WrestlingGear.Com - Title IX Update, Olympic TV Schedule, Last Chance on 2004
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August 9, 2004
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One thing we are looking for help in finding a website or websites around Texas
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We will link some previous articles below and some of our top wrestling books,
be sure to check them out.
Catch an update to Title IX below as well. After wrestling is elminated at the
Collegiate Level, it may sprinkle down to the high school level. If you are not
that current about Title IX, read the articles and visit the site of the author.
Take care and "Get Ready for the Mat" with WrestlingGear.Com
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-Jeff Pape
CAN YOU NAME ALL THE OLYMPIC WRESTLERS?
Well in case you are looking to get to know the wrestlers a little better, check
out our page below that lists websites of Olymplic wrestlers.
If you know any of the unlisted wrestlers, ask them to send us an email that it
is okay to add them to our list.
If you are able to support these wrestlers financially, please make a donation
to help them offset the costs of training this past year (or several years).
These wrestlers are not well-funded and often make financial sacrifices to
represent our country in our sport.
Click here to Visit a List of Olympic Wrestler's Sites
NBC networks to televise wrestling all eight days of the competition from the Athens Olympics
Aug. 22-29
7/21/2004
Gary Abbott/USA Wrestling
The NBC networks have posted a schedule of daily highlights of the television
coverage of the Athens Summer Olympic Games.
Based upon the posting on NBCOlympics.com, there is scheduled television
coverage of wrestling on all eight days of the Olympic wrestling competition
from August 22-29. The wrestling action is planned for three specific networks:
NBC, MSNBC and CNBC.
Women’s wrestling is held August 22-23. Men’s Greco-Roman wrestling is held
August 24-26. Men’s freestyle wrestling is held August 27-29.
Included in the coverage are five different live segments of the wrestling
action, three on MSNBC and two on CNBC.
NBC has wrestling scheduled on its national broadcast five different days,
including both men’s Greco-Roman and men’s freestyle action. NBC has also
specifically targeted the Greco-Roman super heavyweight division, featuring
defending Olympic champion Rulon Gardner, for primetime network coverage.
Fans can check these program listings by visiting NBCOlympics.com
The broadcasters assigned to wrestling includes Russ Hellickson (play-by-play),
Jeff Blatnick (analyst) and Len Berman (reporter).
This schedule includes just “highlights” of the coverage. These listings are
subject to change. There could be additional wrestling coverage based upon the
decisions of the broadcasting executives as the Games progress.
There will be much more detailed schedule information as the Olympics approach,
as well as during the actual Olympic Games. NBC has announced that it will have
an Interactive Television Viewer’s Guide, which will be available by early
August on NBCOlympics.com. It will provide 24-hour coverage on the NBC Universal
networks. Viewers will be able to sort the listings by sport, network, day and
time, as well as search by key words such as athlete, team or country. This will
allow wrestling fans to know more details about when the wrestling coverage will
actually be aired.
The networks of NBC: NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Bravo, Telemundo and NBC HDTV will
broadcast an unprecedented 1,210 hours – more than the past five Summer Olympics
combined.
