University of Oregon women's beach volleyball players have revealed that the team has not received equal funding from the school. The Oregonian/OregonLive interviewed more than a dozen former players and coaches on the Ducks' beach volleyball team and found that Oregon could be in some deep trouble.
The University of Oregon has 20 varsity teams and there is only one team that does not receive scholarship funding. You guessed it…beach volleyball is the only sport with zero scholarship funding. According to the EADA, the operating expenses for Oregon's beach volleyball team for 2021-2022 were $296,605. The team that had the next lowest operating expenses at Oregon was men's tennis, whose expenses totaled $834,755. Every other team's expenses totaled over $1 million. Beach volleyball even brought in more revenue than men's tennis did in 2022. The revenue for beach volleyball was $109,900, compared to $58,491 for men's tennis.
The University of Oregon spent $140,565,297 on all sports in 2021-22, with beach volleyball representing 0.2% of that amount.
The beach volleyball team is generating more revenue but is still lacking in facilities, resources, travel, and even bathrooms.
A Team Without Facilities
The beach volleyball team doesn't even play at a court on the University of Oregon's campus. The team has practices and home games (which are rare) at a public park called Amazon Park. The court doesn't have bleachers, showers, or a locker room. It does have a public restroom…but the stalls don't have doors. Imagine being super sweaty after playing an entire volleyball game on the hot sand and you can't even wash the sand off your body after. A former player said to the Oregonian/OregonLive,
“At least something to rinse your feet off with to get in your car. I even had that growing up in youth volleyball. We had a place to wash our damn feet after we played. That should be a given.”
A Bathroom Without Doors
The public restroom doesn't have doors on the stalls because of concerns about people sleeping in them and drug use, according to the city parks department. The players wouldn't go to the bathroom alone at this park. They would either have teammates go with them or have a coach guard the entrance. When the team complained to the athletics department, an administrator sent one singular porta-potty to the court.
Promises of Better Facilities
When getting recruited to play beach volleyball, many players were told that Oregon was in the process of building on-campus courts and facilities and that the athletic department was working on getting the team scholarship funding. Zoë Almanza graduated from Oregon this past spring and was a member of the beach volleyball program for all four years. When reflecting on the promises that Oregon had made to her during her recruiting visits to the Oregonian/OregonLive, Almanza stated,
“Had I known that this would be the case, I would never have gone here, ever in a million years. Ever. If I knew 100% none of this was going to happen, no chance.”
In 2020, the Ducks had to travel hundreds of miles to their away games in university vans driven by coaches, only to have to sleep at a player's family home on an air mattress. This happened multiple times during that season. It is unheard of for a top Division I team to have to rely on players' families for a place to sleep.
Can Title IX Make a Difference?
Violations of Title IX have proven to be difficult to claim in the past. It is hard to compare funding from one team to another, as Title IX doesn't mean exact equivalence. According to the NCAA website, Title IX applies to athletics through:
- “Participation: Title IX requires that women and men be provided equitable opportunities to participate in sports. Title IX does not require institutions to offer identical sports but an equal opportunity to play;
- Scholarships: Title IX requires that female and male student-athletes receive athletics scholarship dollars proportional to their participation; and
- Other benefits: Title IX requires the equal treatment of female and male student-athletes in the provisions of: (a) equipment and supplies; (b) scheduling of games and practice times; (c) travel and daily allowance/per diem; (d) access to tutoring; (e) coaching, (f) locker rooms, practice and competitive facilities; (g) medical and training facilities and services; (h) housing and dining facilities and services; (i) publicity and promotions; (j) support services and (k) recruitment of student-athletes.”
The other issue is that to get a school to change its funding and resources, an athlete has to go through the federal government or they have to sue the school. Colleges and universities are powerful. They have money, resources, and connections that singular athletes do not. If an athlete decides to sue their school; other athletes, students, coaches, and even teammates could turn on them. They could lose their scholarship, playing time, or even become a pariah around the school which could prevent them from getting future job opportunities with alumni.
Former Women's Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano said to Yahoo Sports,
“Even though Title IX has a provision that prohibits retaliation, the fact of the matter is, kids are not gonna bring a Title IX complaint unless you drop their sport.”
Most athletes are not going to risk everything to get equal treatment in their sport. Even if athletes are willing to sue their schools, the majority of athletes and parents don't know what student-athletes are entitled to, and they don't have the resources to find out. Title IX requires that schools have at least one Title IX coordinator to make sure that they are in compliance. However, it is not required for a school to have a sports-specific Title IX coordinator, which would make it much easier for athletes to ask questions and make complaints about their programs.
Title IX Violations Has Little Consequence
If a school is found to be not in compliance with Title IX, the federal government can withhold federal funds. In the 51 years that Title IX has been in effect, thousands of investigations found that schools were not complying with Title IX…but federal funding has never been withheld.
An investigation of Title IX compliance is not a threat to the school. If they found are found noncompliant, they will have multiple opportunities to fix the problem.
If athletes are given the resources to know what their rights are and Title IX actually starts to hold schools accountable, many schools would be in trouble.
- A Yahoo Sports analysis found that 82.5% of D-I schools would need to add more than 15 women's roster spots to match the gender demographics of their student bodies.
- 308 of the 348 D-I schools would need to add an estimated total of 35,797 women's roster spots to achieve full proportionality.
- Even with football excluded, for every dollar spent on travel, equipment, and recruiting for select men's teams, FBS schools spent 71 cents on the correlating women's teams.
- If the University of Oregon's athletic scholarship spending for women athletes was substantially proportionate to their rate of participation, it would have needed to spend about $972,000 more, or almost $1.6 million more to be precisely proportionate over the years 2017-22, according to an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
We can't say for sure what the future holds for the University of Oregon's beach volleyball team. While we certainly hope that the team ends up with the facilities and resources they deserve, there are also deeper-rooted issues with Title IX as a whole and its effectiveness. Big schools like to focus their attention on the sports that make them money. This makes sense but we also want to make sure that all athletes are given enough resources to succeed and enjoy their college athletic career.
