Title IX Revisited ft. Nancy Hogshead-Makar

Summary

Nancy Hogshead-Makar — 1984 Olympic swimming champion (three gold, one silver), attorney, civil rights lawyer, and founder/CEO of Champion Women — provides a comprehensive briefing on Title IX as it applies to parents of junior and college athletes. The episode covers two dimensions: athletic equity (equal facilities, scholarships, medical care, and treatment for men’s and women’s programs) and athlete protection from sexual harassment and abuse. Hogshead-Makar uses her own experience as an elite athlete — including being raped at Duke University and discovering her final coach was molesting a 16-year-old teammate — to ground the legal discussion in personal reality. She introduces Champion Women’s TitleIXSchools.com (which audits 2,100 schools for compliance) and provides concrete behavioral rules parents can teach athletes to protect themselves before abuse occurs. This is one of the most substantively important episodes in the ParentingAces catalog for families navigating the junior-to-college pathway.

Guest Background

Nancy Hogshead-Makar was the number-one-ranked swimmer in the world at age 14 and competed elite for eight years, training up to 20,000 yards per day plus running and weightlifting from age 12. She won three gold medals and a silver at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. She was raped during her sophomore year at Duke University and subsequently red-shirted with full scholarship support. Her coach at the end of her career, Mitch Ivey, was molesting a 16-year-old teammate — an experience she only retrospectively recognized as abuse. She later earned a law degree and founded Champion Women (ChampionWomen.org), which has been responsible for successful Title IX litigation against the University of Iowa, Michigan State, William & Mary, Dartmouth, and Fresno State, among others. Sports Illustrated named her one of the most influential people in the history of Title IX.

Key Findings

1. Title IX Covers Far More Than Scholarships — It Is a Comprehensive Anti-Discrimination Statute

Title IX requires schools receiving federal funds (which includes virtually every school in the country through student loan programs) to treat men and women equally across all educational programs, including sports. Athletic equity under Title IX means equal facilities, equipment, medical care, travel, coaching, booty bags, and all conditions of participation — not just scholarship dollars. Hogshead-Makar cites the 2021 NCAA women’s basketball tournament as a textbook Title IX violation: workout facilities, meals, merchandise, and medical care were dramatically inferior for women. Champion Women was investigating whether NCAA member schools ceded enough authority to the NCAA to make the NCAA liable under Title IX.

2. The NCAA Stopped Requiring Title IX Compliance Certification Under Mark Emmert

Under Mark Emmert’s NCAA presidency, the organization eliminated the requirement that member schools demonstrate progress toward gender equality as a condition of membership. This effectively removed a key accountability mechanism — previously called “certification.” Hogshead-Makar’s organization, Champion Women, fills this gap by maintaining TitleIXSchools.com, a public database of 2,100 schools (including community colleges and NAIA programs) showing gender equity gaps in scholarships, participation opportunities, and treatment. Example: UNC Chapel Hill needed to add 362 participation opportunities for women and $6.5 million in scholarship dollars.

3. Real Enforcement Comes Only from Current Athletes Filing Legal Actions

The Office of Civil Rights (within the Department of Education) is the federal enforcement mechanism for Title IX, but is described as politically constrained and largely ineffective at producing systemic change. The only reliable enforcement comes from current student-athletes who file complaints or lawsuits. Champion Women builds communities around these cases to make it safe for athletes to hire lawyers and bring legal action — and crucially, ensures the resulting settlements don’t just fix the specific complaint but require comprehensive reform of the athletic department.

4. Club Tennis and Private Academies Are NOT Protected by Title IX

Title IX only applies to institutions receiving federal funds. Club sports programs, private academies, and community tennis organizations are outside Title IX’s scope. Parents who assume their child has the same legal protection in a private tennis academy as in a school program are wrong. This distinction is particularly important for junior tennis, where much elite development happens in private academy settings where coaches may be the top of the power hierarchy with no institutional accountability structure.

5. Three Behavioral Rules That Protect Athletes from Abuse

Hogshead-Makar provides three concrete, teachable rules:

1. Observable and interruptible: Coaches should never be alone with an athlete — they can be away from others, but must remain observable and interruptible at all times.
2. No individual texting: Coaches should only text athletes with a parent on the chain or the whole team on the chain; no individual private communications.
3. No gifts: An ethical coach will never give an athlete a gift, regardless of performance or occasion.

These rules work because they establish a hair-trigger alert system long before inappropriate touching occurs, giving athletes language to name and report boundary violations early in the grooming process.