NBC BROADCAST SCHEDULE HIGHLIGHTS
As of July 20. Subject to change. Check for
updates on NBCOlympics.com
Sunday August 22
CNBC (2 a.m. – 4 p.m. ET) – Wrestling - Women’s Competition
(LIVE)
Monday, August 23
MSNBC (2:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m. ET) – Wrestling – Women’s
Semifinals
MSNBC (11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. ET) – Wrestling – Women’s Gold Medal
Finals
Tuesday, August 24
NBC (8:00 p.m. – Midnight ET/PT) - Wrestling – Super
Heavyweight Greco-Roman Competition
NBC (12:30 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) –
Wrestling – Greco-Roman Competition
MSNBC (2:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m. ET) – Wrestling
– Greco-Roman Competition (LIVE)
Wednesday, August 25
NBC (8:00 p.m. – Midnight ET/PT) – Wrestling – Super
Heavyweight Greco-Roman Gold Medal Final
NBC (12:35 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) –
Wrestling – Greco-Roman Gold Medal Finals
MSNBC (2:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m. ET) –
Wrestling – Greco-Roman Semifinals (LIVE)
Thursday, August 26
NBC (12:35 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Greco-Roman
Gold Medal Finals
MSNBC (2:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m ET) – Wrestling – Greco-Roman
Semifinals (LIVE)
Friday, August 27
NBC (12:35 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle
Competition
Saturday, August 28
NBC (12:00 Noon – 6:00 p.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle
Gold Medal Finals
NBC (8:00 p.m. – 12:00 Midnight ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle
Gold Medal Finals
NBC (12:30 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle
Gold Medal Finals
MSNBC (3:00 a.m. – 5:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle
Competition
Sunday, August 29
CNBC (3:00 a.m. – 12:00 Noon ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle
Gold Medal Finals (LIVE)
Source: themat.com - used with permission
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Wrestling Articles at WrestlingGear.Com
The Articles page is a great place to get tips on motivation, competition,
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our Articles page. Steve Knight (author, "Winning State") has articles on mental
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Interview With The College Sports Council
According to the latest figures from the NCAA, they have just under 8,000 men’s
college athletic teams in the country. Since we are constantly being told that
women are victims of discrimination in sports and require the help of the
federal government, surely the number of women’s teams must be only a fraction
of that figure. Think again – the number of women’s teams is 8,968.
About 5 percent of those men's teams are getting eliminated each year and the
situation is dire, which is why the NCAA and USOC are in meetings right now to
try to stop the bleeding.But don’t count on Myles Brand for leadership – he
insists that Title IX not even be mentioned at that conference..
The only group fighting for Title IX reform – that is to say, sticking up for
the kids – is the College Sports Council. Here’s an interview I had yesterday
with the Executive Director of that group, Eric Pearson:
Eric Pearson is the Executive Director of the College Sports Council (CSC), a
national coalition of coaches, parents, athletes, and former athletes.
OFFWING OPINION-Q. What is Title IX?
Eric Pearson - A. Title IX is a federal law enacted in 1972 largely in response
to discrimination against women in admissions to law and medical schools. It
states that no person shall be subjected to discrimination on the basis of
gender in any educational program receiving federal assistance. It later evolved
to focus more on sports.
Q. Do you support Title IX?
A. The CSC fully supports Title IX. We take issue only with the way it is
regulated.
Q. Are you referring to the proportionality prong of the three part test?
A. Yes, this is the standard method of compliance that schools are now all held
to. It mandates that the male -female ratio of all athletes match the school’s
undergraduate student body gender ratio. In other words, if 55% of your students
are female then 55% of your athletes must be female. Otherwise you are
considered out of compliance. The CSC maintains that this is illegal.
Q. But I thought there are two other ways to comply?
A. In theory yes. If you’ve added a women’s team in the previous five years you
get a pass during that time. The other purported way is that if you demonstrate
that you’ve met “interest” of any and all women, but that has never held up in
court and there is no established method to “measure” this interest. So that
method is a sham, and proportionality remains the law of the land as far as
athletic directors are concerned.
Q. So what is the problem with that?
A. You can’t say that you support Title IX and also that you support
proportionality. Title IX states unequivocally that you can’t discriminate on
the basis of gender, but on the other hand, proportionality requires you to
discriminate on the basis of gender. .
If a school can’t afford to add a women’s team, proportionality requires that
you discriminate against boys. This discrimination manifests itself in two ways:
one is that men’s programs are eliminated, and the other is an artificial limit
placed on the size of their team rosters (this roster cap is never applied to
women’s teams.) The NCAA calls this morally reprehensible practice “roster
management.”
Q. But do they only count athletes on scholarship?
A. Everyone counts. Scholarships have nothing to do with it. They count walk-on
athletes, JV athletes, part time players - everyone. That is what we mean when
we say it has created a gender quota system- a strict numerical limit.
Q. OK, so moving on from the regulatory discussion, we hear a lot about men’s
programs being dropped, isn’t it mostly just wrestling teams though?
A. That’s exactly what the gender quota supporters want you to believe, but in
actuality other men’s sports like track and swimming have been devastated. If
you just add up the total men’s track and cross country teams dropped just in
the four years since the 2000 Olympic games its over 130 programs of a grand
total of 435 men’s teams eliminated – that is a crisis that the track community
needs to quickly come to terms with before it’s too late.
