The Daily Orange

Issue date: 4/15/08 Section: Sports

Pat Jensen taught her boy Luke how to treat women as a child. All Luke had to do was watch his mom coach her high school gymnastics team practice, 30 to 40 girls tumbling in the Ludington High gym with no ice machines in sight.

"In the middle of the winter," said Luke, now coach of the Syracuse tennis team, "if a gymnast twisted her ankle, this is no lie, in a leotard, she put her outside in a snow bank, shove her foot in the snow for 20 minutes. In a leotard in the middle of winter.

"I mean, she wasn't too worried that (the gymnast) was a little girl in high school. She was an athlete. You got to ice that ankle."

The lesson stuck.

Jensen observed that epoch of women's athletics through his family, listening to his mother and watching his sisters as they rose through the tennis ranks.

He carts around that education today, in which he again has firsthand knowledge of the latest trend in women's athletics: men coaching women's teams. Men currently coach 10 of 13 women's squads at Syracuse.

Women coached more than 90 percent of women's team in 1972, the year Title IX took effect. The federal law prohibits sex discrimination in all education programs but applies most often to sports. It ensures institutions provide the same number of men's and women's athletic scholarships.

Title IX meant equal opportunity. It meant more exposure: ESPN, for example, televises the women's basketball tournament. It meant more money: the average salary for the head coach of a women's collegiate team is $131,037 a year, according to the 2006-07 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act.

It also meant more men.

Women now coach just less than 43 percent of women's collegiate teams, according to the 2008 edition of R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter's annual study "Women in Intercollegiate Sport." The two women, both professor emeriti at Brooklyn College, have put out the study since 1978. That year was also the cut-off for mandatory compliance with Title IX: 58.2 percent of team's then were coached by women.

The number has steadily decreased since.

The Orange coaching roster is a snapshot of that trend: Quentin Hillsman pacing the sideline during women's basketball games, Gary Gait doing likewise during women's lacrosse, Jing Pu's quiet presence during volleyball season.

"When you look at the big picture of things, when the statistics show 42 percent," said Celia Slater, executive director of the NCAA Women's Coaches Academy, "that's when it gets your attention."

Continued...

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