Title IX is at it again with sand volleyball

Congratulations to the NCAA for making beach volleyball an official collegiate sport — for women.

Just what we need: another sport that is not sponsored by high schools and is played largely by people who have access to, oh, I don't know, a beach.

By the way, the new sport is being called "sand volleyball," because, as the NCAA explains it, not all schools have a beach.

Did you already figure out why they added the sport? Here's a hint: Title IX.

This is a transparent move to inflate the number of female athletes on college athletic rosters; apparently, the addition of those silly NCAA-sponsored crew teams didn't do the trick. Or didn't you wonder why sand/beach volleyball is being offered, as proudly explained by the NCAA, FOR WOMEN ONLY.

Next stop: Women's hop scotch and jump roping teams.

Well, we've been down this Title IX road before, haven't we. A little background: In 1979, the Office of Civil Rights interpreted the four-year-old Title IX law to mean strict proportionality — in other words, if a school's enrollment was 51 percent women and 49 percent men, then athletic scholarships and spending should be exactly the same.

That sounds good in theory, except that men tend to be more interested in sports than women the same way more women are drawn to dance than men (as a high school track coach for almost 20 years, I can tell you this is true); consistent with that, the original Title IX law that was passed in 1975 required that schools examine "whether the selection of sports and levels of competition effectively accommodate the interests and abilities of members of both sexes."

Furthermore, it states the law should not "be interpreted to require any education institution to grant preferential or disparate treatment to one sex on account of an imbalance which may exist" in the numbers of each sex participating in a sport.

But that is exactly what has happened, as we all know. It's become a quota system. Because football, with its 100-man roster, creates an imbalance in the proportionality (there is no corresponding women's football team, of course), hundreds of men's wrestling, soccer, track and cross country teams have been eliminated while hundreds of women's sports have been added.

Excluding football, there are more female athletes than male athletes, even though this does not reflect "interest." Boy participants in high school athletics outnumber girl participants in Utah in track, wrestling, soccer and basketball. The same is true on the national level.