System’s Unfairness Bugs Price

John Price is a guy with a burden.

He soon might be a guy without a job.

If Cal State Northridge drops volleyball and several other men’s sports within the next few days, as expected, Price becomes obsolete after coaching the Matadors for 12 seasons.

Price understands the school’s predicament. Northridge must make the cuts for financial reasons and to meet state gender equity laws. There are virtually no other options.

What he can’t understand, no matter how hard he tries, is the unfairness of it all.

To him, the same safeguards created to give women a better shake in college athletics ironically are contributing to the downfall of men’s programs, and his is about to join the casualties.

“My beef is with the CAL/NOW settlement,” Price said. “I think it’s wrong. It seems that the people who made the decision were not really in touch with the realities of college athletics.”

Price is referring to the California State University system’s decision in 1993 that called for funding and participation parity in men’s and women’s sports by the 1998-99 school year.

It wasn’t a self-imposed mandate, but an agreement with the National Organization for Women, which sued the CSU system.

Price has a problem with the settlement, not when it comes to equal funding and scholarships for women’s programs, but when it comes to participation.

In short, the settlement requires athletic opportunities for women proportional to the number of eligible female undergraduates at each school, within 5%.

“They want the participation numbers to mirror the makeup of the campus. Why? You don’t do that with race. You don’t do that with religion,” Price said.

“It seems to me that if they were truly interested in equity, they would have gone after the engineering department and they would have gone after some other male-dominated schools and programs. . . . How come they don’t have to be within 5% of the student population? I guarantee there are too many men in the engineering school. I guarantee there are too many women in the education school.”

He has a point. Why sports only? Why not everything on campus, down to the parking lot attendants, as ludicrous as that sounds?

Price believes he knows the answer.

“Seems to me that the National Organization for Women was going after male symbolism,” he said. “The participation [issue] to me was an attack on football so there’s no way they are not going to count football [in participation statistics] because I think football was the target of this whole thing.”

The participation equation in gender equity includes football and some schools have dropped their programs. At Northridge, though, football is a Big Sky Conference core sport and cannot be eliminated. Men’s volleyball and the other sports in jeopardy, including possibly baseball, are not Big Sky members.

For the most part, the Northridge teams on death row have been highly successful, but that hardly seems to matter. Neither sentimentality nor tradition apparently can save a volleyball program that was national runner-up to UCLA in 1993 and that attracts players easily.

“I have over 30 guys try out every year,” Price said. “Women’s volleyball can barely keep 12 out there. Baseball gets 40 or 50 [players] trying out, softball gets 20.

“The way most male sports got developed, there was a grass-roots participation in high schools and then they had club programs in colleges because there was interest.

“Eventually, without gender equity, they would add those sports [to sanctioned status] because there was so much interest. The women, they are not doing that. They are doing it the other way around. They are saying, ‘Here, we want things to be equal, so you have to participate. If you don’t want to participate, we’ll just eliminate men.’ ”

By next week, that could mean Price and his players, but the coach is hoping for a reprieve.

“My attitude is business as usual until they tell me I don’t have a team anymore and that’s what I told my guys,” Price said. “Every two years we get put on the chopping block in the name of gender fairness and every year we survive, so I hope we survive this one, too.”