Ever since the passage of Title IX legislation in 1972, opportunities for young women to play sports at college have proliferated. Mostly this has been seen as a very positive development. Yet Rick Eckstein, a sociology professor at Villanova University, strikes a cautionary note in his new book, examining how the pure joy of participation sometimes is drained from youth and school sports by the quest for college athletic scholarships and what he calls the masculinization of female sports.
Here’s an excerpt from How College Athletics Are Hurting Girls Sports:
“[P]ay-to-play, noneducational, commercial opportunities have largely replaced high school interscholastic athletics to the ‘next level.’ Girls and young women are still playing high school sports, but it is no longer the primary pathway to obtain preferential college admissions or scholarship aid. Instead, the pipeline from youth sports to intercollegiate athletics is an increasingly commercialized and prohibitively expensive pay-to-play system that bypasses high school interscholastic sports and severely limits participation by modest- and low-income families.… Women’s intercollegiate athletics subsidies have become a de facto affirmative action program for wealthy, primarily white, suburban families.”