6. Grooming Is Premeditated and Targets Elite Athletes Specifically

International Olympic Committee research shows that the more elite the athlete, the more likely they are to be abused by someone within their entourage. Hogshead-Makar explains why: elite athletes have an intense experience of giftedness, flow, and specialness that makes them particularly receptive to “you’re special, I love you” language that is a core grooming tool. She emphasizes that grooming is premeditated — it is not an accidental slide into inappropriate relationships, but a calculated process. The symptom parents most commonly describe is not depression or moodiness but the athlete being happy and feeling specially chosen.

7. The Mandatory Reporter Architecture Within the USTA Structure

Champion Women was responsible for passing legislation making members of the Olympic movement (including USTA members) mandatory reporters — they must report suspected abuse to both law enforcement and the US Center for SafeSport. Parents can search any coach’s name at the US Center for SafeSport website to check whether they have been investigated. This architecture does not extend to private tennis academies or community programs outside the USTA/Olympic structure.

8. Title IX Protects Against Peer-on-Peer Sexual Violence, Not Just Coach Abuse

Twenty percent of US Center for SafeSport complaints involve peer athletes rather than coach perpetrators. Title IX applies to peer sexual violence in school settings the same way it applies to coach abuse — schools have a responsibility to prevent it, investigate it when reported, and ameliorate its educational impact. Hogshead-Makar shares her own rape at Duke as an example of a school responding appropriately: housing relocation, dropped classes without academic penalty, specialized parking, counseling, and red-shirt status with full scholarship maintained.

Actionable Advice for Families

• Teach your athlete the three bright-line rules (observable/interruptible, no individual texting, no gifts) as early as age seven — these rules work because they give athletes the ability to name and report boundary crossings before abuse escalates
• Search every coach’s name at the US Center for SafeSport website before entrusting your child to them, particularly in private academy or club settings where Title IX protections do not apply
• Check your child’s school or college on TitleIXSchools.com (Champion Women’s public database) to understand their institutional compliance before selecting a college; at the college level, report equity violations to the school’s Title IX coordinator or directly to the Office of Civil Rights

INTENNSE Relevance

• Mixed-gender roster and Title IX literacy: INTENNSE’s mixed-gender roster structure is novel in professional tennis — the league should proactively develop clear equity policies that go beyond what Title IX requires, treating gender equity as a competitive differentiator rather than a compliance floor
• Coach-athlete conduct policy: Hogshead-Makar’s three behavioral rules (observable/interruptible, no individual texting, no gifts) should be codified in INTENNSE’s coach-athlete conduct policy — the mic’d-coach format puts coaches in sustained, visible contact with players, making clear conduct standards essential for both protection and broadcast integrity
• Institutional accountability structure: INTENNSE should build the accountability ecosystem that private academies lack — a formal reporting chain, conduct standards, and investigation protocols that give players, coaches, and staff clear recourse, independent of any external regulator
• Broadcast framing of gender equity: The NCAA women’s basketball treatment disparity was a public scandal in 2021 — INTENNSE’s mixed-gender pay and resource parity can be positioned as a deliberate answer to that failure, providing broadcast and media narrative differentiation
• Player trust in the league: The research Hogshead-Makar cites — that elite athletes are MORE likely to be abused within their entourage — underscores that INTENNSE players at the professional level are in an elevated risk category; league culture and policy should actively counter the power-imbalance dynamics that enable abuse, not merely comply with baseline requirements
• Athlete safety as recruitment signal: Young professional players choosing between INTENNSE and other opportunities will note whether the league has transparent, enforced athlete safety policies — this is increasingly a factor in career decisions, particularly for women

Notable Quotes

“Coaches shall not have romantic and sexual relationships with the athletes they coach, regardless of age or consent.”

“A good coach, an ethical coach, will never try to be alone with you.”

“The number one symptom that parents tell me — how they figured out their kid was being abused — was not that the kid was morose or really moody. It was the kid was happy that the coach had told them, ‘You’re not like the other girls. You’re special. I love you.’”

“Actually, being elite is a risk factor. There’s research from the International Olympic Committee showing that the more elite the athlete, the more likely they are to be abused from someone within their own entourage.”

“We can’t allow sport to be the vehicle where a kid gets abused, and parents naturally would expect that their kid would be as protected in a club program as they are in a school. And that’s not true at all.”

“You want a hair on the back of the neck of the athlete to go up long before good touch, bad touch.”