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USCB struggled to find women for its program

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In a year of triumphs marking USC Beaufort's return to intercollegiate athletics, one day left Kim Abbott feeling utterly defeated.

This past July, the Sand Sharks' athletics director and golf coach met with her boss, USCB Chancellor Jane Upshaw, to recommend the school scrap plans for a women's golf team. Abbott had rounded up enough hopefuls to start a men's squad for its first season as an NAIA member, but interested females were in too short supply.

"It was regretful," said Abbott, the women's golf coach at USC's main campus in Columbia from 1991-94. "I regretted that I couldn't do it. I regretted that I had to call that meeting with Dr. Upshaw and tell her the best thing for this university at this time is to concentrate on the men and pull the plug on the women's side."

The school's difficulty attracting female athletes would be evident again the next month, as cross country coach Larry Kimball assembled men's and women's teams. The Sand Sharks had a handful of commitments from experienced male runners (though by the start of the season, only two would be academically eligible), but for the women's team, Kimball was reduced to recruiting students he saw jogging across campus. An open tryout drew a few curious women, but only one returned for the team's second practice.

Abbott and Kimball agree bad timing had a lot to do with the Sand Sharks' dearth of female athletes in 2007-08 -- USCB wasn't accepted for provisional NAIA membership until late March of last year, by which time many recruitable high school seniors had already selected colleges. USCB also decided not to offer athletics scholarships for its first season of competition, one less enticement to recruits who would, essentially, be invited walk-ons.

Kimball anticipates a hefty recruiting class this spring and a full contingent of cross country runners -- 14 men and 10 women -- next fall.

And Abbott is confident she and Gavin Grenville-Wood, who was named interim head golf coach just before the start of the men's spring season, will get the women's team off the ground by then, too. Earlier this month, Grenville-Wood said he had six strong commitments and anticipates an eight-member team in the fall.

Additionally, the Sand Sharks plan to start softball and women's volleyball in 2010.

"We're heavy on the male gender starting up, but I think we'll quickly catch up by adding not only women's golf, but softball the next year and then volleyball after that," Abbott said. "It doesn't matter if it's hard; it needs to be done."

The Sand Sharks should anticipate more bumps in the road, though, says Michael Sergi, the men's and women's cross country coach at the nearby NAIA school Savannah College of Art and Design.

"With the amount of sports there are and the amount of female athletes out there, it is more difficult to get female athletes," the Bees' first-year head coach said. "It was very, very slow for me in the beginning. I started recruiting (last) spring, and it was hard filling out that first recruiting class.

"I'm at least starting to make real headway. Every day is a new learning experience for me, and I'm sure it will be for them, too."

LEARNING THE NUMBERS GAME

Abbott came to USCB in August 2005 as director of athletics development, charged with launching an intercollegiate sports program for a school that hadn't had one since playing basketball in a loosely knit association of USC branch campuses in the early 1970s.

Administrators considered joining NCAA Division II or Division III but decided USCB's limited finances made the NAIA a better fit, in part because the organization doesn't require members to field a minimum number of varsity teams.

On its Web site, the NAIA bills itself as a staunch supporter of gender equity and the first organization to include women in national championships. However, in keeping with the NAIA's commitment to member autonomy, the NAIA leaves its schools and conferences to determine if they will require a minimum of female sports and roster spots.

Earlier this month, the Sand Sharks joined SCAD in the Florida Sun Conference, which "has passed a minimum amount of scholarships per sport, and it is equal for men's and women's," commissioner Rob Miller told The Island Packet in a recent e-mail.

The conference doesn't mandate gender parity in roster spots or teams fielded, according to Miller. However, it assumes members will comply with federal equal-opportunity legislation.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 states that "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Most colleges -- public and private -- receive federal dollars in some form and are subject to Title IX's mandates.

Although not written specifically to govern high school or college athletics, the law's application to sports has been called its "public face." Compliance is demonstrated by meeting any one of the "three-pronged" tests established in 1979 by the Carter Administration:

• The institution provides athletic opportunities that are substantially proportionate to the student enrollment.

• The institution demonstrates continual expansion of athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex.

• Full and effective accommodation of the interest and ability of the underrepresented sex.

Some colleges seeking to comply by providing "substantially proportionate" opportunities have reached numerical parity in men's and women's roster and scholarship counts by dropping men's varsity sports, adding women's sports or some combination of both.

