MYTH: Title IX has resulted in the loss of athletic opportunities for men's sports.
FACT: Overall, men's athletic opportunities since Title IX's passage have increased. Title IX has been wrongly blamed by its critics for cuts to some men's sports teams at some educational institutions.
Schools choose to support, eliminate or reduce particular sports opportunities on both men's and women's specific teams for a variety of reasons, including varying interests in specific sports and choices about how to allocate budget resources among the sports teams the school decides to sponsor or emphasize. The number, competitive level and quality of sports programs are individual institutional decisions, just as the number and quality of academic programs are institutional prerogatives. The government cannot dictate that particular varsity sports be added, retained or discontinued for men or women.
Opponents of Title IX have tried to mislead the public into believing that the loss of men's wrestling and a few other sports at some schools is a sign of massive loss of men's participation opportunities overall when exactly the opposite is true – men's sports participation continues to grow. Athletic programs add and drop teams all the time. Men are not losing.
This misinformation campaign takes the focus away from the facts that (1) women continue to be significantly underrepresented among high school and college athletes, (2) the gap between men's and women's sports participation and support is not closing and (3) it is the wealthiest athletic programs in NCAA Division I-A that are dropping men's minor sports, typically because they are shifting these monies to compete in the football and men's basketball arms race.