Q. You didn’t mention the numbers for wrestling or swimming.
A. Wrestling lost 21 teams in the time period since 2000 and swimming lost 23
teams. The wrestling community is very well organized when it comes to saving
threatened teams. An athletic director who tries to drop a wrestling team is
really putting his hand in a hornet’s nest. They really have no idea what
they’re getting themselves into. The swimmers are also catching on and beginning
fighting back too.
Q. So how does that number of 435 dropped men’s teams stack up to the total
teams remaining.
A. According to the NCAA, in 2003 their member schools sponsored 7,968 teams for
men and 8,968 for women. So the total men’s teams dropped during the last
Olympic cycle was 5% of the total. Another thing to consider is that there are
over 3.9 million boys playing sports in high schools compared to 2.8 million
girls.
So that means that there are fewer opportunities for each boy in high school who
wants to play a sport in college. Combine the loss of teams with roster
management and you get a double whammy that really hammers boys. It’s a
disaster.
Q. But isn’t the harm done to boys offset by the gains for girls.
A. Remember that we only take issue with proportionality, not with the law Title
IX. I always have to emphasize that we have women coaches in our coalition who
say that proportionality doesn’t work. And I always have to emphasize that we
want more opportunities for girls to play sports, we have fathers and mothers in
our coalition who have daughters too. With that in mind you need to evaluate
whether or not proportionality has helped female athletes, and the evidence of
that is scant at best.
For example, last year the WNBA was promoting a ‘Save Title IX’ (anti-reform)
petition claiming that without it their players would not have had the
opportunity to play basketball in college. Well, proportionality was instituted
in 1979 and also not enforced during a few years in the 80s. So we evaluated
whether the teams where WNBA players played in college were added when
proportionality was in force and every one of their teams existed outside the
enforcement of proportionality. So it didn’t help them.
Q. You don’t address the gains in participation for girls playing on high school
teams. Didn’t it go from something like 200,000 in 1972 to as you said 2.8
million girls playing today? Wouldn’t that say something?
A. Again, greater participation in sports for kids is a great thing, but if you
look at 1979 as a starting point for enforcing proportionality there were over 2
million girls partipating in 1980. So the increase is not as marked as it seems
at first look. Also, the emphasis on Title IX enforcement in High Schools is
more on facilities than proportionality, which we think makes more sense and is
much more in the spirit of the law.
Q. You said that proportionality isn’t emphasized in High Schools- is that
correct?
A. Yes, but we are very concerned about that changing; in some states like
California they have made the three-part test law. If this spreads nationwide it
is going to have absolutely catastrophic consequences- you’ll have to eliminate
over 1 million boys from high school teams to get them fully in compliance with
proportionality. In this day of latch key kids and single parent households we
need to be adding more after school activities for our children not taking them
away.
That is precisely why we are fighting to eliminate proportionality as the method
of compliance with Title IX, and that is what we mean when we say that Title IX
is a good law-poorly regulated.
Q. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A. Yes, if you care about preserving opportunities for student athletes to play
sports, join the College Sports Council. Sign up at our website
www.collegesportscouncil.org, membership is free.
Click Here To Visit Our Articles Page
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Lee Kocher's Perspective
Leo Kocher's Perspective, Volume I
NCAA/USOC Task Force to Discuss Preserving Olympic Sport Teams in College
The NCAA has agreed to join with the USOC in a task force which will address the
increasing number of dropped sports teams in the NCAA. Members of the task force
include USA Wrestling’s Executive Director Rich Bender. Unfortunately NCAA
Executive Director, Myles Brand, would only allow the NCAA’s participation on
the task force under the condition that discussion of Title IX in the meetings
be prohibited.
The good news here is wrestling has a knowledgeable and strong advocate like
Rich on the task force. The bad news is that when the main cause for the
elimination of programs Title IX gender quotas cannot be addressed it can end up
being an exercise like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Something
positive can still come out of this but don’t hold your breath.
Sad Anniversary
It was one year ago that the Bush Administration - caving into the threats of
the National Women’s Law Center and other quota advocacy groups - refused to
consider any of the Title IX reform recommendations overwhelmingly passed by its
own Commission on Opportunity in Athletics. This amazing display of political
timidity has resulted in 120 more NCAA men’s programs dropped in the last year
alone.
