A Division I women’s soccer student-athlete at Vanderbilt made history by competing in a football game at the Power 5 level
Athletics Veritas is a weekly series aimed at helping higher education executives, faculty, and other stakeholders stay tuned in on trending national issues impacting college athletics, especially NCAA Division I. Athletics Veritas is created by senior DI athletic administrators around the nation.
A History-Making Kickoff Refreshes Implications of NCAA Rules & Title IX
A Division I women’s soccer student-athlete at Vanderbilt made history by competing in a football game at the Power 5 level
NCAA Division I sport sponsorship requirements are defined, in part, by requiring member schools to offer a minimum number of sports by gender (with exceptions)
A team that includes both male and female student-athletes is considered a “mixed” team for NCAA sport sponsorship purposes
Student-athletes starting the academic year competing in one sport and switching over to play a second sport has potential financial aid implications, especially if football is one of the sports
A female student-athlete kicking for an all-male Division I football team has historical roots in Title IX litigation
One of the most positive and inspiring stories borne from this fall’s topsy-turvy college football season is the emergence of Sarah Fuller. As the NCAA reported, Fuller is an SEC champion in women's soccer and made college football history this weekend for Vanderbilt. Wearing No. 32 and with her parents in attendance, Fuller's historic kickoff to open the second half against Missouri made her the first female student-athlete to play in a major conference college football game. "It's just so exciting," Fuller told ESPN after the game. "The fact that I can represent the little girls out there who want to do this or thought about playing football or any sport really. And [I hope] it encourages them to be able to step out and do something big like this."
In addition to milestones of female athletes earning roster spots on college football teams or even competing in a college football game, females have received scholarship offers to play football at the college level. These offers have generally happened in the NAIA and junior college ranks. In one instance, a female football prospect earned a scholarship to play safety at an NAIA institution in Missouri. Interestingly, that female football prospect’s story was captured in a Toyota commercial campaign run during a Super Bowl. The use of her name, image, and likeness (NIL) while she was a prospect could have been an impediment to immediate NCAA eligibility had she signed and enrolled at an NCAA Division I school under current NIL rules. How the NIL rules evolve in the near future could result in more flexibility for prospects to utilize their NIL for compensation in more permissive ways while preserving their NCAA competition eligibility.
Sarah Fuller’s participation in football at Vanderbilt and other examples like hers provide us a learning opportunity to contextualize certain NCAA membership requirements and remind us of a pivotal Title IX case from twenty years ago.
Sarah Fuller’s participation in a Division I football game invokes two contextual components as they relate to NCAA bylaws. The first involves NCAA sport sponsorship requirements that pivot off of whether a team is comprised of a single gender or both males and females. The second addresses whether a student-athlete participating in two sports in the same academic year (Fuller competed for Vanderbilt women’s soccer earlier this fall) also presents potential NCAA team financial aid limit implications.
In its membership requirements, the NCAA defines a “mixed team” as a varsity intercollegiate sports team on which at least one individual of each gender competes. Technically speaking, Vanderbilt’s football team competed as mixed team on Saturday when Sarah Fuller suited up and kicked off for the Commodores. Although football bowl games exist outside the purview of NCAA championship policies, NCAA rules hold that a mixed team is only eligible to participate in NCAA male sport championships. In this instance, a female competing on a football team comprised of male student-athletes would not hinder that team’s ability to compete in a bowl game because, even as a mixed team, a football squad would be eligible for a bowl game.
Conversely, a male basketball student-athlete suiting up and competing with a Division I’s women’s basketball team otherwise composed exclusively of female student-athletes would cause that women’s basketball team to be a mixed-team and ineligible for the NCAA Division I women’s basketball tournament.
