Daily Bruin File Photo Women’s basketball coach Kathy
Olivier (far right), feels the administration is equally
supportive of the men’s and women’s teams.
By Scott Schultz
Daily Bruin Senior staff
[email protected]
Women’s athletics has seen an increase in participants,
scholarships, recruiting expenses and coaching salaries over the
last decade. However according to the most recent NCAA
gender-equity report, there is still a vast margin when it comes to
funding men’s and women’s athletic programs.
According to the report, the largest gaps between men’s
and women’s programs are in the spending for assistant
coaches. Seventy-two percent of all salary spent on assistant
coaches goes to men’s teams. There are also double-digit
differences in percentages spent on recruiting expenses (68 percent
to 32 percent), operating expenses (64/36) and head coaches’
salaries (59/41).
“We have made some progress in the last few years,”
said Rosie Stallman, NCAA director of education outreach.
“We’ve gone up a few (percentage) points in scholarship
dollars, so this is good news.”
An additional concern, according to the report, is that almost
half of women’s head coaches are male.
The report was released earlier this month to coincide with the
NCAA Title IX Seminar. The report compares levels of gender
participation in athletics, spending for men’s and
women’s programs for coaches and assistant coaches and
recruiting expenditures for the 1999-2000 academic year. It’s
the fourth such report released by the NCAA since 1991-92.
Eight hundred thirty-two NCAA institutions, including 295 of the
321 Division I schools participated in the report, which is
conducted in accordance with the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act
(EADA).
EADA, passed by Congress in 1994, requires all coeducational
institutions of higher education that participate in any federal
student financial aid program, and sponsor intercollegiate
athletics programs, to annually provide specific information on
their program. The NCAA created the current gender-equity report as
a convenient instrument to gather data.
UCLA’s recruiting budgets are based on coaches’
determinations of their needs, according to UCLA Associate Athletic
Director and Senior Women’s Administrator Betsy
Stephenson.
TYSON EVANS/Daily Bruin Steve Lavin, coaching
here against Oregon, earns a significantly higher salary than his
female counterpart after corporate sponsorship money.
“It’s more driven by the recruiting environment for
a specific sport,” Stephenson said. “The recruiting
process for a Division I football player on the east coast may have
a higher price than the best water polo player in Southern
California who lives an hour away.”
Stephenson noted that if the best water polo player is in Maine,
the coach would receive the necessary funds to recruit that
player.
“We don’t set a budget and tell them to stay within
that budget. They tell us what they need to recruit and at the
level we need to recruit, and then we are able to fund
that.”
For the 2001-02 academic year, UCLA spent $354,139 on recruiting
for men’s sports and $166,435 on women’s sports,
according to UCLA sports information.
According to Stallman, the exact amount of money spent on each
program is less important than the actual equity in terms of
competing for championships.
“If a coach of a men’s program were to coach a
women’s program, would they be pleased that the
student-athlete was getting a quality experience that matches the
mission of the institution and the NCAA? If the coach can say yes,
then that is equity.”
By comparison, UCLA has won nine women’s, and seven
men’s, national championships between the academic years
1997-2001.
UCLA women’s basketball coach Kathy Olivier says she has
never been denied an opportunity to recruit the best players, and
doesn’t believe that a gender-based formula should determine
recruiting budgets.
“As much as I think everything needs to be equal, I think
they are very equal here, in their own way,” Olivier said.
“People can’t look at an exact dollar amount.
There’s different things that come into play when you weigh
everything out.”
At UCLA, the head coaches of the men’s teams receive a
combined salary total of $720,824 and the coaches of the
women’s teams receive $719,692, according to the athletic
department’s statistics.
However, football coach Bob Toledo and men’s basketball
coach Steve Lavin each receive an additional $425,000 in apparel
sponsor money, which brings their actual earnings to $578,000
annually. Olivier also receives an extra $17,000 in apparel
money.
According to UCLA sports information, this extra income is
distributed by the athletic department to allow the coaches to be
paid closer to their actual market value. They also said that this
is in lieu of endorsement money they would earn separate from the
university.
Stephenson said that coaches’ salaries are determined by
longevity, success and the marketplace.
She added that when hiring coaches, UCLA hires the best
candidate available, but that its commitment to a diverse staff,
whether ethnicity or gender, is a priority.
“I believe that we have achieved a high level of diversity
within our staff both from the head coaching and assistant coaching
positions. And we will continue to strive for that,”
Stephenson said.
In contrast to the national trend indicated in the report,
nearly all of UCLA’s women’s head coaches are female.
The only male coach of a women’s team exclusively is
women’s volleyball coach Andy Banachowski, who has been at
UCLA since 1968. He is the all-time NCAA leader in coaching
victories in women’s volleyball.
Coaches who oversee both the men’s and women’s teams
for a particular sport were not included in the survey.
The university is close to the national average when it comes to
paying assistant coaches. Men’s assistant coaches receive
approximately seventy percent of the budget allotted for assistant
coaches. However, if the assistant football coaches are removed
from the equation, the women’s team receives $622,061 in
contrast to the remaining men’s assistant coaches who receive
$527,270.
Women’s swimming coach Cyndi Gallagher, who has been
coaching at UCLA for 14 years, said she has never been denied an
opportunity to recruit an athlete she wanted, and that whenever she
adds players, the department is quick to provide her with
additional equipment.
She describes UCLA as a campus where all the students, including
the women, want to be athletes.
“Over 100 people came out for 30 spots on the
women’s crew team,” Gallagher said. “When people
say that women don’t want to participate in sports, that is a
joke. It’s a cop-out.”
She noted that even though the rowing team wasn’t
nationally ranked this year, neither was the women’s water
polo team when they first started in 1995, but they have won five
out of the last seven NCAA championships.