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Jewish World Review March 6, 2001 / 11 Adar, 5761

Betsy Hart

Betsy Hart
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Consumer Reports


Plan now for your daughter's athletic scholarship


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- MY HUSBAND and I recently found out via sonogram that the baby we're expecting in June is likely to be another bundle of female joy. That makes child #4 - and girl #3.

Well, we can live with that. Their dad and older brother might feel a bit beleaguered at times by all the estrogen in the house, but there is a huge upside to having three daughters within five years. Like college tuition costs. Or better said, "What costs?"

Thanks to Title IX of the U.S. Code, which was expanded in 1974 to prohibit discrimination against women and girls in school sports programs, we can easily put our little girls on a fast track to some bogus college sports scholarships. Yahoo!

That's because social re-engineering feminists, using (and abusing) Title IX and backed by the courts, have decreed that women will compete in sports at the college level at the same rate as men do - whether they like it or not.

Only what was true in 1974 is true now: Not as many women as men want to compete in college level athletics. This in spite of the fact that today's university women have grown up being actively encouraged to participate in school sports at all levels, and having had any legal impediments to that involvement removed long before they even started kindergarten.

But, hey, the dearth of women athletes at the college level is great for families like mine since it means quotas, plain and simple. That's because colleges across the country have for years fought tooth and nail to attract women into their sports programs. But no matter what they do they can't get them as interested as the men.

So they've resorted to eliminating popular men's sports programs so the rate of men and women in athletics programs at any given college can be at parity relative to their numbers on campus - and thus current policy satisfied. That's why the Independent Women's Forum (IWF) in Washington, D.C., could find at least 350 men's college sports programs across the country which have been scrubbed altogether.

But even that's not enough to get the numbers "right," so now colleges are simply paying women big-time to become "athletes."

IWF found that Boston College both phased out its men's lacrosse, water polo and wrestling teams made up of non-scholarship athletes, for instance, then funded 40 new full scholarships for the women's crew team. That's because crew uses lots of athletes and more women rowers makes it easier to at least keep the most popular and lucrative of college athletics programs - men's football.

Boston College is hardly alone. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Michigan State University wrote to high-school coaches looking for females 5-foot-10 and taller who were "born to row but don't know it yet.'" San Diego State "gave three full scholarships in rowing this year (1999) to women who had never touched an oar." And at the University of Virginia potential women rowers were lured with slogans of "no experience necessary," and promises of "a winter training trip to Florida and access to sports psychologists."

OK, for all that I can get my girls to paddle around in a boat. But best of all crew seems to be just one example of scholarship women's "sports" programs suddenly proliferating on campuses for which little or no experience is necessary - like women's bowling. (Yes, bowling.)

Now, what if any of my daughters has genuine athletic activity and legitimately merits and desires a sports scholarship? Well, who's to ever know? She'll be lumped in with every other woman collegiate "athlete" whom people view, often correctly, as simply being a product of quotas. Oh well, lots of people in our society have learned to live with that stigma - I guess my girls can, too.

Anyway, they'll learn quickly enough since they'll be patronized by The Sisters more than anyone else. Virtually every successful female athlete from Olympic medallists to World Cup Soccer champions have been told by the feminists that their success is directly attributed to Title IX - even though the most prominent athletes like elite ice skaters, gymnasts, tennis and soccer players have routinely received their training from their earliest days outside of any school sports program (the only institutions covered by Title IX.)

Well, it's nice to have a plan now to save all that money on our daughters' college tuitions. I mean, we have a son, too. And it seems these days the guys are the ones most likely to pay full freight.



JWR contributor Betsy Hart, a frequent commentator on CNN and the Fox News Channel, can be reached by clicking here.

Up

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01/30/01: Moral bankruptcy of the civil rights establishment
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01/10/01: The extent to which our culture has been feminized
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12/20/00: Now that the head banging has stopped ....
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12/01/00: Sorriest legacy of election has nothing to do with chads, 'aborted pregnancies' or the electoral college
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10/24/00: Spare the rod ...
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08/30/00: Helping out at school is more than an obligation
08/24/00: Family time comes far down the summer schedule
08/16/00: A tale of two wives
08/09/00: The Brady Bill isn't achieving its aim
08/01/00: Attention feminists: How to really keep our daughters safe
07/25/00: Everything is protective: the parents, the gear, the age
07/18/00: Say it ain't so, Ann
07/11/00: Limiting a child's choices
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06/21/00: It's a bad time to be a boy in America
06/13/00: The state of our unions
06/02/00: Federalizing care of kids
05/25/00: "STOP WHINING, GET BACK INTO THE GAME, AND DO YOUR BEST!"
05/17/00: The natural food threat
05/09/00: To stop gun violence, keep families intact
05/03/00: Pass the fat, please
04/25/00: Something just for boys
04/18/00: When toleration goes too far
04/10/00: Women warriors
04/05/00: Confessions of a soccer mom
03/30/00: Getting an education about schools
03/22/00: If you're a parent, act like one!
03/14/00: Not child advocates, but self-advocates
03/06/00: McCain not what he seemed at first
02/29/00: An effective answer to social problems
02/22/00: The feminists' newest target: Toys
02/06/00: Harassing the harassers
01/31/00: It doesn't take a village to raise a child --- it takes a scheduler
01/25/00: Psuedo science and global warming
01/18/00: Socially responsible nonsense
01/10/00: Monica may be onto something
12/27/99: Sometimes it matters quite a lot what government thinks
12/17/99: Teens have no inherent 'right to privacy'
12/10/99: Buying a minivan and tossing the SUV
12/03/99: On the mommy track
11/05/99:The waste of recycling
11/01/99: Welcome to Harvard pre-school
10/22/99: No disaster for women that Dole is out
10/19/99: 'Humanitarian' hypocrites
10/15/99: On a first-name basis with a three-year-old

© 2001, Scripps Howard News Service