Division I institutions must meet a variety of sport sponsorship requirements including the three-season requirement which dictates that Division I member schools sponsor a sport in fall, winter, and spring. Specifically, an institution shall sponsor at least one sport involving an all-male team or a mixed team and at least one sport involving an all-female team in every sport season. An institution may use a sport to meet the three-season requirement only if the institution has met the minimum contests and participants requirements for sports sponsorship in that sport. Generally, Division I institutions sponsor multiple sports by gender each of the three seasons, but it’s noteworthy that a team that goes from female to mixed (due to the addition of a male athlete to an all-female team) has potential impacts on an institution’s sport sponsorship portfolio.
A student-athlete crossing over their participation from one sport to another in the same academic year could also have scholarship implications based on Division I’s scholarship hierarchy in Figure 15-3 (below). The hierarchy is in place, in part, to assure integrity in the team scholarship limits as to prevent Division I schools from “hiding” football players on a tennis, track, or soccer team, for example. For Sarah Fuller at Vanderbilt, she is listed as a senior who started the 2020-21 academic year with Vanderbilt’s women’s soccer team and, after competing for the football team in the last few weeks of the season, appears on track to graduate at Vanderbilt by the end of this academic year. She does appear to have at least one, possibly two, seasons of competition in women’s soccer available (she redshirted her freshman year), and she would appear to have the full complement of four seasons of football competition remaining because the NCAA granted blanket relief from normal application of seasons of competition rules to student-athletes competing in fall sports this year due to the pandemic.
NCAA financial aid rules have contemplated a situation, like Fuller’s, in which a student-athlete begins the academic year in one sport and changes directions and joins a different sport. Specifically, if a student-athlete changes sports during an academic year, the student-athlete's financial aid shall be counted in the maximum limitations for the first sport for the remainder of the academic year. If the student-athlete continues to receive financial aid, the award shall be counted the next academic year against the maximum limitations in the second sport.
A unique variable for Fuller is that football is one of the involved sports in her two-sport fall experience. Per NCAA rules, a student-athlete shall be counted as an initial counter in football during the year in which the student-athlete first becomes countable in that sport, regardless of whether countable financial aid was received previously for another sport. That caveat may mean Fuller needs to count against Vanderbilt football’s overall 85 counter limit this year (2020-21).
In the event Fuller must count toward Vanderbilt’s football scholarship limit of 85 this year, it is possible Vanderbilt had room under its limit anyway or, alternatively, the institution may have sought NCAA legislative relief from the football counter limit, if it was necessary. It is also possible Fuller is not on athletics aid at Vanderbilt and earned exempted honorary academic and/or need-based aid that prevented her from becoming a financial-aid counter.
Beyond the NCAA membership requirements implicated when a female student-athlete competes on an otherwise male team, such a scenario is examined in a distinct chapter in the history of Title IX and anti-discrimination litigation. In a 1999 case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the Fourth Circuit held that once Duke University had allowed a member of one sex to try out for a team of the other sex in a contact sport (e.g., football), a federal provision---that normally allows, in part, institutions to operate or sponsor separate teams for activities that constitute a contact sport---would no longer apply. The court further noted that, due to this nullification, the institution would be subject to anti-discrimination provisions.
The court noted that once Duke allowed the female athlete/plaintiff-appellant to try out for its football team (and actually made her a member of the team), then discriminated against her and ultimately excluded her from participation in the sport on the basis of her sex, the court held that the plaintiff-appellant had stated a claim under the applicable regulation, and therefore under Title IX.
The court took to heart Duke’s cautionary observation that in so holding for the plaintiff-appellant, the court would become “the first court in United States history to recognize such a cause of action.” However, the court further explained that once the university invites women into what the appellees characterized as the “traditionally all-male bastion of collegiate football,” the court was convinced that this reading of the regulation is the only one permissible under law. A summary of this case is available here.
Athletics Veritas is presented for information purposes only and should not be considered advice or counsel on NCAA compliance matters. For guidance on NCAA rules and processes, always consult your university’s athletics compliance office, conference office, and/or the NCAA.
