Title IX at SRU: Coaches Perspective and the Future

The women's soccer/softball complex built recently to improve equity on campus

Everyone has their own opinion on equality. The website Dictionary.com defines it as, “the state or quality of being equal; correspondence in quantity, degree, value, rank, or ability.”

Slippery Rock University defined equality in its latest Strategic Plan for Equality in three goals.

The first was to increase the revenue for athletic scholarships among both men and women. I guess you could call that value.

The second was to increase the budget for athletic facility operations, maintenance and upgrades, which would increase rank and ability.

The final was to develop a process that allows more flexibility to maximize resources to best fund all athletic programs. This somewhat falls under quantity.

It seems that the definition of equality in the dictionary is somewhat similar to what SRU looks to do with its athletics. Its strategic plan is to improve all athletics at the university.

Head coach of the women’s soccer team Noreen Herlihy said that she remembers when the campus was in a much different situation with Title IX where women's teams had to drive in vans to games and now they have buses with drivers that take them to games. That's just one of the improvements that she has seen in athletics overall at SRU.

Coach Herlihy discusses what she believes the intent of Title IX was at SRU and what she has seen firsthand. 

In our past part of the series we saw that when it comes to the student athlete on campus, women are very close to equal in receiving scholarships, and ahead of men in the amount of recruiting expenses they are given and the game day expenses.

When it comes to coaches, that equality swings the other way. An average of seven men’s hea coaches showed that the annual institutional salary is $49,638 and for female head coaches, the average is $44,299.

This is a difference of $5,339. Now, there are factors that must be examined such as the length of time that coaches have been on staffs but the raw data shows that male head coaches make more money at SRU than female head coaches.

When you examine the data of assistant coaches there is a swing in the opposite direction. Assistant female coaches make $20,866 on average where male assistants make $18,847, a difference of $2,019.

Once again it seems that while there are some differences between the amount of money given to males and females, equality from a numbers standpoint has been reached or is at least very close to being reached.

As Holly McCoy said in part two of this series about Slippery Rock being in great compliance with Title IX, coach Herlihy seems to agree and believes that the future of Title IX is one where equity will be reached, or at least always strived for, and even if Title IX was taken off the books that'd still be the case.

Herlihy discusses the future of Title IX