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RUN Those words will be heard in the next couple of years at TCU, hopefully in conjunction with the baseball team at the new Charles and Marie Lupton Baseball Stadium, but also with the new softball team. The Board of Trustees approved adding the team on Friday. The addition will help close the gap between men’s and women’s athletics at TCU. It will also help pull TCU closer to compliance with Title IX. Title IX is a federal law that requires equal opportunities for men and women to participate in sports. The ratio of male to female athletes should be proportional to the ratio of male to female undergraduate students, according to the NCAA’s Web site. Achieving a balance with the ratio of female to male students is especially hard at TCU with the often-referred-to overabundance of women on campus and lack of men. Another challenge in being compliant with Title IX for schools that field a football team is balancing the number of sports and scholarships, since the football team has more than 100 players on scholarship. Add to that men’s teams in basketball, tennis, baseball, track and field, golf, soccer, swimming and diving, and it is hard to have as many women athletes on scholarship, especially with the increased challenge of an unfavorable ratio. The trustees should be applauded for making an effort to increase the number of women’s sports, but what has taken so long? There has been talk of adding a team for years. The team will not begin playing for at least two or three years. Even with this addition TCU will still not be compliant with Title IX. The foundation for the softball program is about to be laid, hopefully with many successful years of play ahead. For the next couple of years we will have to wait until the words “play ball” are yelled by an umpire and the tradition for softball at TCU begins. |
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TCU Daily Skiff © 2002 |
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