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| From the issue dated May 26, 2006 |
What Athletes Can Expect When They're Expecting
Many colleges are ill prepared for pregnant athletes and some players suffer as a result
Table: Colleges' policies toward pregnant athletes
Article: A Pregnant Cause
Article: Havens for Students Who Give Birth
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As Connie Neal toiled through preseason basketball training in August 2003, she knew that something wasn't right with her body.
The University of Louisville athlete soon discovered why: She was four months pregnant.
The news sent her mind spinning: Would she lose her scholarship? What if she had to give up the sport she loved? What judgments would she face as a 20-year-old unwed mother?
Over the next few months, even as she slowly gained weight, she kept her pregnancy a secret. She avoided a trip to the doctor, wore sweats to conceal her slightly bulging stomach, and forced herself to stay in step with teammates, lifting weights, diving for balls, and running up and down the steps of the 18,865-seat Freedom Hall arena.
Finally, after a three-hour practice at the end of her eighth month, she felt sharp pains in her stomach — early contractions, she would later learn. It was time to reveal her secret.
Ms. Neal stayed silent for so long in part because she didn't know what would happen to her scholarship.
Louisville, like many other colleges, does not have a written policy for dealing with athletes who become pregnant. Some universities are establishing such policies, but others are often unprepared when female athletes discover they are pregnant. When universities do not have a policy, their pregnant athletes are left wondering how long they can keep competing, whether they will lose their scholarships, and if they will be allowed to continue competing after they have the baby. Sometimes those uncertainties lead athletes to withdraw from college or have abortions.
Colleges that are not prepared also expose themselves to potential lawsuits. One former pregnant athlete sued her college over how she was treated, winning a financial settlement and forcing the college to establish a written pregnancy policy.
The issue has caught the attention of women's rights organizations. Next month the Women's Sports Foundation plans to release a recommended policy to protect pregnant athletes from discrimination. Donna Lopiano, the executive director, urges athletics departments to establish policies that preserve opportunities for pregnant athletes.
As the number of women who play college sports continues to rise, the odds are that some of them will become pregnant during their playing days, says David S. Cohen, a staff attorney at the Women's Law Project, a nonprofit advocacy group.
When that happens, colleges owe it to women to treat them properly, he says: "It's important for student-athletes, if they want to continue their pregnancy, to not feel like they're going to be punished for it."
Paucity of Policies
It is hard to know how many college athletes become pregnant every year. Many college officials say the number is low, but no one keeps such statistics. Athletes and athletics officials agree, however, that pregnancies happen more often than most people realize.
Over the past couple of decades, three or four athletes at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, have become pregnant. One of them, Stephanie Mahle Davis, discovered that she was pregnant in 2001, the summer before her sophomore year. Ms. Davis, a soccer player, told her coach soon after she learned the news. At the time, the university did not have a pregnant-athlete policy, and she lost her scholarship for the year.
Two years later, Michael Cusack, Wright State's athletics director, decided that a policy was needed. He asked Elizabeth Sorensen, a nursing professor and a faculty athletics representative, to investigate what other colleges were doing.
She didn't find much. After combing the Internet and calling other colleges, she turned up only a handful of policies. Some agreements protect the scholarships of pregnant players for at least a year and require the athletes to notify their coaches as soon as they learn they are pregnant. Other policies state bluntly that if a player becomes pregnant, she will be dismissed from her team.
In many student-athlete handbooks, the only mention of pregnancy is a statement limiting the college's liability for any medical problems a pregnant athlete may have.
The paucity of policies troubled Ms. Sorensen, a former gymnast at Ohio State University.
By not having policies that protect scholarships, "institutions create environments where women athletes are not going to feel safe revealing they're pregnant," she says. "They're going to suffer the psychological trauma of it silently, or they're going to drop out of college."