As a result, there are more women's than men's teams in 18 of 23 championship sports sanctioned by the NCAA and more women's teams overall, according to statistics on the organization's Web site.

At college athletics' upper reaches, the consequences of this disparity aren't severe, Abbott said. NCAA Division I accounts for just 330 of the 1,565 schools (or 21 percent) of all NCAA and NAIA members. Because they tend to offer the most prestige and the most scholarships, these schools can comply with Title IX while skimming the cream of the recruiting crop, she said.

But at college sports' lower levels, the pool of talented female athletes -- or even interested ones -- shallows more than the pool of men, Abbott said.

Statistical evidence suggests she is correct.

For example, there are 1,182 NCAA and NAIA women's cross country teams and 81 fewer for men. However, more boys than girls participate in high school cross country -- 216,085 to 183,376 during the 2006-07 season, the most recent school year for which statistics are available on the National Federation of State High School Associations' Web site.

In golf, men's college teams outnumber women's (948 to 647, a 32-percent difference), but by only about half as much as boys high school players outnumber girls (159,747 to 66,283, a 59-percent difference.) Further, male contestants typically outnumber females by a two-to-one ratio in events conducted by the elite American Junior Golf Association, according to results posted on the organization's Web site. In events sponsored by the Hilton Head Island-based International Junior Golf Tour, the ratio skews even more heavily toward males.

"Coming from a Division I program, (I didn't) understand that as you get deeper into recruiting pool for the individual sports, there are fewer candidates," Abbott said. "I'd been told that, but now I know it."

JUST ONE OF THE ... ER ... GUYS

Katie Mock was excited to join the Sand Sharks' first women's cross country team. She just didn't realize she would be the team.

In fact, she was the only female athlete in USCB's inaugural season of NAIA competition.

"I really didn't know that would be the case until the second day of practice, when I was the only one who showed up again," Mock said. "We had some girls there (at the first practice) -- I think we had seven.

"But I was pretty determined to follow through. I never thought about not doing it."

Kimball is grateful for Mock's persistence -- without it, his women's team would have suffered the same fate as Abbott's golf team.

"That period in August when we were trying to find runners was kind of hectic," Kimball said. "We were being more reactive than proactive. This year, with a full year under our belt to go about it the right way, is much more satisfying."

Mock, a Ridgeland native, was home schooled most of her life. She had never been on a scholastic team before, although she played recreational softball, soccer and volleyball. She considered going to USC Aiken to ride for the Pacers' equestrian team, but when USCB announced it would start athletics during her freshman year, she decided to stay closer to home and give cross country a try, even though her experience as a competitive runner was limited to a few weekend road races.

All things considered, Mock's first season went well.

She trained with USCB's two male cross country runners, Patrick Mastrianni and Allen Tanner. Together they marked the Sand Sharks' return to intercollegiate competition Aug. 31 at the Gamecock Invitational in Columbia, where Mock finished 97th in a 116-runner field with a time of 24 minutes, 5 seconds.

Mock set personal bests in four of the team's five subsequent events, notched one top-10 finish and concluded the season Oct. 20 by running the Sand Shark Invitational in 20 minutes, 58 seconds.

Despite her progress, "It's not a lot of fun, I'd bet, for her to go on a trip with a coach and two guys," Kimball said. "Next year, she gets to be part of a team, which is always better than just being an individual."

With teammates to train with and compete against, Mock believes she'll improve even more as a sophomore than she did as a freshman.

"I think it will be a lot more motivating," she said. "We'll be hoping for a lot of top-10 finishes. ... I'm looking forward to the competition between each other."

THE SEARCH CONTINUES

Each day on the job lends Abbott new perspective on women's sports -- and this was not a woman lacking perspective to begin with.

Abbott's mother, Polly Erickson, was a golfer at Ohio State in the late 1940s, more than two decades before Title IX's passage. In the mid-1980s, Abbott was an all-Big Eight golfer at the University of Missouri before coaching the women's teams at Dartmouth and USC.

After nearly three years at USCB, Abbott has discovered she was cloistered from the realities of small-college athletics while competing and coaching at NCAA Division I schools.

"Have my views (on Title IX) changed? I don't think they've changed," Abbott said. "But I think I see a different challenge at a school like this. ... One thing to remember about Title IX, it's not just being equal, but providing proportionality with a student body's needs. It's not about being equal, it's about offering equal opportunity."

