Post-pandemic, schools eye finances with Title IX in mind
At The College of Saint Rose and Siena, sports department heads say equity and balance is critical
At the end of the school year, College of Saint Rose athletic director Lori Anctil asks her athletes to sit down for an exit interview and fill out a survey that includes two questions about equity.
The first question: Do you feel your needs as a minority or woman or underrepresented athlete were identified and met?
The second question: Do you feel that the athletic department treats all men’s and women’s sports at Saint Rose equally?
Anctil, a former soccer player at the University at Buffalo, introduced the survey when Division II Saint Rose hired her in August 2019 following 14 years in the Siena College athletic department.
“I just think it’s important,” Anctil said. “I’m not doing my job if I’m not continuing to try to figure out if there are any issues or concerns or how I can get better at it. I want
our student-athletes to feel empowered and to use their voice, just like I had the opportunity when I was a student-athlete.”
Anctil is well acquainted with Title IX, the 1972 federal law that, in part, requires women and men to be provided equitable opportunities to participate in sports. It’s her job to make sure Saint Rose complies with Title IX, even during a global pandemic that has created a financial burden for athletic departments all over the country.
Saint Rose athletics had roughly $5.2 million in expenses in 2019-20, according to the school’s Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act Report, including $2,012,800 spent on men’s sports and $2,139,086 on women’s sports.
“Every day, no matter whether you’re in COVID or not, you always have to pay attention to Title IX,” Anctil said. “Does it complicate it more? I don’t know.”
During a season in which Saint Rose tried to limit its travel expenses, Anctil said, she had to make sure both genders were treated equitably. If the baseball team was allowed to make an overnight trip or play a nonleague game, for example, she had to make sure the softball team got the same opportunity.
“It’s not just you’ve got to pay attention to what you do for the men, you do for the women,” Anctil said. “I also look at it, what you do for the women, you do for the men.
I’m always trying to see how we can elevate all of our programs.”
While some colleges and universities around the country have cut athletic teams because of financial challenges created by the pandemic, Anctil said there are no such plans at Saint Rose with men’s or women’s programs.
“We’re doing good,” she said. “We have roster expectations for our program, and that’s more of a Division II kind of model. It’s more enrollment driven and we don’t have a problem with our programs or filling our rosters.”
At her former school, Siena also said it has no plans to ax teams. Athletic director John D’argenio said sports help drive enrollment with so many athletes outside of the basketball programs paying at least some of their own way.
Since D’argenio was promoted to athletic director in 1993, Siena has added women’s sports in lacrosse, swimming and diving, water polo, golf and indoor and outdoor track. The women’s basketball head coach was a 10-month position. Now it brings a multiyear contract.
“I think that equitable opportunity is built into every day-to-day decisionmaking that we have,” D’argenio said. “If we’re going to talk about adding staff in a particular area, how does that affect equity and balance? If we talk about adding a full-time assistant in a men’s sport, we have to talk about adding it in a women’s sport, and vice versa.”
Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Commissioner Rich Ensor, whose league includes Siena, has had to deal with the financial challenges of the pandemic. With no ticket revenue or sponsorship money coming in from the basketball tournament in Atlantic City, N.J., which is the league’s centerpiece, the MAAC spent $200,000 on COVID testing for men’s and women’s players in Atlantic City and another $150,000 testing game officials all year.
“I think the pandemic’s hurt college sports generally, so I don’t know it’s been gender-specific,” Ensor said. “Those challenges are across the board, they weren’t gender-specific. Certainly, we’ll have to spend the year next year or so getting right-sided again.”
At the Division III level, recently retired Union women’s basketball coach Mary Ellen Burt has seen women’s athletics come a long way since she played basketball at USC in 1982.
She is hoping the pandemic doesn’t reverse any of those gains.
“I think everybody’s worried about budgets and what’s going to happen with budgets and where are we going to go,” said Burt, still the women’s golf coach. “Luckily, at Union, my budget wasn’t really affected, so I don’t want to misrepresent anything at Union. But I just think it’s going to be that case, everybody’s holding their breath, like, how is that going to impact us and is it going to impact us equally. I think that’s kind of a wait and see.”