Ms. Sorensen also discovered that the National Collegiate Athletic Association does not offer colleges much guidance about how to handle pregnant athletes. The NCAA has a sports-medicine handbook, which describes some of the risks and benefits of allowing pregnant athletes to participate in intercollegiate athletics. The book says, for example, that women who exercise during their pregnancies may experience easier labor, but that activities that pose the risk of falling should be avoided. The association's bylaws state that if an athlete becomes pregnant, she is allowed a sixth year of athletics eligibility. However, NCAA rules also allow colleges to strip scholarships from athletes who voluntarily withdraw from their sports.
"Athletes shoot themselves in the foot if they say, 'I'm pregnant, I can't compete anymore,'" says Ms. Sorensen. "If the only way you can pay for college is that you have athletic talent, and that financial aid gets taken away from you, how do you stay in school?"
When she created a pregnant-athlete policy at Wright State, Ms. Sorensen included language to protect athletes' scholarships for their current year of eligibility and to encourage women to seek help from the university rather than conceal their pregnancies.
The policy specifies that a pregnant athlete should not voluntarily withdraw from her sport. Instead she is encouraged to notify her coach and trainers, who are supposed to advise her to seek counseling outside of the athletics department. Wright State's policy lists several places where pregnant athletes can turn, including the campus women's center, which has expertise in helping students make decisions about whether to end their pregnancies, whether to put the baby up for adoption, and whether to continue playing their sports.
Since establishing the policy, in 2004, Wright State officials do not know of any athletes who have become pregnant. But if a player finds out she is pregnant — and decides to both proceed with the pregnancy and participate in college sports — the university will establish a support group for her.
The group, which would consist of the athlete's coach, a trainer, and a health-care professional, would monitor each pregnant athlete's health and academic progress, and help ease her return to the playing field. Depending on the sport, pregnant athletes are allowed to continue training and competing up to 14 weeks into the pregnancy with a doctor's approval.
Such procedures would have comforted Ms. Davis, the former Wright State soccer player, when she discovered she was pregnant.
"Having a policy in place, then you know it's happened to other people," says Ms. Davis, who returned to the team for three more years, with her scholarship, after taking a season off during her pregnancy. "You have somewhere else to turn besides, 'Oh no, I have to quit.'"
Speaking Out
After developing the policy at Wright State, Ms. Sorensen took her concerns to the NCAA. In mid-2003 she sent a proposal to the association, asking it to change its bylaws to treat pregnancy as a protected medical condition for which a scholarship may not be revoked. The NCAA received her proposal but has not changed its rules.
An NCAA spokeswoman says the association believes that its sports-medicine guidelines provide colleges with adequate recommendations for dealing with pregnant athletes.
Ms. Sorensen continues to believe that the NCAA — and colleges — should do more to protect pregnant players. She has spoken at conferences and meetings to encourage more universities to establish such policies.
Some colleges are heeding her advice. About a dozen have contacted her for information about Wright State's policy, she says. In the past few years, at least five colleges have used that information to help set up policies of their own (see table on Page A41).
After two athletes at the University of Illinois at Chicago became pregnant during the 2003-4 academic year, Dennis Wills, the associate athletics director, sought Ms. Sorensen's assistance.
In the past, pregnancies were handled differently by each coach. Now Chicago has a policy very similar to Wright State's, Mr. Wills says, specifying that every pregnant athlete is to be treated the same way.
One key part of the plan: Once an athlete becomes pregnant, several members of the athletics department will form a team to help her make decisions.
Faith-based colleges have a particular incentive to develop policies. Officials of the University of Detroit Mercy tailored parts of Wright State's policy to meet the Jesuit college's own needs. While Wright State's policy offers the options of keeping the baby or having an abortion, Detroit Mercy's policy avoids any mention of abortion but includes steps for counseling and protecting the athlete's scholarship for that year of eligibility.
"The policy is meant to be as objective as possible," says Omar Wang, the university's director of sports medicine. "Obviously we would like for the student-athlete to have the child and use adoption as an option. But that's not stated in the policy."
