Concordia College’s try and bolster athletics with one hand whereas slashing 4 sports activities with the opposite was hampered by a federal decide who granted a preliminary injunction stopping the Division II college from dropping the ladies’s swimming and tennis applications.
Seven members of the ladies’s swimming and diving crew and two girls’s tennis gamers allege in a intercourse discrimination class motion lawsuit filed in August that by dropping the applications, the Irvine faculty is violating Title IX.
Choose Fred W. Slaughter agreed, ordering that the injunction stay in place at some stage in the lawsuit. Concordia should instantly reinstate the ladies’s groups and supply them “with funding, staffing, and all different advantages commensurate with their standing as varsity intercollegiate groups,” Slaughter wrote in a 19-page ruling.
Concordia introduced the cuts of the boys’s and ladies’s swimming and tennis groups in Could, stating the college had “decided that the present mannequin is just not sustainable within the midst of accelerating operational prices, facility limitations, and vital modifications within the collegiate athletics panorama.”
However the cuts got here at a time when Concordia was plowing $25.5 million into upgrading the college’s athletic infrastructure. Every week after athletic director Crystal Rosenthal calculated the cuts would save $550,000 a yr, she despatched an electronic mail to unaffected athletes boasting that main enhancements could be made to Concordia’s athletics infrastructure.
Rosenthal, who can also be the college’s softball coach, wrote: “We’re at the moment within the midst of a serious $17.5-million development venture that features a new 19,000-square-foot facility that includes a state-of-the-art weight room, locker rooms, and fashionable coaching room house. This facility represents our perception in the way forward for our athletic applications and our student-athletes.”
She added that greater than $8 million had been earmarked for upgrades to the baseball, softball and soccer/observe/lacrosse services — together with the set up of out of doors lights.
The lawsuit adopted in August and Slaughter issued the preliminary injunction Friday. Arthur Bryant, the lawyer representing the feminine athletes, mentioned that girls comprised 59% of Concordia’s college students however obtained solely 51.2% of the roster spots for sports activities.
“The court docket’s thorough, compelling determination confirms what we mentioned from the beginning: CUI’s determination to eradicate the ladies’s swimming and diving and tennis groups was a flagrant violation of Title IX,” Bryant mentioned in an announcement. “Concordia wants so as to add about 100 alternatives for ladies to succeed in gender fairness. It shouldn’t be eliminating any girls’s groups.”
The concurrent spending on infrastructure was notably galling to feminine athletes and a few alumni, in accordance with SwimSwam. The swimming and water polo groups practice off-campus and place few operational calls for on the college. The swimming program had 23 males and 25 girls on its rosters final season.
Concordia, a Lutheran-affiliated faculty with about 1,500 undergraduates that moved from the NAIA to NCAA Division II in 2017, is one in every of a number of universities whose efforts to trim athletic applications have been thwarted by courts.
A federal decide in Texas issued a preliminary injunction in opposition to Stephen F. Austin State in August, stopping the college from eliminating its girls’s seaside volleyball, bowling and golf applications. In accordance with Sportico, a minimum of eight different faculties since 2020 have been ordered to reinstate applications after Title IX challenges: Iowa, William & Mary, UConn, Dartmouth, Clemson, East Carolina, North Carolina Pembroke and Dickinson School.
