TargetTalk

News from Washington DC: (ususally bad)

The Obama Adm. has strengthened/enhanced the ability of colleges and high school to comply to Title 9 compliance with by dropping the college survey of students to find out if the college is meeting Title 9 compliance and if the college is meeting the individual students "needs" regarding athletic opportunities.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100421/ts_csm/295901_1

Prior to this the survey actions was one of three actions that could be used be used to satisfy Title 9.

We in the shooting communities know that this will mean cutting the lesser spectator "friendly", income producing, usually male dominated shooting sports teams, to allow for the colleges to report to the government that: Yes we have increase the availablity for women by adding (fill in the blank) that has/will increase(d) the opportunity of women students, based on the college enrollment percentages. Therefore we the college/school district have met our obligation and are in compliance with Title 9.

You better darn well go out there and recruit some ladies to shoot on your teams!

Anonymous wrote:You better darn well go out there and recruit some ladies to shoot on your teams!

Recruting ladies or more ladies to a team does NOT carry anymore weight in Title 9 requirements as the number of members of a rifle team are usually low 8- 12 at MOST with few exceptions ( ie. service academies, full blown military academies and large ROTC programs). As a percentage of campus population the roster of totally women teams, softball, vollyball, swim, basketball, tennis, hockey and the like have a greater impact on "the numbers" that a college will want to report.

Sports with larger rosters allows a team to keep more members that show promise, whereas a rifle coach should not cut a better shooter for a lesser abled shooter for "development". And with VERY few scholarships or stipends available to attract shooters of any sex from high schools coaches have to rely on the scores from past shooting, the academics, training habits, etc to submit any kind of stipend for a potential recruit.

If you say " well just expand the shooting roster" .... forget it. Sharing equipment (which many schools are forced to do even with small rosters) poses other problems. Practice schedules, keeping the equipment functional, ammo, targets and all the rest can be hard enough for a shooting team to work with even a small roster. Expanding it would hurt the the core members ( the better shooters that would normally make the cut).

It is also good to remember that in collegiate rifle ... at a Level 1 school, there are only 3.6 scholarships available. So a coach with a large team may have to spread that thin, or concentrate it on a few as they see fit.

Now a service academy is a bit different, but most of the shooters that appear on those teams are maybe not looking at shooting as a long term "career" .... they are there to become officers in the armed forces as their primary focus.

two of the kids that on our little group of pick up kids have been looked at by a couple of diff schools ..but the schools are really haveing a problem over the filling the shooting roster with females shooters..

i do find it funny that one of the schools is a military school ..they have ask to come and talk to the two kids about there future and have ask the kids parents if they would like and come and vist the military academy this next month take the tour and see if they would like to let the child come to the academy to become a officer ..for one of the kids is going back east to school and the parents where ask to call them if they where close by and they would take care of houseing for the night if they would like to take a tour of the academy ..

your going to be seeing a lot of the military academy trying to pick up the future shooters to bring into the program for the military shooting sports .. for the way the guy who was doing the looking that day it seam that there is a big back behind the curtain type push for getting the branchs of the diff services out there in the public eye..

all branchs of the service are going to try and pick up future shooters to get them into there shooting programs ..for the best way to show the public in a lot of places where owning a fireamr is way of life is to show the public the diff shooting programs in the military shooting programs..

I agree. Seeing the Army guys shooting action pistol/steel plates etc on Outdoor Channel is a tremendous legitimizer of the shooting sports.