NCAA Sponsored Group Proposes Eliminating 2 High School Weight Classes
The National Federation of State High School Associations is bringing to a vote
a recommendation to move the number of weight classes from the current 14 down
to 12.
The NFSHSA is funded by the NCAA which provided office space to the NFSHSA when
the NCAA headquarters were in the Kansas City area and moved with the NCAA to
Indianapolis a few years ago.
I hope the state wrestling communities fight this. I don’t believe getting rid
of weight classes is a solution to some schools having trouble filling all of
them. Given the NCAA’s endorsement of the gender quotas that lead to the
elimination male athletes in its colleges, it doesn’t give you a lot of
confidence that the reduction in weight classes is being suggested with the high
school wrestlers’ welfare in mind. Make no mistake there is increasing gender
quota pressure in high school athletics.
If a school cannot fill all the weight classes why not drop the administrators
and coach who will not create a program about which the kids can be enthused?
Now there is a solution.
Legal Actions
I have been asked to provide a summation of the litigation efforts directed at
helping our campaign to reform Title IX. The following was composed by Eric
Pearson - Executive Director of the College Sports Council (CSC members include
the NWCA) with help from Larry Joseph - our selfless superstar attorney who
specializes in regulatory law in DC.
The College Sports Council and the NWCA currently have three lawsuits in Federal
Courts.
They are:
NWCA v. US Department of Education, filed January 2002.
CSC v. US Department of Education, filed December 2003.
CSC v. US General Accounting Office (GAO), filed September 2003.
Both the NWCA v. Dept. of Ed. and CSC v. Dept. of Ed. are Title IX cases that
directly challenge the legality of three part test as the established method of
regulating the law. CSC v. GAO challenges the validity of reports published by
the GAO regarding numbers of athletic teams sponsored by colleges in the United
States.
The courts have yet to rule on the merits of any of these cases. The only
actions taken so far by the court involve the case, NWCA v. Dept. of Ed. and
judges have addressed only the question of whether the NWCA and CSC have the
right to sue the Department of Education. Two courts have issued procedural
rulings unfavorable to the NWCA but the coaches have filed for an appeal to the
'en banc' panel of judges. If the 'en banc' request is denied then the coaches
will petition the US Supreme Court. At issue is whether the coaches simply have
the right to proceed with their case against the Dept. of Ed. under the
complaint they filed in January 2002.
(THE CSC V. DEPT. OF ED. SUIT CURES THE PROCEDURAL DEFECTS FOUND BY THE PRIOR
TWO COURTS, THEREBY ENSURING THAT THE CSC WILL HAVE ITS DAY IN COURT AGAINST THE
THREE-PART TEST IN THE COMING YEAR.)
The CSC views its legal initiatives as a key component in its campaign for Title
IX regulatory reform. A lawsuit can serve as a vehicle for publicity as well as
an effective tool to apply political leverage. Winning in court is just one
possible benefit from filing a lawsuit.
One example of a lawsuit that accomplished its goal without actually achieving
victory in court is the case, Women's Equity Action League (WEAL) v. CALIFANO
(Secretary of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.) This case
was filed in 1974 against the agency that was responsible for regulating Title
IX compliance, and eventually dismissed by the court in 1990. During this 16
year time period this coalition of women's groups managed to pressure the
federal regulatory agency to comply with its demands in handling Title IX
complaints, A PROCESS THAT RESULTED IN THE DEPARTMENT ISSUING THE THREE-PART
TEST IN 1979. Even though the WEAL case was eventually dismissed, it proved to
be an extremely effective tool for the plaintiffs to achieve their objectives.
Since it was filed, the NWCA v. US Dept. of Ed. lawsuit has been very successful
in drawing the attention of both the media and the Bush administration to the
problems with the three part test. The CSC sees its lawsuits as invaluable tools
to use in its overall strategy to change public perception of Title IX. The CSC
supports Title IX as it was originally written by Congress in 1972. The CSC aims
to achieve regulatory reform of Title IX, so that the law can protect women
without harming men.
Click Here To Visit Our Articles Page
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