Behind them, in the women's basketball locker room at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, is a solid-maple wall painted to look exactly like the basketball court here in Bud Walton Arena. A hot tub burbles quietly next to the team's showers around the corner. And it's not a bad definition, if you have the money Arkansas does. Thanks to the success of the Razorbacks' football and men's basketball teams, the university can afford to treat female athletes as well as it treats men. I institutions with separate men's and women's athletics departments.
Women never play second fiddle.
Across the country, institutions in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association made modest progress in women's athletics in 1998-99, according to The Chronicle' s annual survey of participation and financial trends in college sports. Data gathered from 311 institutions show small gains in the proportion of athletes who are women, the amount of scholarship money they receive, their coaches' salaries, and their budgets for recruiting and operating expenses. While women's sports are clearly on the rise across the board, the rate of growth varies widely among the different kinds of colleges in Division I. Wealthy sports programs can subsidize new opportunities and greater spending for women, but those without revenue-producing football and basketball teams lag. And the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. A visit to Arkansas's four Division I universities illustrates those trends.