UConn women’s rowing coach Jen Sanford had just finished swimming with her 10-year-old son when the phone rang the afternoon of June 23. It was UConn athletic director David Benedict, telling her that the university was going to announce the next day that her team would be dropped.

Feeling blindsided, Sanford spoke during the school’s board of trustees meeting the following day. Members of the rowing team had not rallied, nor had the alumni, in an effort to raise money to try saving the program as had been done for track and field and golf. Sanford thought her team was safe from budget cuts because of Title IX.

Sanford, who has been the team’s only coach for 23 years, hopes to be able to save the program, gathering information and not ruling out filing a Title IX complaint, if “factual information supported that,” for the team that had close to 50 members this past season.

“It pains me to have any negative attention brought to the university,” she wrote in an email. “However, as the leader of the rowing program, people are counting on me to take action to have the decision reversed, so my focus now is on gathering more information to see what options we may have.”

Men’s tennis, men’s swimming and diving and men’s cross country were also eliminated and there will be an additional 15 percent across-the-board cut to athletics spending as the school cracks down on the $40 million subsidy it provides to the athletic department.

Women’s rowing, in addition to women’s lacrosse, was added in 1998 when UConn’s football program upgraded from Div. 1-AA to Div. 1-A, to fulfill Title IX requirements. Nearly 7,000 people have signed a petition to keep the rowing program alive on the Division I level.

The university stated that the recent cuts were based on operational costs, “existing and traditional strengths,” the quality of facilities, and Title IX compliance. School officials also believe the university is Title IX compliant.

“When making the decision to cut one or more sports, it is necessary to take into consideration whether participation opportunities for male and female students in numbers is substantially proportionate to their respective full-time undergraduate enrollments,” UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz said in a statement via email. “The university did so carefully and is confident we are complying with our responsibilities under Title IX, and that we are offering full and effective opportunities for both male and female athletes.”

A look at Title IX

Title IX, a federal law enacted in 1972, states that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Many schools, however – especially those with football – may not be in compliance. In October 2019, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, stated that (based on numbers from 2017) “of all the 1,085 institutions governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, 815 are probably out of compliance. For many of the institutions at the top of the list, the heavy skew of female enrollment in recent years has made achieving proportionality a near impossibility.”

There is a three-part test used to satisfy Title IX requirements, with a three-prong test as part of the first part. The first prong states that the number of male and female athletes must be of the same proportion as the number of male and female undergraduate students. If the first prong is not met, a school may satisfy the requirement via the second prong, dealing with a history of development and expansion of opportunities for the underrepresented sex, or the third prong, which deals with the institution’s accommodation of viable interests of the underrepresented sex. Since UConn is cutting women’s sports, it would have to satisfy the requirements of the first prong.

The second part is that the school must provide equal benefits and treatment, in matters such as marketing, locker rooms, recruiting, coaches salaries and other aspects of the sport. The third part is the school must treat the athletes equally in financial matters, such as scholarships.

Every year, each school is required to report its roster numbers, coaching staff numbers and salaries and revenue expenses for The Equity in Athletics Data Analysis, or EADA.

For the 2018-19 season, the UConn women’s rowing team was listed as having 61 participants, while the men’s tennis team had 10 and the men’s swimming and diving team had 29. The men’s cross country and indoor and outdoor track teams had a total roster number of 124. Cross country was not broken out as a separate number, but on the UConn website for the 2018-19 season, the men’s cross country roster number was 20. According to the 2018-19 numbers, 59 participation slots on the men’s side and 61 on the women’s side would be cut, although it’s assumed that many of the men’s cross country runners would participate in indoor and outdoor track so they would still have an athletic opportunity at the school. The track athletes, both male and female, can be counted multiple times for participation slots, since some runners would compete in two or three disciplines.

“You’re either in compliance or out of compliance,” said Donna Lopiano, the former Women’s Sports Foundation CEO who runs Sports Management Resources, a consulting firm that brings former athletic directors together with high school and college athletic departments to solve growth and development challenges.

“I don’t think they’re in compliance in 2018-19,” added Lopiano, who has testified before Congressional committees and in numerous court cases regarding Title IX. “I don’t know what their [participation] numbers are last year. In my experience, if I were a lawyer looking at this, I could think of three or four angles that could be easily brought up in terms of questioning whether or not they’re in compliance.”

The numbers

According to EADA numbers, UConn had a disparity of 11 less female participation slots for the 2018-19 season, 387 women to 398 men. The first prong for Title IX compliance states that male to female participation rates must mirror the male to female student population – UConn had a male undergraduate population of 8,998 (48.9 percent of the total school population) and 9,399 female undergraduate population (51.1 percent) but its athletic population was 49.3 percent female and 50.7 percent male.

Felice Duffy, a lawyer who focuses on Title IX, is a UConn graduate who filed a Title IX complaint against UConn to get the school to establish a women’s soccer team in 1979. She agreed with Lopiano, adding that, in her experience as a lawyer over two decades, any college that has a football program as one of its many men’s sports would be unlikely to be in compliance with Title IX.

“These participation numbers are not the end of the story,” Duffy said. “Many schools think they’re in compliance if they’re within two percent of the undergraduate population percentage based on some court cases that have used that as guidance.

“However, you need to look behind these numbers. Even if they’re exactly equal, they might not be in compliance because you have to look at so many other factors such coaches’ salaries, recruiting budgets, quality of athletic slots.”

Women’s rowing had a $1.5 million budget and brought in revenue of $264,000. All the teams which were cut will be allowed to compete during the 2020-21 school year and scholarship recipients will be allowed to keep their scholarships.

“There are solutions that are less onerous than cutting sports,” Lopiano said. “But what they’re doing is sacrificing other sports to the god of football or basketball and keeping football and basketball exactly at the standard of living they have now. That’s the crime.”

Sanford said Monday she will continue to research and look for ways to save the program.

“It has been stated that fundraising campaigns would not impact the decision at this time,” she wrote in an email, “so as the person who has led the program for 23 years, I’m brainstorming anything that could help the President and Board of Trustees reconsider their decision.”