EDITORIAL: The playing field is more level, but work remains

Jun. 25—A few months from now, thousands of high school girls across the state of Minnesota will lace up their sneakers and begin practices for the 2022-23 basketball season.

Some of them will have heard of Title IX, but it's unlikely that many of them will grasp the significance of an event that took place 50 years ago — and none of them will have directly witnessed the transformational impact that a young Lindsay Whalen had on the sports landscape in Minnesota.

Whalen was a great high school basketball player at Hutchinson, but it wasn't exactly big news when she fulfilled a childhood dream by enrolling at the U of M and playing for the Gophers.

The headlines, however, weren't long in coming.

Whalen became the face of a formerly downtrodden, suddenly prominent program. In her four years at the U, attendance at women's games increased nearly tenfold, and Whalen led the Gophers to what is still their only appearance in the Final Four. She went on to win four WNBA championships with the Minnesota Lynx, two Olympic gold medals and played pro basketball all over the world. She returned to the U of M as the Gophers women's head coach in 2018, and earlier this year she was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

Without Title IX, which was signed into law in 1972 by President Nixon, Whalen's life would likely have been far different.

Title IX, which was an update to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibited sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that received federal funding. Sports participation was not a primary consideration at the time Title IX became law, but in the 50 years since, we'd argue that Title IX's greatest achievement has been leveling the playing field for female athletes at the high school and college levels.

The field, unfortunately, needs further leveling.

This week, Post-Bulletin reporter Abby Sharpe marked the 50-year anniversary of Title IX with a three-part, in-depth examination of its successes and shortcomings. It's a fantastic piece of reporting that includes accounts of several southeast Minnesota women who took full advantage of Title IX as high school athletes in the '70s, and then as college athletes, too.

Such stories could likely be told about athletes all over Minnesota, which has embraced Title IX better than any other state in the nation. In 2019, USA Today piggy-backed on reporting by the Fargo-Moorhead Forum to declare that Minnesota led the nation in per-capita girls sports participation, with 49 percent of high school athletes being female.

That data prompted USA Today to call Minnesota "The ultimate poster child for female sporting equality and opportunity."

But Sharpe's reporting points out that as women's college sports expanded, the percentage of female coaches actually shrank. Before Title IX, women coached 90% of women's college sports teams. When universities were mandated by law to pour money into women's sports, men stepped into the top roles, with women sitting next to them as assistants.

That trend has reversed itself somewhat, and today Whalen's Gophers squad is among the 42.7% of women's Division 1 sports teams that have a female head coach. That sounds pretty good — until you consider that women coach just 8.6 percent of men's Division 1 teams. Furthermore, not a single Division 1 men's basketball team is coached by a woman.

Minnesota isn't immune to such troubling numbers. When two high school girls teams square off on the basketball court or the softball diamond, there's a 50-50 chance that one of the head coaches will be female. But if the game is boys basketball, baseball or boys hockey, you'd get very long odds indeed on either coach being a woman. And football coaching, of course, remains very much a man's job.

Other inequities exist. Given that Minnesota currently is suffering from a significant shortage of officials, referees and umpires, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to recognize that the quickest way to solve this problem would be to recruit more women for these important roles. Really, is it so far-fetched to think that at some point, a boys high school basketball game in Minnesota could feature two female head coaches as well as an officiating crew that includes two women?

Title IX is about equal opportunity across a broad swath of our society, and in the sports world, it's not just about players. It's about coaches, assistant coaches, officials, athletic directors and trainers. It's about opening — and widening — doors to career paths that formerly were open almost exclusively to men. White men, specifically.

While much progress has been made, new controversies related to Title IX constantly arise. In recent years, a hot-button issue in Minnesota (and Rochester) involved girls playing on boys teams — and vice versa. Now, the national debate about transgender athletes has brought new scrutiny to Title IX, and we suspect that Minnesota won't manage to avoid this controversy for very long.

And perhaps avoidance is the wrong goal. Clarity and consensus are far better options, and just as Minnesota led the nation in letting Title IX open doors for female athletes, perhaps we can lead the way in crafting policies that maintain fair competition on a playing field that includes a growing number of athletes who don't check one of the "traditional" gender boxes.

Whalen's alma mater could play a big role in that process, perhaps even at the national level. Since 1994, the University of Minnesota has been home to the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, which fulfills the dual missions of gathering data and advocating for women in areas such as pay equity for athletes, gender inequity in coaching and Title IX compliance. As Title IX evolves, the Tucker Center will need to evolve, too.

Ultimately, the goal should be fairness, equality of opportunity and a safe environment for all athletes. We owe it to tomorrow's athletes — whether they are future pro stars or junior varsity bench-warmers — to make sure the gates remain open to all.