BODY: Kevin Jackson got the news at a
wrestling camp in the summer of 1985. Already a three-time
All-American, he was about to enter his senior year at LSU ranked
No. 1 nationally in his weight class.
The
news: He would have to find a new college. LSU was dropping its
wrestling program.
After transferring to
Iowa State, Jackson finished second at the national championships in
1987. He won a world championship in 1991 and an Olympic gold medal
in 1992.
Now the coach of the USA's
national freestyle wrestling team, Jackson is back to searching for
Plan B because college cuts continue. "Even though they're going
away slowly, they're going away surely, and it really scares me," he
says of the decline over the last 2 decades in college programs such
as wrestling and men's swimming and gymnastics. "If it keeps going
like this, we're not going to have a strong feeder program to our
Olympic system."
In the ongoing debate
over Title IX, a 1972 law that calls for equal sports opportunities
for women at federally funded schools, the USA's Olympic performance
rarely figures prominently. Yet as colleges, faced with ever
stricter enforcement of Title IX mandates and ever
tighter budgets, shift resources out of men's programs and create
women's programs in sports such as soccer, ice hockey, rowing and
water polo, the U.S. Olympic outlook inevitably is affected.
At future Games, Olympic officials predict
more women and fewer men will be saluting the red, white and blue
from atop the medal stand.
"You're going to see a majority of our medals, maybe as early as Athens (in 2004) and I would suspect for sure by 2008, go to women and not men because of Title IX and its impact," said Bret Bernard, immediate past president of U.S. Water Polo.
Atlanta opens the door
The 1996 Atlanta Games were a coming out of sorts and a celebration of Title IX, with American women winning team titles in soccer, softball, basketball and gymnastics and overall capturing 44 of the USA's 100 medals, or 44%. At the Summer Olympics in Sydney last year, American women won 36, or 38%, of the USA's 95 medals.
Because of the double-edged effect of Title
IX, U.S. Olympic officials toe a fine line when talking about its
role in American Olympic performance.
"We believe strongly in the benefits of athletics for women and broadening that participation base," says Jim Scherr, the USOC's senior managing director of sport resources and a former head of USA Wrestling. "The unintended consequences of Title IX -- the decline of male sports opportunities -- is very unfortunate."
In recent months, three Big 12 schools --
Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa State -- announced plans to cut their
men's swimming programs before next season. Michigan State decided
last week to drop men's gymnastics. Syracuse, Seton Hall and Coppin
State dropped wrestling this spring.
Bucknell announced Wednesday that it will drop wrestling after next season, calling it a Title IX decision. The school also will end funding for men's rowing, which isn't an NCAA sport but is an Olympic sport.
Meanwhile,
Drake said it would add women's soccer to its varsity programs
beginning in 2002.
At the epicenter of
such decisions are the college athletes and coaches. "I don't think
we carry it out so far as to how it might affect Olympic
performances," says Dru Hancock, associate commissioner of the Big
12.
The tremors nevertheless are reaching
Colorado Springs, home to the U.S. Olympic Committee and many of the
national governing bodies (NGBs) for Olympic sports that rely
heavily on college programs for athlete development.
"(College administrators) say, 'Well, we're not the
Olympic training grounds,' when they really are," says Bob Boettner,
head swimming coach at Clemson for 17 years and now head of the
College Swim Coaches Association of America. "When you get right to
the facts, most (Olympic) sports are pulling their better athletes
out of the collegiate ranks. . . . It is a core of athletes that has a place to go and train and get an education and keep the dream alive."
End of collegiate
incentive
The decline in college programs
kills the dream at the grass roots, Olympic officials contend, where
college scholarships can act as a carrot for many boys and girls to
get involved and stay involved in specific sports.
USA Swimming executive director Chuck Wielgus already sees
some damage done in swimming, where the number of Division I
men's programs has fallen to 149 from 181 over the last 20 years.
Boys now comprise about 35% of age-group swimmers, down about 10%
from 10 years ago, he says.
"Is that a concern? Absolutely. Because the broader the pool we have to draw from at the age-group level, the thicker the cream will be when they rise to the top," Wielgus says.
The top U.S. men's swimmers won 17 of the 33 U.S. swim
medals in Sydney.
Rather than
taking that as a sign that concerns might be overstated, national
team director Dennis Pursley saw it as "an anomaly."
"If you had talked to any of our college coaches during
the 2, 3 or 4 years preceding that, they would have told you that,
in their opinion, the level of talent coming into collegiate
programs is deteriorating and diminishing. The athletes aren't
there," Pursley says.
Better
female athletes emerge
NGBs responsible for women's
sports such as water polo, in which the U.S. women won a silver
medal in Sydney, are seeing just the opposite.
"With women recognizing that water polo is a viable option
for a scholarship . . . we're getting more women playing the sport and we're getting better athletes," Bernard says. He notes that in addition to Division I programs rising to 26 from 10 in the last 5 years, there are more than 100 club programs, up from about 30 just 5 years ago.
In
men's gymnastics, which has suffered a precipitous decline in
college programs (from 59 Division I programs in 1981-82 to 21 this
past season), youth participation still is strong through club
programs. But colleges no longer are producing enough coaches to
keep up with demand.
"We get a substantial
number of calls at the office from people looking for coaches," says
Ron Gallimore, senior director for men's programs at USA
Gymnastics.
Soon Gallimore could be
looking just as fervently for gymnasts to provide the kind of depth
he needs to keep the USA competitive with countries such as China
and Russia.
The search for solutions
"The alternatives to (college programs) are
the private club system and the national training centers," USA
Gymnastics President Bob Colarossi says.
He notes that all but seven men's Olympic gymnasts since
1972 came through an NCAA program.
"But when you take the 10,000-foot view and you look at men's gymnastics and you understand that the average age of maturity of a male gymnast at the peak of their career happens in and or around the collegiate years, the impact is devastating."
In 1996 the USOC tried to head off some of
the impact with an $ 8 million NCAA grant program aimed at ensuring
the survival of sports such as men's gymnastics and wrestling, as
well as encouraging the establishment of others, including women's
water polo and ice hockey.
The
program, however, expired this year, and the USOC, struggling with
budget constraints, has no plans to renew the grant program.
Any solutions, then, fall to the NGBs, which admit they
have little power to sway college administrators. USA Swimming
instead is encouraging alumni and others in college communities to
lobby for programs to stay in place.
"We have to lead from behind the scenes," Wielgus says.
USA Wrestling, with fewer college programs to count on
(Division I men's wrestling programs will be at 87 next season, down
from 146 in 1981-82), is leaning more and more on resident
programs and privately sponsored club programs to develop
Olympians.
Jackson, though, knows from his
own experience how valuable college programs are to wrestlers.
"Very few actually make it at this level who
don't have some collegiate experience," he says. "It's just like
minor league baseball. It's a feeder system for our Olympic
hopefuls."
GRAPHIC: GRAPHIC, b/w,
Keith Simmons, USA TODAY(Illustration); PHOTO, color, Robert Tong, USA TODAY;
PHOTO, b/w, Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY; PHOTO, b/w, Steve Parker, Gannett News
Service; Beyond Sydney: UCLA's Robin Beauregard, water polo silver medalist,
will play for the first NCAA title. Growing sport: Brenda Villa prepares to fire
a shot for the U.S. women's water polo team at Sydney. Done: Jason Gleasman of
Syracuse throws a foe in 1997 match. Syracuse no longer sponsors wrestling.
Document 60 of 67. 