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A field of nightmares: a number of male sports have been kicked off campus.

Article Excerpt
MIKE SCOTT came to Providence College in Rhode Island for one reason: to play baseball. His dad had played college ball, spent some time in the minors, and was now a high school baseball coach. The younger Scott had been playing baseball since he was old enough to hold a bat. Now he had his eye on a chance at the big time: to play in the majors.

Providence, Scott thought, was the place to begin his journey. Since joining the program as an assistant coach in 1991, head coach Charlie Hickey had worked to build the eighty-year-old Friars program into a northeast powerhouse. In the 1990s, the team began to attract NCAA tournament bids and recorded just one losing season.

A standout high school hitter, Scott briefly considered the baseball program at the University of New Hampshire. But when UNH announced that it was cutting baseball in order to comply with Title IX, a federal statute that has caused gender quotas in sports (see page 13), he turned to Providence College. And although Coach Hickey couldn't offer him a scholarship, a spot on the team and a chance to play were enough. One crisp fall day in October 1998, just two weeks into the pre-season practice schedule, Coach Hickey was summoned from the practice field into Providence athletic director John Marinatto's office. A few minutes later, he returned to the practice diamond with shocking news: The 1998-99 baseball season would be the Friars' last.

The reason was Title IX. Because Providence--like virtually every college and university--receives some federal money in some form, the school was legally bound to comply with the provisions of the law.

But Scott and his teammates were confused: What women had faced discrimination at Providence? The Catholic university had a strong program of athletics for females. Of the twenty varsity programs carried by the college, half were for women. No female athlete had filed a complaint of discrimination at Providence, and no investigation had found a pattern of discrimination that somehow had escaped a complaint. What, Scott and his teammates wondered, was wrong at Providence College?

The answer could be found in a set of statistics that Marinatto had compiled that fall and submitted to the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. The Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) requires that all colleges and universities submit a mind-boggling array of detailed information on their sports programs, broken down by sex. Schools report the number of athletic participants by sex, the assignment of head coaches by sex, operating expenses by sex, recruitment expenses by sex, coaches' salaries by sex, and on and on. In addition, the EADA demands one statistic that has nothing to do with athletics: Schools must compile and submit the number of full-time undergraduates, by sex.

Feminist women's groups like the American Association...

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