USA Today has a story about a male college athlete who’s challenging the NCAA’s eligibility rules that allow female athletes a one-year extension of eligibility for pregnancy.
The NCAA’s pregnancy exception states a school “may approve a one-year extension of the five-year period of eligibility for a female student for reasons of pregnancy.”
Butler’s case is the first time the NCAA’s pregnancy exception has been challenged by a male student athlete, the NCAA said.
“The pregnancy exception is explicitly written for female students whose physical condition due to pregnancy prevents their participation in intercollegiate athletics, and therefore is not applicable in this case,” NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson said last week when USA TODAY asked about the Butler case.
Note: it’s not an extension based on caring for a child, it’s an extension based on the physical changes a female athlete’s body goes through during pregnancy, which of course affect her athletic performance. Neither male nor female athletes get extensions based on caring for a child.
So, really, it’s hard to see how Butler will be at all successful in his case, since the rule applies specifically to pregnancy. Male athletes can continue training and competing all throughout their wives’ or girlfriends’ pregnancies, as well as through caring for a new infant, with no diminution of the level of their performance. A pregnant sprinter isn’t going to be able to run as fast as she did pre-pregnancy.
Currently, the NCAA allows athletes five years to complete four years of eligibility. While in many sports, this allows student-athletes who are benched due to injuries to take a season off with no effect on the total number of seasons played — because in most collegiate sports, athletes begin playing in their freshman years — football is different. Freshman football players are routinely redshirted for the first year in order to give them time to develop a little more physicially and to allow them to do the kind of physical conditioning that will help them avoid injury at the college level. So they typically have no wiggle room in their college careers; if they’re benched for injury, they lose a season.
Butler’s case is a bit more convoluted, and runs into issues of eligibility that are completely unrelated to whether or not female athletes get an extra year to complete their four seasons:
Coming out of high school in Leawood, Kansas, Butler and his wife, Chantel, originally planned to attend Northwest Missouri State but once Chantel learned she was pregnant and once the Butlers found out the school did not allow children in their dorms, they chose colleges close to home and shared caretaking responsibilities for their daughter.
Butler’s five-year eligibility clock began in 2001 when he enrolled at the local campus of DeVry University, which didn’t have collegiate sports. His five years expired after last season even though Butler played just two seasons of college football, in 2005 for the Jayhawks and in 2003 for Avila University, an NAIA school.
So Butler’s real problem is not that he can’t get an extra year because the deck is stacked unfairly towards female athletes, but that the NCAA clock started ticking for him even though he was at a school that didn’t even offer athletics.
THAT is his problem. Frankly, I can’t gin up a whole lot of sympathy for his situation since he chose to attack female athletes rather than the actual rule that started the clock running for him and came back to bite him. Or the fact that neither male nor female athletes — who are, for all intents and purposes, revenue generators and thus employees — can take parental leave.
Experts for the National Women’s Law Center say if eligibility is extended for child rearing, it should extend equally to men and women. If eligibility is extended because of the physical effects of pregnancy, then that obviously only applies only to female athletes.
“If athletic programs allow women to be redshirted for a period of child raising, then that is treatment that should also be extended to male team members who take leave from school for the same reason,” said Jocelyn Samuels, National Women’s Law Center senior vice president. “As a matter of social policy, that is a direction that the NCAA may want to consider. As a matter of social policy, to ensure that people can fulfill both their academic and their parental responsibilities would be a good thing.”
Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel of the National Women’s Law Center added, “But I see why you would want a separate rule for an athlete who is actually pregnant and going through the physical demands of a pregnancy vs. a more general provision. Pregnancy does provide its own physical limitations. Women would automatically need more time.”
Via Broadsheet.