Abbott doesn't consider herself a crusader -- "Just because I'm a female AD doesn't mean I'll make women's sports my first charge," she said -- nonetheless, she's determined to help get her school past its initial hurdles in recruiting women.

Now, she looks under stones she might have left unturned as the Gamecocks' coach. Instead of scouring the top of leaderboards at elite junior tournaments, she takes a closer look at the also-rans. Recruiting and scouting services she might once have considered a nuisance now are sources of valuable information. The university's Web site is vital as USCB tries to build name recognition without the benefit of television exposure.

Abbott also believes small schools' search for female athletes is as much about what you tell recruits as where you look for them.

"Your starting point is diving into the pool of women in high school who believe their chances of being a college athlete aren't available," Abbott said. "You start recruiting by telling them they are good and they are good enough to be an athlete at college. That's completely different than Division I recruiting.

"Then, you try to find those girls who thought they might be Division I prospects only to find out they really weren't that good. Those girls might be frustrated and give up on college sports altogether, but you can convince them there's still a place to play if they have the desire."

HOW TO BE ALLURING

Sergi has learned many of these lessons, too.

The former SCAD assistant was promoted to men's and women's cross country coach about the time USCB announced it had been accepted for NAIA membership. In his previous capacity, the extent of his involvement in recruiting was completing paperwork and "licking envelopes."

But now, recruiting is practically a job in itself, particularly when it comes to filling out his women's team.

"There's not a night that I'm not on the computer contacting kids," said Sergi, who brought in two freshmen on both squads this season and has more athletes on his women's team (seven) than on his men's team (six). "It's a seven-day-a-week thing."

It pays to be creative and frugal, Sergi said. With an almost non-existent recruiting budget, he tries to create a dual purpose for every out-of-town trip -- meets, signings and professional conferences become opportunities to meet high school coaches and evaluate athletes.

"I'm a young coach. I'm still learning," Sergi said. "But it seems like it's all about connections. If you have them, you can pick up some good runners. Those coaches are my asset. They help me in spreading the word about my program."

That's made easier, Sergi said, because SCAD has an international reputation as an arts school. USCB will have to work harder to create its reputation, he said.

"If I were in Larry's shoes over there at USCB, I'd really be struggling right now because I'd be looking inside the state of South Carolina and within the region because that's the kind of student body USCB has," Sergi said. "On the other hand, I can recruit internationally."

The conventional wisdom is that academically rigorous schools or schools such as SCAD that serve a narrow niche face difficulty recruiting. But both Sergi and the Bees' women's golf coach, Amanda Workman, say they have used their school's elitism to their advantage, getting the first pick of athletes interested in studying the arts.

Indeed, Workman's 2007-08 roster includes golfers from five states and two foreign countries but not a single athlete from Georgia.

"Our situation probably is a lot different from (USCB's) in that regard," Workman said.

Nonetheless, she recognizes similarities.

When Workman came to SCAD, the school was a member of NCAA Division III, and it had just started its women's golf program. The Bees, which had belonged to the NAIA when they started intercollegiate athletics in 1987, returned to the organization in 2003, and Workman has led her team to the national tournament every year since.

"It's taken seven years to get to where we're at," Workman said. "Any time you start something from scratch, it is difficult, but (USCB) should be fine eventually. Once you get it rolling, it gets easier because you can recruit on your reputation.

"But I can definitely feel their pain a little bit right now."

Workman said women's coaches at smaller schools need to recruit with an eye toward player development.

"I think there is more teaching for girls coaches than men's coaches at this level," said Workman, who played at NCAA Division I Texas Christian University. "I don't know if that's the case at the bigger schools, but it's been the case here, particularly when we first got started. Most of the girls who played here at that time didn't play a lot of junior golf before college."

And Workman said that to the extent USCB competes for athletes with NCAA schools, it should take advantage of the NAIA's more lenient recruiting rules, which place no restrictions on contact with student-athletes and allow recruits to practice with college teams during campus visits.

"That's been huge for us because it gives them a chance to see the campus and see how they fit in with their teammates, and it gives me a chance to really see them play," Workman said.

She also said both recruiting and retention will be less difficult once the Sand Sharks offer athletic scholarships.

"When you're Division III like we were or when you don't offer scholarships, any kid can decide not to play at any point in time," Workman said. "You have nothing to hold them there and nothing to attract them."

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