Mr. Steven Bilsky, here is the first step you need to take to get Penn closer to Title IX compliance: change the women's water polo team from club to varsity status.
Calm down, let me explain myself.
First, let's get this out of the way -- Penn should thank its lucky stars that Title IX is rarely enforced.
If it were, Athletic Director Bilsky would be the first to feel the heat for one of the worst gender discrepancies of student athletes in the Ivy League. Currently, Penn has nearly 200 more male athletes than its female counterparts.
So what can Penn Athletics do to close this glaring gap?
One option is to eliminate a men's team, ideally a large one. However, this would in almost any case mean bidding farewell to a team that has either been nationally ranked or won its league championship in recent memory, which could lead to Bilsky being thrown into the Schuylkill with the goalposts.
One men's team with a slipping record and attendance turnout is sprint football. However, sprint football has tradition on its side -- the program is classic, and it's refreshing that Penn isn't heartless enough to fire head coach Bill Wagner, who has been coaching Penn sprint football since the Nixon administration.
And besides, schools are often frowned upon in Title IX cases when they cut a men's team for compliance.
So the only logical option is to add -- make another women's varsity sport.
Penn is no stranger to this tactic -- it last added the women's golf team to boost its female varsity athlete figures.
Now it's time for another varsity sport, and it should be water polo.
Let's look at other women's club sports programs to see if there is a better fit.
The other logical selection would be women's ice hockey, which went to Nationals for the first time in its history this year.
Ice hockey was once a varsity sport at Penn, and it's very popular on most Ivy campuses. In fact, there are schools that follow their hockey teams closer than their [gasp] basketball teams.
Judging by the great programs of Ivy rivals like Cornell and Harvard, hockey certainly has fan appeal. Plus, hockey rosters are fairly large, and Penn has a rink on the eastern side of campus that you haven't visited since you bought your computer there freshman year.
However, Penn cut its hockey programs two decades ago for financial reasons, and that remains the reason why varsity hockey will not be brought back anytime soon.
Let's examine the water polo team, since I'm sure most of you haven't.
The Quakers finished second in their league last season and have finished this regular season 7-1. They once featured a former member of the Brazilian national team. They play in Sheerr Pool, a facility that will be maintained regardless of whether polo is played there or not. Thus, they are no extra burden in that respect, while keeping the Class of '23 Rink in shape and fully employed would be a huge investment.
And here's the kicker: their team is actually two players larger than the hockey team. This may not seem like much, but in the world of Penn gender equity, every little bit counts.
You might be asking, "Who would go to see water polo?" Hockey involves checking and fighting, but water polo women don't hold back either. Noses are bloodied, eyes are blackened -- the intensity can be palpable. Plus, the games are less than 30 minutes long, so it requires little fan time investment.
The Ivy League is big on water polo as well. Yale, Cornell, Brown, Princeton and Harvard all have squads and annual invitationals. The Bears are currently ranked in the national top 20, and the Tigers boasted impressive performances this season against University of California schools, where polo thrives.
In addition, this could be a good way to tap into the surprisingly large population of Penn students originally from the West Coast, who usually feel somewhat isolated on campus and bore their East Coast classmates with lamentations of the bright-skied Golden State. Water polo is intense in those parts, and promoting it could give the Californians an extra piece of home, while providing Penn with a springboard audience as the team develops.
Being an advocate of full disclosure, I will admit that I have a possible conflict of interest -- my girlfriend is a Penn polo goalie. However, making water polo a varsity sport would probably prevent a lot of the current club members from playing, which raises another question: does Penn want to kill a thriving club team?
Probably not, but it might be in its best interest to do so.
With the combination of a large roster, low costs and stellar athletes, a varsity water polo team is the best short-term solution for Penn Athletics to comply with Title IX. Obviously this solution is makeshift, and there is the much larger issue of getting schools to take gender equity seriously and not just see it as a chore they will ignore if not enforced.
Now there's a problem for which I have no solution.
