Hillsdale College basketball teams suffered lower attendance at home games this season–and many on campus blame a Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (GLIAC) policy that requires women’s teams to play after men’s teams every other season.
This year, average attendance for women’s games at Jesse Philips Arena dropped to 168, down from 298 last year. For men’s games, average attendance fell to 421, from 579.
“It was definitely noticeable that there were more fans last year when we played first,” junior Hillsdale basketball player Angela Bisaro said.
Although both teams had slightly better records in the 2011-12 season, many do not believe this is why the women lost half of their fans.
According to GLIAC Commissioner, Dell Robinson, a study of all GLIAC attendance numbers show a decrease in fans across the conference.
For the 2010-11 season, the GLIAC ended its long standing practice of having women’s teams play before men’s teams during doubleheaders. From that point on, teams would go back and forth from season to season, with men playing first one year and women playing first the next.
The policy arose after Tom Wilson and Diane Madsen, president and vice president of the Michigan Gender Equity Team, filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in February of 2010. They complained that when women play before the men’s team, they are subordinated to a discriminatory “warm up” role.
Wilson and Madsen said the women faced unequal treatment because the later time slot usually draws a bigger crowd and is easier for fans to attend without leaving work early.
OCR responded by sending a letter to Robinson, suggesting that scheduling may violate Title IX, the federal education law that prohibits sex discrimination. It suggested that the GLIAC change the way it schedules basketball games.
“When we first received the letter, there was a terrible reaction,” Robinson said. “For years, we had the authority to place games when we wanted in doubleheaders, but if we did not react to the complaint, they could have adopted a harsher form of enforcement.”
“I’m pretty sure none of the GLIAC athletes would have been in favor of the change [in game time] had they been asked,” senior Hillsdale basketball player Lea Jones said. “As soon as we heard that it might be changed, we all said it wasn’t a good idea.”
Other schools in the GLIAC have seen their attendance drop during seasons in which women play after men.
While not all GLIAC members have posted attendance numbers for this past year, the three-year study Robinson referenced shows all 14 GLIAC members, both men’s and women’s squads, lost fans from the 2009-10 season to the 2010-11 season, the first year women began playing second.
Hillsdale women lost over 3,000 fans, while Saginaw Valley State University and University of Findlay each dropped over 5,000. Eleven of the women’s teams saw attendance numbers increase again in the 2011-12 season when it was again the men’s turn to play second.
“I did not feel we were playing the ‘warm up’ slot,” Hillsdale women’s head basketball coach Claudette Charney said. “We had our games scheduled first for many years and to my knowledge, there were no complaints about how our league approached men’s and women’s games. I have been a player in this league as well as a coach, and I felt the arrangement of game times worked well.”
This sentiment is widely shared around the GLIAC, according to Hillsdale Athletic Director Don Brubacher. “A lot of the coaches of the women’s teams are former players,” he said. “They’ve opposed the change.”
After experiencing two seasons of decreased fans when the women played second, Robinson says the GLIAC members are not in favor of the reversed game times.
“The dynamic of how people come to games has changed. Women’s basketball was more family friendly when they played earlier,” Robinson said.
Hillsdale College Sports Information Director Brad Monastiere described how OCR did not understand the crowd’s dynamic Robinson referenced when calling for change.
“Most everywhere, the men’s games draw bigger crowds than the women’s. You can debate whether that’s right or not, but that’s reality,” Monastiere said. “When you have a traditional schedule, the crowd peaks in the second half of the women’s game, and they enjoy playing in a lively atmosphere at the crunch time of their games.”
When the women play second, the reverse happens and few fans remain by the
end of the second half.
“Now the women are going to warm up and the stands empty,” Monastiere said. “If we’re concerned about relegating women to warm-up status and how that makes them feel, how are we supposed to reconcile that with the real-world observation of watching everyone bolt for the exits when they’re getting ready to play their games?”
Jones agrees.
“It is awkward to see the whole student section rise and leave,” she said. “By the second half, the gym is silent.”
Although the men do not suffer as drastic attendance drops as the women, Hillsdale men’s basketball player, junior Anthony Manno, says he also opposes the men-play-first model.
“It hurts the revenues of every game and it’s ironic that this was done to empower women, but it’s hard to find a female athlete who likes it,” Manno said.
John Tharp, Hillsdale men’s head basketball coach, says the men will support the women regardless of what time they play, but that he is not happy the students being affected don’t have a choice in the matter.
“The thing I was most upset about is that things like this should come from student advisory committees,” Tharp said. “It needs to come from students instead of threatening possible lawsuits – let them have the voice.”
Brubacher also thinks student-athletes should have more of a voice in scheduling.
“It is a perfect case of bureaucracy that has lost sight of who and what it serves,” he said. “As is typical, it has unintended consequences. So where the principle upon which it was based had substantial rationale, when it becomes a government-mandated program usually it’s not a particularly healthy result.”
Avoiding the unintended consequences from such government-mandated programs is why Hillsdale College does not accept government funding, so why is Hillsdale abiding by this threat from OCR when it has no leverage with the college?
“We are not bound in any way to Title IX regulations,” Brubacher said. “The Hillsdale College President decided we would follow the same rule that the conference established in order to prevent creating problems for our conference members.”
Robinson says in a few years there may be another conversation about the GLIAC’s schedule, but OCR will want to see proof that the GLIAC’s members have attempted to boost attendance using methods like email blasts.
“We have counseled this, but we haven’t seen a great deal of energy put towards it,” Robinson said.
Until then, men and women make the best of their situation- because they have no other choice.
“When it’s inevitable, you roll with it,” Jones said. “But there are very few perks to having the later game.”
