucknell," he said. "When you get into the work world, you need to take on these roles, be biggies on committees, be on the school board, get into the decision-making process and make sure that politics don't take over."