Georgia State’s decision to add football created a ripple effect throughout its athletic department and into the wallets of the student body.
Adding football, with its allotment of 63 scholarships, meant that the school would need to add more opportunities for female athletes because of the federal law Title IX. Those opportunities, just like football, come with a cost.
Toward that end, Georgia State recently announced that it was adding sand volleyball, to start in 2013, and that another sport would be added in the next few years. To help pay for those sports, as well as any inflationary costs, athletic director Cheryl Levick will ask the student mandatory-fee committee later this month for another increase of as much as $12 that will go into effect for the 2012-13 academic year.
The board already has approved increases of $85 (2008-09), $24 (2010-11) and $12 (2011-12). With sand volleyball, Georgia State has nine men’s sports and 10 women’s sports.
The decision to increase student fees and add sports is being made by many other schools such as Old Dominion and Texas-San Antonio, which have started football programs within the past few years.
And Title IX, which originally had nothing to do with sports, is the reason why.
Title IX was signed into law in 1972 as an amendment to the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title IX originally was drafted to prohibit gender-based discrimination in any education program that received federal funding. The word “sports” wasn’t included in the final draft.
However, the amendment eventually was used by those who felt that colleges weren’t providing females the same opportunities to play sports as males.
Eventually, a three-prong test was used to measure compliance. Schools only had to satisfy one of these three conditions:
- Provide opportunities that are proportionate to the student enrollment.
- Demonstrate continual expansion of sports opportunities for the under-represented gender.
- Full and effective accommodation of the interests and abilities of the under-represented gender.
Schools generally try to fulfill the first condition, known as the proportionality rule. It doesn’t require scholarship-for-scholarship balance, only opportunity-for-opportunity balance. That distinction allows for some flexibility in costs, while satisfying the rule as well as the student body’s interests.
For example, sand volleyball seems like an odd choice for an urban campus such as Georgia State’s, but it comes with a relatively small price tag: four scholarships spread among as many as 15 players. The estimated start-up cost of $1.5 million covers building three courts and bleachers, among other things.
However, it’s an inexpensive addition when considering the cost of building a pool for a swim team, or buying the land to build a practice facility and field for lacrosse, for example. Those sports create a lot of opportunities, but come at a big cost, particularly for urban campuses where real estate not only is scarce, it’s pricey.
Plus, sand volleyball will provide another sport to give GSU students something to attend on campus, rather than having to make the 11-mile drive to Panthersville, where many of the sports are played.
Old Dominion, located on the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, chose a slightly more expensive route, but one that created numerous opportunities. It constructed a world-class crew facility at a cost of $2.75 million. The team has 20 scholarships that can be divided among as many as 75 team members.
The athletic department also decided to fully utilize the maximum number of scholarships in each of its women’s sports, in addition to adding locker rooms for its women’s field hockey and lacrosse teams in its new football complex. It’s considering the addition of another women’s sport, but hasn’t decided which one.
“We want to make sure we are in compliance with Title IX because Old Dominion has always been a leader for women and women’s athletics,” athletic director Camden Wood Selig said. “We understand our history and want to make sure we maintain our consistency with our past relative to opportunities for women.”
While GSU could add as much as $12 to the student fees, which would bring to $133 per semester the fees assessed for athletics, that’s less than what other schools have done.
Old Dominion, with an enrollment of more than 24,000, have increased student fees by $360 per year to cover some of the costs of the new sports and facilities.
Texas-San Antonio, which has an enrollment of more than 31,000, took advantage of some existing facilities by adding women’s soccer and golf before it started football. Those two sports include 20 scholarships and more than 30 opportunities for female athletes.
To pay for a portion of those three new sports, Texas-San Antonio has gradually increased student fees. The fee that was appropriated to athletics started at $10 per credit hour per semester, up to 12 hours, for a maximum of $120 per semester. However, that fee will soon double, reaching a maximum of $240 per semester in 2013-14.
That amount could provide a glimpse of what Georgia State may do, should it one day decide it wants to compete on the FBS (formerly Division I-A) level.
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