— The passage of Title IX in the 1970s has provided female athletes with many opportunities over the past four decades. However, the legislation has also required athletic administrators to engage in a balancing act, allowing women’s sports to grow while also eliminating some top-notch men’s programs at times to reach equity.

Two collegiate programs in the Johnstown area have achieved significant success as a result of the benefits provided by Title IX.

St. Francis University in Loretto now has 22 athletic programs, 13 of them for women and nine for men. The Red Flash compete at the NCAA Division I level in the Northeast Conference, and their women’s teams started that level of competition in 1985.

The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown now features 12 athletic programs – seven women’s and five men’s. They now compete in NCAA Division II.

Title IX requires schools to provide similar opportunities for female and male athletes. Passed in 1972 as part of the Education Act, it was made applicable to athletics in 1975.

Both St. Francis and Pitt-Johnstown have used Title IX to achieve outstanding success in women’s basketball. St. Francis, which currently has 1,746 undergraduate students and 2,398 total, captured nine Northeast Conference tournament championships in 10 years from 1996-2005 under head coaches Jenny Przekwas and Myndi Hill. That success led to their being labeled a “small-college basketball dynasty” at the Division I level.

Frank Pergolizzi was the athletic director who started the St. Francis run. He hired Przekwas in 1991.

After working hard to become competitive, the Red Flash finally started that championship run in 1996.

In addition to St. Francis, Pergolizzi has served as athletic director at Eastern Tennessee State and Southeastern Louisiana State, and currently holds that position at West Virginia University Institute of Technology.

Pergolizzi attributes the success at St. Francis to a number of reasons.

“Certainly, hiring (Prezkwas) was the critical part of the success since she was the right coach at the right time,” Pergolizzi said. “After that, we just tried to give her the resources to have a fighting chance.”

St. Francis has added to that championship record as the Red Flash won two NEC titles in the past three years under former coach Susan Robinson Fruchtl.

Pitt-Johnstown became a Division II power under Jodi Gault, who coached there from 1982-2007. The Mountain Lions captured regional championships in 1987 and 1988, advancing to the Final Four in 1987.

Pitt-Johnstown Athletic Director Pat Pecora has coached wrestling at the school for the past 36 years. His teams have recorded tremendous success, winning two NCAA Division II national championships (1996, 1999) and 20 regional championships. Since 2008, he has also served as Pitt-Johnstown’s athletic director, leading the programs in achieving equity during that time.

He explained how the current system that is used to determine whether or not institutions are complying with the NCAA dictates works.

“Title IX has a three-pronged system: The first prong is proportionality, which means that your athletics numbers basically have to reflect the percentage of distribution of male and female at your institution,” Pecora said.

“We are very rare in that our numbers actually comply with Title IX on the first prong. We are the only school in (the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Association) who does comply with the first prong.”

The other two prongs of Title IX include whether male and female athletes are receiving equivalent treatment, benefits, and opportunities regarding facilities, and whether or not the interests and abilities of male and female students are equally effectively accommodated.

Title IX is controversial with some men’s coaches and male athletes.

For instance, in order to close a $2 million shortfall in their athletic budget earlier this year, Slippery Rock University dropped two women’s sports and five men’s sports. After some female athletes filed a lawsuit in federal district court earlier this year, the university was required to reinstate the two women’s sports, swimming and water polo, because their elimination violated Title IX regulations. The school did not have to reinstate the dropped men’s programs.

Pecora explained that Title IX has been very positive for women’s athletics. However, the rules do have an impact on some men’s programs, although not at Pitt-Johnstown.

“You always have these unintended consequences,” Pecora said. “Over the years, universities were put into a position that you have to comply with one of these three prongs. The whole premise was to expand the opportunities for women, and that is what everyone is trying to do. But, what happens in the unintended consequences is that if you put a lot of effort into trying to expand the opportunities, but if the numbers and the interest are just not there to do that, then you have to cut to comply with it.”

Pergolizzi has worked to bring four different academic institutions into compliance, each with varying student bodies.

“It depends on the institution. It is a challenge since you have to look at what percentage of the student body is male to female, and you try to get the proportionality as close to that as possible,” he said. “When you have more females at an institution, that makes it more difficult to bring it to the same level as males.”

Pitt-Johnstown is moving in a positive direction, Pecora said. “(President) Dr. (Jem) Spectar is very, very supportive of our efforts. Over the past three or four years, we have ensured that we have scholarship money in all the sports, at least some. We are not fully funded in everything, but when I first came into the position, we had scholarship money in just three sports,” he said.

The process of building a successful program can take time.

“When we hired Jenny (Przekwas), the women’s program was not funded at the same level as the men’s was,” Pergolizzi said. “What we did was put together a multi-year plan to gradually increase the number of scholarships and the size of the coaching staff. That happened over a three-year period. One of the problems at St. Francis is that at that time, approximately 60 percent of the students were women. That makes it harder to achieve proportionality.”

The Title IX birthday is certainly celebrated by female athletes and coaches, but it still remains controversial because of the balancing act that some call establishing “quotas.”

For Pitt-Johnstown and St. Francis, the schools both have solid men’s programs while allowing the women to reach pinnacles of success that may not have been possible without the legislation.