A Daily Orange exclusive

Daryl Gross, Mr. Impatient, won’t like this process. Not much on his never-ending to-do list will take as long as his latest major project, a secret for months.

Gross, also Mr. Enthusiasm, will oversee the addition of a new Division I women’s sport during the 2010-11 school year to remain in compliance with federal gender-equity law.

The specific sport will officially be named in January 2008 and needs approval from chancellor Nancy Cantor and the university’s Board of Trustees.

Gross, Syracuse’s flamboyant and progressive athletic director since December 2004, said ice hockey and golf top his list of choices because facilities exist already-Tennity Ice Pavilion and Drumlins Country Club, respectively.

‘There are some great hockey players in this area and there are some great golfers in this area,’ Gross said, wildly gesticulating even more than usual at the prospect of building his first sport from scratch. ‘Wouldn’t it make sense to have a women’s hockey team here? We’ve got a lot of talent in this area-they’re very good-we can be champions at it.

‘So you see I’m trying to compete in sports we’re good at and have the resources in.’

That Syracuse would add a sport first appeared in print on page 84 of a 118-page athletic department self-study released June 28, 2006. The report remains available in the football archives on the department Web site. The NCAA requires each of its member institutions to release a comprehensive self-study every 10 years.

Jamie Mullin, who served as assistant athletic director for compliance until becoming assistant AD for team services on Aug. 11, said an ad-hoc sub-committee on gender equity for the self-study deemed a new women’s sport necessary to remain in compliance with Title IX.

Title IX of the Education Act of 1972-an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964-illegalized discrimination on the basis of sex. The law remains most often associated with athletics, ensuring institutions provide the same number of men’s and women’s athletic scholarships. But Title IX has only been taken seriously by schools in the last 10 years.

While the rate of adding women’s sports and dropping men’s sports to comply with Title IX peaked in the mid to late ’90s-including at Syracuse-the issue remains in the national consciousness.

Rutgers cut six programs in July for what the school called financial reasons, but five were men’s-fencing, crew, tennis, swimming and diving. South Carolina announced on Aug. 29 the addition of women’s lacrosse for the 2009 season to remain in compliance.

Schools may satisfy Title IX-punishable only by law, not the NCAA-through one of three prongs:

1. Have the same percentage of women on Division I teams as in the undergraduate student body.

2. Demonstrate a ‘history and continuing practice’ of expanding athletic opportunities for women.

3. Demonstrate they are ‘fully and effectively accommodating the interests and abilities’ of female students.

‘The sub-committee felt that right now we are in compliance with prong (No. 2),’ Mullin said. ‘But we get out to 2010 it will have been 10 years since we added a sport. The comfort level wasn’t as good when we got to 2010.’

Syracuse will not satisfy prong No. 1-the only one measured objectively-in the near future.

Currently, Syracuse places next to last in the Big East with a gap of 11.8 percent, according to the latest available data from the Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2004-05, women made of 56.7 percent of the undergraduate population at Syracuse but only 44.9 percent of Division I athletes.

With more and more women attending college-the New York Times reported in July that women now make up 58 percent of the undergraduate population-fewer and fewer universities will comply through prong No. 1. The female takeover means schools, including Syracuse, Gross conceded, must continue to add women’s sports over time to satisfy prong No. 2 or No. 3.

Judith Sweet, who recently retired as senior vice president for the NCAA but will continue consulting for the NCAA on Title IX, her area of expertise, called Syracuse smart for adding a women’s sport.

‘Court precedent has suggested when (the Office of Civil Rights) does a review it looks for schools to add a sport every three years,’ Sweet said. ‘While (prong No. 2) doesn’t say you have to add a sport specifically every so-and-so years, that’s what they are looking for.’

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In the 34 years since the establishment of Title IX, Sweet said the Department of Education and Office of Civil Rights, the two government entities responsible for enforcing Title IX, have never applied the official punishment: restricting federal dollars.

But Sweet said nearly every time an institution has been challenged in court since the landmark 1992 Supreme Court case Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, which ruled plaintiffs could sue for monetary damages in Title IX cases, the institution was forced to increase opportunities for women.

Female athletes won landmark cases at Brown, Auburn and Colorado State in the mid-’90s that forced universities to take Title IX seriously.

One sport makes it all so tough.

‘Nothing compares to football,’ former Syracuse athletic director Jake Crouthamel said.

While football generates the most revenue for all top athletic departments-at Syracuse, the program now with an 11-game losing streak supplied more than half of the department’s revenue in 2004-05, according to a special internal ad-hoc committee report on the athletic department released April 19-it also swallows 85 scholarships.

