Author: Joshua Thompson
The College Sports Council released a study today that links Title IX, a statute that has been applied to require "proportionality" in men and women collegiate athetics, to an overall decrease in the availability of tennis for men and women.
Women tennis players have more teams (311) to compete for than male tennis players (258) in NCAA Division I, but the percentage of NCAA schools sponsoring women's teams has not increased since the 1996 policy clarification (96.4% in 1996 vs. 93.4% in 2009) and the percentage of NCAA Division I schools sponsoring men's tennis teams has declined by more than 14 percent (91.8% in 1996 vs. 77.5% in 2009).
You can check out the entire study here. Unsurprisingly, the decrease in the number of men's tennis teams has been more substantial, but it is also noteworthy that the number of women's tennis teams has also decreased. For more on the discriminatory problems with TItle IX check out my previous posts here and here.
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