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Only a tiny minority of girls appear to want to play contact sports against boys. But there is no doubt that the girls want and indeed are insisting upon a fair chance to develop their athletic abilities. Their cause is being substantially helped, albeit unevenly so far, by a section of the Education Amendments Act passed by Congress in 1972: the passage known as Title IX. In essence, Title IX forbids sex discrimination any educational institution receiving federal funds. The prohibition applies on the athletic fields as well as in classrooms. To enforce Title IX, Congress gave the Department of Health, Education and Welfare an enormous weapon: the right to deny federal funds to any institution that does not measure up. Almost all of the nation's colleges and public schools get federal money of some kind—approximately $12.2 billion in all for the colleges, $4.9 billion for the public schools.
How much of those sums could be penalized remains under dispute, but HEW clearly had the clout to change what was happening on the fields of the nation very quickly indeed. Instead, the department has been acting with more caution than deliberate speed. What constitutes a discrimination-free athletic program turned out to be difficult to define. Title IX raised the hackles of male athletic directors and many of their Congressmen. The fear of the N.C.A.A., which has fought Title IX from the beginning, is that the Government would destroy the men's athletic programs, while trying to build up the women's. The argument: it would be financially impossible for any university to create a program for women as elaborate as the two big moneymaking ones, football and basketball. These programs can be immensely expensive. The University of Michigan, for example, spends $800,000 a year on its football team—and grosses $4 million, including $500,000 in gifts from well-wishers. The funds help subsidize the school's other athletic programs. Conversely, if football and basketball were cut down to approximate women's sports in size, the entire system would collapse. The N.C.A.A. warns that Title IX "may well signal the end of intercollegiate athletics as we know them."
Edging into this minefield, HEW took until 1975 to publish a set of regulations to govern application of Title IX. The provisions stopped far short of requiring a school to set up an equivalent women's team for every male one; but if a school had only one team in a noncontact sport, like golf or tennis, women had a right to try out for it. Schools did not have to let females take part in such contact sports as football, basketball, ice hockey and rugby. When it came down to the key question of money, the regulations were vague; they allowed more money to be spent for a male team than a female one, but demanded that "the patterns of expenditures should not result in a disparate effect on opportunity."