NSU does not have a football team and when they first come to the university, many students wonder why that is.
“An institution with 29,000 students, you would think would have a football team but athletic programs are determined by the size of the undergraduate population,” said George L. Hanbury II, Ph.D., NSU president. “There are only 2,000 first-time undergraduate students and of that, less than 1,000 live on campus.”
NSU’s undergraduate population has grown in the past ten years and it is projected that the number will double in the next five years. However, a larger undergraduate population is no the only thing needed to put together a football team. Due to Title IX, NSU would need more male than female students to justify having a mostly-male sport.
Title IX dictates that no school will discriminate on the basis of gender regarding financial aid, sports, housing, etc. Therefore, if a school’s population is mostly female, the school may not represent more males than females in its athletic programs.
“If we have 70 percent female and 30 percent male, we can’t have a greater representation of male over female sports,” said Hanbury.
This is the reason NSU has more female sports than male sports. Introducing a football program would throw off the gender balance created by these regulations. Hanbury said that it is not the nature or number of sports that matter, but rather the people participating in them. The university’s athletic program may include more female than male teams but if the total number of male athletes playing in those teams is more than the female athletes, the university would be violating Title IX.
For these reasons, Michael Mominey, director of athletics and head coach of men’s basketball, said, “NSU will not be and has not considered the addition of football to its athletic program.”
Integrating a football program would also mean moving from Division II of the National Collegiate Athletic Association to Division I. The move is something the administration does not favor entirely because of the different focus each division has.
Hanbury said, “Division II, contrary to Division I, emphasizes the student in studentathlete. Even in Division I, less than three percent of the student-athletes go on to play in professional [leagues], which means that 97 percent did not go on to play professional sports. But what was stressed on their four-year program? Is it going to be beneficial for the rest of their lives?”
To ensure NSU student-athletes focus on being students rather than athletes, Hanbury said, “The athletic department and the athletic director report to the provost to keep tabs on how the students are doing academically – don’t get me wrong, we love to see winning teams, but these are things we need to think about.”