No female sport comes close.

After years of non-commitment to Title IX under republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush from 1980-1992, the Congress under democrat Bill Clinton passed the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act in 1994.

The law requires all institutions to report each year on participation numbers, scholarships and coaching salaries by gender in addition to revenues and expenses.

In 1993-94, women constituted 51 percent of all undergraduates but only made up 34 percent of Division I athletes, according to a Chronicle survey.

Now with the information public and the prospect of lawsuits after Franklin, schools nationwide started adding women’s sports and/or dropping men’s sports to narrow the gap without touching holy football or the other primary revenue stream, men’s basketball.

Crouthamel, Syracuse’s legendary AD from 1978 until his retirement in 2004-he helped create the Big East and built the Carrier Dome-anticipated the 1994 law.

The 2006 self-study said Syracuse conducted a review of its Title IX compliance in 1993 that determined the school must improve its roughly 70-30 male-female athlete ratio to 50-50, which was then within one percent of the undergraduate ratio of 51 percent women.

Syracuse dropped men’s gymnastics in 1998 and men’s wrestling in 2001. The school added women’s soccer, women’s lacrosse and softball in 1996, 1998 and 2000, respectively. That makeover gave the university its current ratio of 12 women’s sports to nine men’s sports.

‘It was a really agonizing decision for me personally,’ Crouthamel said from his retirement home in Centerville, Mass. ‘The coaches in wrestling (Ed Carlin) and gymnastics (Walt Dodge) were guys who had been there a long time and dedicated their lives to the university.’

Kathleen Parker, Syracuse’s field hockey coach since 1979, shared a common sympathy toward non-revenue sports for both genders in reaction to cuts in men’s gymnastics and wrestling across the country in those years.

‘I cried the day they announced we were dropping men’s wrestling and gymnastics,’ Parker said. ‘I still look at football and don’t understand it. I don’t like the idea of dropping men’s sports for women’s. Pro football teams have 45 [sic] people on their roster while colleges need 85?’

But that won’t change. In fact, the football-mad NCAA fought Title IX at first because the association claimed the law acted in reverse, single-handily destroying non-revenue men’s sports.

In a 2003 Washington Post story, it was noted that Walter F. Byers, a former executive director of the NCAA, wrote in his book ‘Unsportsmanlike Conduct,’ ‘(T)o decree that football and women’s field hockey immediately deserved the same per-capita expenditures was financial lunacy. We contended that income-producing sports should be exempted.’

But while Sweet doesn’t want to see men’s sports cut, she wants the ultimate focus on providing more opportunities for women. She hopes schools comply with prong No. 1 in the future, if not reach to increase the percentage of female athletes in Division I from 43 to 50. Lofty goals, for sure, but the trend of adding more women’s sports appears destined to continue.

‘No one complained when there was a higher percentage of male students,’ Sweet said. ‘They set the standard for proportionality. Seems as though there’s a double standard.’

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Ultimately, no major issues face Syracuse with regard to gender-equity considering the vagueness of prong No. 2 and No. 3.

Gross knows he can’t comply with prong No. 1 by closing the gap all the way as long as nearly 57 percent of the undergraduate population is women-and he doesn’t have to.

‘That’s what’s very tricky,’ Gross said. ‘We have better numbers here than (I did at (Southern California). But the student population is what’s driving it at all. It may look like we’re way off, but given the history of how sports have emerged over the years, we’re actually very progressive.’

He stressed he would never cut a men’s sport simply to comply, saying he would add a men’s sport if one ever needed to go. Therefore, Syracuse will always field at least 21 Division I teams.

Now that Gross must add a sport, he’s presented with a chance to form a winner.

Michael Wasylenko, chairman of the Athletic Policy Board (one of the three faculty oversight committees for athletics) said expenses would not derail ice hockey. Besides, Gross is the type to make a splash anyway.

‘It depends what kind of sponsorship you get,’ Wasylenko said. ‘It depends how enthusiastic the alumni are for hockey. We have a rink. As far as seating is concerned, it wouldn’t take much more to add 2,000 seats in there. That’s all it really takes. Even in the good hockey programs, that’s all you draw.

‘But golf may be a little simpler. We have the course. The tees are already there. So, tee it up!’

Well, give it some time.

The self-study said a head coach wouldn’t even be hired until August 2009, more than a year after the sport’s selection in the first place.

At least by then Gross will only be a year away from feeling comfortable with Syracuse’s gender-equity compliance.

‘We don’t want to close the gap just to close the gap,’ Gross said. ‘We want to offer real valuable opportunities to women.’

Published on September 11, 2006 at 12:00 pm