NCAC: 25 years of Women's athletics

Title IX and the NCAC

[Images of Title IX, WARNING: this file contains several images]

Twenty-five years ago, Congress handed down Title IX. Women have been running with it ever since.

According to Title IX, schools are required to maintain gender equity in athletics. Title IX sounded the death knell for rules prohibiting women from competition, banning them from gyms and relegating them to calisthenics class. For collegiate athletics, it was a whole new ball game.

It's a game that's been played with varying degrees of success. The mere passage of Title IX has not been enough to ensure complete gender equity in athletics. Many women have been forced to wage lengthy court battles to bring schools into compliance with the law.

Oberlin's athletic conference, the North Coast Athletic Conference (NCAC), has long prided itself on its commitment to gender equity. This week, the schools of the NCAC have joined together to take a closer look at the conference's claims.

Editors of the Review and the Wooster Voice contacted all NCAC-member schools earlier this year and asked them to participate in a collaborative project. Five of the nine student newspapers agreed to submit articles analyzing the state of women's athletics at their school. The results are below. The articles are appearing in every NCAC-member school student newspaper this week.

We're hoping this series will be the first of many collaborative efforts. Schools in the NCAC should meet in more places than the gym. The Ivy League was once just an athletic conference too.

We look forward to hearing what you think.

-Hanna Miller Oberlin Review

-James Koller Wooster Voice