Discrimination Claims
Administrators at many colleges say they do not need a policy on how to treat pregnant athletes. But without a written plan, some colleges have faced legal disputes over the issue.
In early 2003, Tara Brady, a former basketball player at Sacred Heart University who got pregnant, sued the Connecticut university for discrimination, claiming that her coach had told her to go home for the semester because her pregnancy would be a "distraction" to the team.
According to the lawsuit, Ms. Brady had requested a "medical redshirt," a status like that given to injured athletes, to allow her an additional year of eligibility. But she claimed that her coach never redshirted her, and that the university revoked her scholarship. Under the terms of the eventual settlement, no Sacred Heart official can comment on the matter.
Ms. Brady withdrew from classes but remained in Fairfield, Conn., and attended home games. She noticed that she was listed in a game program as a medical redshirt, even though she was not receiving any benefits.
After she spoke with C. Donald Cook, Sacred Heart's athletics director, and with a compliance officer, the university reinstated her full scholarship. Ms. Brady returned to the team but later asserted that the coach refused to speak to her and prohibited her from attending a scrimmage. After that, Ms. Brady left the university.
Sacred Heart settled the lawsuit in the fall of 2003. According to a news release, the university admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to add a pregnancy policy to its student-athlete handbook. The policy now in place encourages pregnant athletes to remain on their teams, and protects the athletes' scholarships for the academic years in which they are pregnant. The policy also states that athletes "will not be retaliated against because of their incapacity."
Breaking the News
When Connie Neal, the Louisville basketball player, finally broke down and told her coach, Tom Collen, about her pregnancy, he was "shocked," he says now. He couldn't believe that Ms. Neal could have played so well when she was eight months pregnant.
Mr. Collen notified the team's trainer, who drove Ms. Neal to the emergency room. At the hospital, doctors gave her an injection to stop the contractions.
Mr. Collen assured her that she could keep her scholarship and come back to the team whenever she was ready.
But first she had some big decisions to make. For months, Ms. Neal says, she had been in denial, avoiding the decisions that she would have to make once she had the baby. When she finally confronted them, she worried that she could not handle going to college full time with a baby at home.
She considered adoption. But after a visit to the doctor — where she got a clean bill of health and learned that she was going to have a girl — she knew right away that she wanted to keep her daughter.
Having a good support network helped her do that. Her teammates, who heard the news after the coach did, threw her a surprise baby shower, and she moved back in with her mother and stepfather, who live 20 minutes from campus.
In early 2004, after 5 hours and 44 minutes of labor, she delivered a healthy baby girl, Carsynn Neal.
Three weeks later, with her doctor's blessing, Ms. Neal returned to the gym. Six weeks after giving birth, she was back in uniform for the Conference USA tournament, although she did not play.
This spring Ms. Neal completed her senior season. But Louisville still does not have a policy for pregnant athletes. Tom Jurich, the athletics director, says pregnancies are such an unusual occurrence among Cardinals athletes that the university does not need such a policy.
Ms. Neal says she doesn't know whether she would have come forward sooner had she known that Louisville would let her keep her scholarship. But she does say pregnant athletes would be more likely to come forward if their colleges had such policies.
This month Ms. Neal graduated from Louisville. She has an internship at a local advertising agency and expects to stay in town, to be near her family.
She also wants to remain close to Louisville's women's basketball program. Many of her good friends still play for the Cardinals, and her daughter, who is now 2 years old, likes to chant with the cheerleaders. Carsynn, once a secret kept from the team, has become a beloved mascot.
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COLLEGES' POLICIES TOWARD PREGNANT ATHLETES A growing number of universities are establishing policies to deal with pregnant athletes. The University of California at Davis and Butler University are developing policies, while at least six other colleges have recently established plans. Below is a sampling of policies.
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Section: Athletics
Volume 52, Issue 38, Page A41