Student Scholarship Addresses Contact Sports Exception

I recently came across two student-written articles that critically examine Title IX's contact sports exception -- the regulatory provision that requires schools allow cross-over tryouts, (e.g., a girl trying out for a boys' team, when there is no girls' team in that sport) but only when the sport is not a contact sport.

Jessica Constance Caggiano's note in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review criticizes the exception as both the product of a contributor to stereotyped notions about girls' and women's physicality and athleticism. She calls for a policy change that would eliminate this limitation.

Marielle Elisabet Dirkx's comment in the Mississippi Law Journal addresses the unconstitutionality of the contact sports exception in light of courts' decisions that prohibiting cross-over participation violates the Equal Protection Clause when it is based on over-generalization and stereotypes.

These articles are:

Jessica Constance Caggiano, Girls Don't Just Wanna Have Fun: Moving Past Title IX's Contact Sports Exception, 72 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 119 (2010).

Marielle Elisabet Dirkx, Calling an Audible: The Equal Protection Clause, Cross-over Cases, and the Need to Change Title IX Regulations, 80 Miss. L.J. 411 (2010).

Default was not "consequence" of Title IX

There were a lot of issues/controversies raised by last week's story about a male high school wrestler who defaulted his match rather than wrestle a girl. Religion, violence, gender roles. Title IX was not one of them. Why? Because of the contact sport exception.
So I was surprised to read a blog post on the Chicago Tribune website Chicago Now entitled "The Unforeseen Consequences of Title IX" by Kirk Mango. Note that the title is pretty ubiquitous. Opponents of Title IX use it all the time to talk about a myriad of issues. But the post colon blog title "Top Iowa High School Wrestler Defaults, Won't Face Girl" was a little surprising. Because, again, Title IX does not require integration of teams when the sport is a contact sport. And as Joel Northrup pointed out when he issued a statement about his default to Cassy Hekelman, wrestling is a contact sport.
Girls have gained access to wrestling either because they have just been allowed to participate or because they have sought legal remediation under either an individual state's equal rights amendment or the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
But no one seems to be writing pieces titled The Unforeseen Consequences of Equal Protection.
For more on this I highly recommend Dr. Sarah Fields's book Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America. She specifically addresses the legal and cultural controversies girls' wrestling has engendered.
So I hope Mr. Mango picks up Fields's book. As someone who in involved in promotion of youth sports (he has a website called Becoming a True Champion about empowering individual athletes) he--and all who work in youth through intercollegiate sports--should know what Title IX does and does not do.

2/24 UPDATE: Mr. Mango has changed his post to reflect the fact that Title IX was not a factor in the integration of wrestling. This is the new post.