![]() As readers know, Cincinnati cut the rowing team (and replaced it with lacrosse) in the fall of 2006, coincidentally (or not?) after the rowers filed a complaint against the University for failing to provide adequate equipment and facilities. It seems that the final shoe has fallen on the University of Cincinnati rowers' efforts to reinstate their team. I hope the people in Washington who want to save men's wrestling 1) really have the best interests of women in mind, and 2) have thought through all the potential consequences of this plan. ![]() Just because there are men's and women's "versions" of the sport does not mean they must both exist at the same institution. And I know of at least one college where there's a women's wrestling team but no men's team. There are schools all over the country where there is a women's soccer team but no men's women's swimming, no men's women's cross-country, no men's. Budgets get tight and if a viable women's team is already in place and your school is not meeting Title IX's requirement for equitable participation opportunities then men's wrestling could go. Adding a women's team is not guarantee that the men's team will remain. But it seems like some of these coaches are thinking about men's and women's wrestling as a package deal. And it's more cost-effective for a school to add a team if the facilities are already in place. Women's tennis? Soccer? How about increasing the number of swimmers on the current women's team?Īgain, I am not disparaging women's wrestling. It may help with a school's proportionality score but it may strain an already strapped budget because who doesn't have budget issues these days? And why women's wrestling? A school could add any women's sport and better its proportionality. But additionally I wonder if this plan that the Washington wrestling community has come up with is really going to work. Maybe this is an ends justify the means kind of situation.īut I cannot get over some major worries (some of which I wrote about the other day). It should not be the ugly stepsister of men's wrestling that is tolerated because it serves a purpose that benefits male wrestlers. Let me just reiterate that I think women's wrestling is a good thing. Adding women's oportunities takes men's wrestling out of the cutting danger zone, so the theory goes. Not save the sport by keeping it in the (somewhat dim) spotlight because of the decline in male wrestlers, but save the sport by saving men's teams when women's teams are established. One coach in the state told the writer of this article that girls were going to save the sport. And that water is trickling down over the heads of high school coaches. Well there must be something in the water in Washington. I suspected that the motives were not exactly pure that the idea came from a desire to save the men's team and that the benefits to women were secondary, which had the potential to actually hurt the women who got involved. ![]() Not too long ago I wrote about the push to add women's wrestling at a community college in Washington where the men's team was on the chopping block because of skewed proportionality numbers. ![]()
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