Kasic Talks Roster Caps & Civil Rights

Roster "management" strategies work in two ways - toward one goal.

Male sports' rosters are capped, meaning that outstanding walk-ons are told "Thanks, but no thanks. Check with intramurals."

Women's rosters are inflated, meaning that some athletes listed on a roster may have little or no experience and may not actually practice/compete.

Both methods help athletic departments achieve gender equity - at least on paper.

Ah, the beauty of proportionality...

Read more from Allison Kasic of the Independent Women's Forum here.

This article presents a good example of roster management at work at Boise State, complete with a great definition of the practice: "Roster management entails promoting walk-on opportunities in women's sports and limiting men's rosters to the minimum necessary to compete for championships."

Kasic has also posted on the fight to save Delaware's men's track program. Read more here.

Seems the government may actually investigate a claim of gender discrimination against - get this - men!

This will be interesting to watch. I've seen examples of men's teams unsuccessfully sue schools to try and get their programs reinstated, but this is the first time that I can remember the government investigating a school on Title IX grounds on behalf of a men's team. If nothing else, the investigation should produce more information about the process that led to the school's decision to cut the programs -- a decision that obviously wasn't publicly debated,as it caught those involved completely off-guard. Stay tuned.


On the subject of UD track, the university denies it intentionally blocked the track team's Save UD site. Read more here.

Wall told The Review Thursday that several people had informed him they could not access the site. He said he confirmed it by testing several locations on campus and by accessing his site logs, which showed there had been no visitors from the university network since April 4.

Tests by The Review also confirmed the site was not accessible from campus. A reporter sitting in Kirkbride Hall Thursday afternoon tried, but failed, to access the site. But moments later, the reporter successfully accessed it using a proxy server, a third-party website designed to help users bypass content filters.

"I was very upset today," Wall said Thursday night. "I just don't think the university has a right to do that. They can block explicit material like porn [...] but a blog, voicing an opinion they feel is against them? To me that violates freedom of speech."

Contacted by The Review Friday morning, university spokesman David Brond said the site was blocked April 3 by an automatic process meant to keep spammers and hackers off of the university network.

"The IP address the website is part of tried to contact 11,000 people on this campus," Brond said. "Immediately, automatically our server said, ‘It must be a hacker.' It didn't even know it was saveud.com."

Brond became aware of the site Friday when he received a Google News Alert about a post on the site regarding the federal investigation. When he visited it, he saw another post accusing the university of blocking the site.

He viewed the site and instructed IT personnel to manually override the block.

"It was never a conscious decision to block this," Brond said, adding that several IP addresses are automatically blocked every week.

Although the site is now accessible on campus, Wall said he remains skeptical of Brond's explanation.

"I'm not going to take the university's word for that," he said. "It's definitely possible, but I'm not convinced."

Gotta love the trend. Investigative journalism being used to shine a little light on the subject. If Josh Shannon hadn't done a little research for this story, do you think they'd have acted so quickly? At all?

It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you, right?

The First Amendment isn't what it used to be...

Edited 4/26:

Artist asked that I remove cartoon that was here. No problem.