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Title IX and the Evolution of College Athletics with Ann-Marie Guglieri

Ann-Marie Guglieri, Executive Deputy Director and COO of Athletics at Yale, joined SOM’s Social Impact Lab during Title IX Awareness Week to lead a discussion on Title IX and important developments in college athletics.

Ann-Marie Guglieri
Ann-Marie Guglieri, Executive Deputy Director and COO of Athletics at Yale University.

Yale’s Ann-Marie Guglieri joined SOM’s Social Impact Lab during Title IX Awareness Week to lead a discussion on Title IX and important developments in college athletics. Ann-Marie is the Executive Deputy Director and COO of Athletics at Yale. Over lunch, she shared Title IX’s history, what it means today, and how it fits into the changing landscape of college athletics. As a former collegiate field hockey player at Syracuse University (’04), Ann-Marie shared that her scholarship allowed her to embark on an athletic career, a path not available to women for decades previously.

Ann-Marie began by describing the environment Title IX was born into over 50 years ago, where the aim was to “equalize the playing field for both genders.” Today, the challenges facing athletics are shifting away from blatant inequities such as disparities in funding, toward issues that are less clear-cut and harder to regulate. The group discussed some of these challenges, including acceptance of transgender athletes, collectives, and the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) ruling.

Title IX is falling behind on many of these challenges due to its inability to regulate beyond educational institutions. Collectives, as an example, are pools of alumni money that can be distributed to recruit student-athletes to certain schools. While Title IX has influence over the school, it cannot control or compete with collectives that may exist for men’s teams but not women’s teams. Similarly, Title IX does not govern collegiate athletic conferences or the NCAA, which has recently come under fire for inequity in treatment between men’s and women’s teams.

This discussion prompted lots of questions for Ann-Marie from the student and faculty audience about the arguments and misconceptions that arise around Title IX and gender in athletics, and how to restructure and reallocate resources to meet the challenges of the present day. The conversation also focused on the future of Title IX, for example, with respect to the emergence of women’s teams in predominantly men’s sports such as wrestling, and the potential impact of the recent movement toward unionization by the Dartmouth men’s basketball team.

“I think that will affect us tremendously,” Ann-Marie shared about the NIL ruling, which designates team members as employees, because “becoming an employee is a decision where precedent is set and you can’t go back on it.” Turning toward Yale Athletics, she reflected on their own decisions to promote equity, including making women’s hockey games free in order to reduce attendance barriers. (Despite their prowess not only at Yale but nationally, attendance at women’s hockey games is not as high as at the men’s games).

Overall, Ann-Marie’s ongoing engagement with student-athletes makes her hopeful about the direction of college athletics. “What’s exciting to me is that we are around a group of students that are more educated than they’ve ever been,” she said. “They can engage in building the future of athletics, answering the question, ‘Where is this road going to take us?’”