Title IX Strangling Men’s Soccer
I had to pass along a passage from this post that appeared at SoccerLens. In it, an American soccer fan tries to explain to an international audience exactly why the “beautiful game,” is struggling so mightily in the USA:
Title IX has decimated the youth systems that at one point existed.
[…]Because American football without a doubt brings in the most revenue and requires larger squads, schools around the nation have had to cut football (soccer) to make room for the women’s synchronized ice skating teams. Nowadays you can only find baseball teams in the south, hockey teams in the north, wrestling in Iowa. The small numbers of football programs that survive have no funding, terrible pitches, and no legitimate coaching.
Here’s a number to chew on: according to the most recently reported data from the National Federation of High School Associations, the state of Texas, the second most populous in the USA with a massive Latino population counts 528 schools fielding Soccer teams, with over 27,000 participants. Despite that, the only Division I soccer program in the entire state is at Southern Methodist University, a private school.
Meanwhile, thanks to Title IX, we see plenty of ridiculous decisions being made inside athletic programs. Syracuse University sits in the midst of one of the most hockey-mad sections of the nation in Western New York state. Yet, for some reason, while they support a women’s varsity hockey team, there’s no equivalent varsity squad for men.
Even crazier, despite the fact that the state of Arizona doesn’t have even one water polo team at the high school level, Arizona State boasts a women’s varsity water polo team that fails to feature even one participant from the state of Arizona. I wonder what the taxpayers of the state of Arizona think about that?