We Speak Tech
NCAA Sports
Be the best in your class and on the field. Or wherever you play.
Shmoop takes you inside NCAA sports. We report the stats you’ll need to score a scholarship to a Div-I school and regale you with stories from "a typical day in the life of an NCAA athlete." (Hint: It involves a lot of training, some eating, then some more training and eating.) We even give you delightful, data-driven warnings about how hard it is to go pro. Time to suit up and get this party started.
Sports
Everything you ever wanted to know about the NCAA, from Div-I to Div-III. We tell you how to nab a scholarship, what schools are best for each sport, and how to live your A Game...You know, YOLO and all that. (Note: Some sports have separate pages for the men's and women's competitions. Others are all wrapped up into one delicious burrito. Enjoy.)
Title IX
Ahoy, Shmoopers. We want to offer you a little information about Title IX, since this tiny bit o' legislation has big ramifications for NCAA sports. Undoubtedly, it will be an oversimplified explanation. But we hope it'll still teach you something.
Dateline: 1950. A Stone Age for gender equality. A lot of women didn’t go to college. In fact, girls were often encouraged to take scintillating high school courses like Typing and Home Ec (a.k.a., “how to pay the light bill with this thing called a check book”) over other electives. Female participation in sports was low at many levels of competition, despite the examples set by some truly stellar athletes, including golf's Babe Zaharias, who was named Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year that year.
Fast forward to the passing of Title IX in 1972...and the many "letters of clarification" issued about it in the late 1990s and early 2000s (source). Even as participation in college sports was approaching gender parity, women received only a fraction of the scholarship money that men did. Then came Title IX. It was revolutionary in that it essentially requires universities to give equal, or at least equivalent, scholarships to men and women.
Sorta.
Why "sorta"? In a word: football. Women don't play NCAA Division I football. And there's a lot of money tied up in the sport, in addition to a lot of fame (source). So, the applications of Title IX to NCAA football get muddy quickly. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about the ethics involved in the finances of college football.
It seems that schools are basically allowed to spend as much money as they want on football as long as women have "equal opportunity to participate" in the sport...whatever that really means (source). One issue with Title IX, then—or with schools' lavish spending on football, depending on your spin on the events—is that there is often little scholarship money left over for other men's sports (source). Meanwhile, many female athletes continue to get the short end of the stick because plenty of universities aren't in compliance with Title IX, no matter how the legislation is interpreted; in 2010, FBS Division-I schools spent about $20.5 million on men's programs and only $8 million on women's programs (source).
In sum: we don't necessarily know any better than you do what the exact ramifications of Title IX are now for college sports, or what they will be in the future. All we know for certain is this: Title IX has, on the whole, fostered some greater degree of equivalency in men's and women's college sports.
We'll leave the rest up to history.