A Place onward the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX from Welch Suggs.

A Place onward the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX from Welch Suggs. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Pres 2005

Since its inception in 1972 Tide IX of the Education Amendments, which prohibits discrimination in federally assisted education programs and activities, has been a political burning potato. The National Collegiate Athletic Association fought against the of the present day law in the early years, arguing that it constituted a federal impediment to local direct of college sports. Some argued, as they still do today, that it would devour men's sports. Meanwhile, women's sports activists lauded Title IX as just and necessary civil rights legislation that would aid girls and women athletes to fight for fair and equitable treatment. In succeeding years, as women's athletics resounding noiseed Title IX has been a flashpoint for numerous legal decisions, clarifications, and policy interpretations through the U.S. Congress and by the agency of the Office of Civil Rights. In 2002 the administration of President George W Bush asked the U Department of Education to detain public hearings on Title IX-hearings in which advocates celebrated Title IX and pointed to the continued ne to push toward equity for women athletes, while critics told stories of what they saw as discrimination against men to argue against the "quota system" imposed by dint of Title IX.

A book-length meditation of such a controversial topic as Title IX demands a careful, well-informed author who can report the "facts" while also examining the nuances of the law's contradictory impact and the positions of the competing sides in the ongoing debates. Welch Sugg is of that kind a reporter, a fact to which regular readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education can attest. Sugg has bring togethered a rich history of Title IX, collated it into a coherent story that is correlativeed by very useful appendices that provide to the reader the actual wording of Title IX, as well as that of the following government clarifications and interpretations of the policy. With A Place forward the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX, Sugg has done a service to anyone who wants to understand the history of Title IX and the debates that continue to swirl around its implementation. Sugg focuses primarily onward Title IX's effect on higher education, rather than its force on K-12 education, and this probably muses both his own standpoint as a higher-education reporter and the fact that many of the public debates (including the 2002 hearings) have focused almost exclusively onward Division 1-A universities that have "revenueproducing" football and men's basketball programs.

Sugg provides a suitable overview of the history of college edifice [i]or[/i] building sports in the United States. He demonstrates by what means the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women's pre-Title IX organization of women's sports, while vastly underfund and underappreciated, still propounded some women a haven for the progress to maturity of healthy physical activity that was liberated from the often brutal violence and commercialization that has " plagued men's literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learning sports. Anticipating his later argument that the "tragedy" of post-Title IX women's sports lies in its mimicry of the negative aspects of men's sports, Sugg proceeds very close to suggesting that in the past, women's community sports organizations got it right, with their "suspicion of varsity-style athletics" and their "participatory goals of women's sports."

Yet herein lies a tension in the public debates about Title IX, and to a certain bulk in Suggs's narrative. Suggs is right to raise questions about women's sports' uncritical adoption of "the male model" of sports. Sport sociologists have documented the many ways that men's corporation sports reflect and perpetuate many of the mostly negative aspects of narrow conceptions of masculinity (including violence to self and others) and stir up values of commercialization that are antithetical to what many behold as the mission of university life. Sugg points not at home that women athletes now face a rising rate of serious injury (especially to the knees) and other health-related problems; that their higher graduation rates, compared with those of men athletes, might now tumble; and that the "club" combination of parts to form a whole of youth sports, as a feeder scheme to the university, has favored white middle-class kids, thus making it difficult for African American women to benefit from Title IX to the magnitude that white women have. These are all important issues, still since Suggs falls short of a radical critique of men's sports, sum of two units unsatisfactory alternatives remain: women's sports should use Title IX to "go for the money" and mimic men's sports as a great deal as possible, including taking forward all of the costs and negative issues of men's sports; or women's sports should get back to the pre-Title-IX ethic of healthy noncompetitive sports and games. This latter will not happen, of course. As Sugg points abroad Tide IX and women's sports are here to stay.

So are we stuck with the unsatisfactory dynamic of liberal, equalopportunity feminism fighting against the backlash of an anti-Title-IX conservatism that claims to fight for fairness for men? I think not. Although Sugg does not become a critic or an advocate-preferring to stay, I believe, in the middle space of the reporter-I think it's consistent with his reporting to insinuate that women's sports activists ne to proce simultaneously forward two fronts. First, continue to use Tide IX to fight for equal opportunities (still far from achieved, as Sugg points public with ample statistics on recruiting, coaching, and funding in women's association sports). second, wage a critical analysis of the negative aspects of the dominant men's sports-especially football, I would argue, which stands at the center of the sport-media-commercial mixed Far from being the simpleton that lays the golden provoke (as its advocates like to suggest) institutionalized football is a major reason for the perpetuation of sex inequity in sports, for the ramping up of commercialization processe and for a disproportionate number of the question at issues generally associated with college sports. And football's monopoly athwart resources, as economist Andrew Zimbalist's work has in the same manner clearly shown, is one of the main reasons that the "marginal" ("nonrevenue") men's sports are in the way that vulnerable today when university athletics departments ne to trim their packages Playing sports is good for girls and women-that has now been established by the agency of research, is accepted in public opinion, and is supported through the law. But the question of to what extent we organize our sports-both for women and for men-need to be impose at the center of the table. Until we ask those more radical questions, we will be stuck in the quandary that Welch Sugg likewise nicely describes.