Showing posts with label Cheer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cheer. Show all posts

Friday, August 10, 2007

U of O Baseball & Cheer teams

The University of Oregon made an announcement earlier this summer that they would no longer have a wrestling team. This decision was made so the university could add a baseball team to their list of athletics. In an attempt to make the distribution of teams fair between the sexes, competitive cheerleading is also being added to the athletic teams. Both baseball and cheerleading will be given an equal number of scholarships to be given to team members, but that is where the equality ends. The baseball team will be operating with a budget of almost $250,000 a year more than the cheerleading team, and between 5-10 million dollars is going to be spent to build a new baseball stadium for the team. The decisions being made by the school, and the athletic department are unfair. They are supporting the male sporting events with extra funding and media coverage, while choosing a less expensive female sport to add in a botched attempt at equality. U of O already has a cheerleading squad, and with the addition of this new competitive cheer team, they will be one of only a handful of schools with both. This is not a good use of money to promote what females can do as athletes, and it is an obvious attempt to try and not seem sexist in their choices. As a duck I am disgusted at these choices.