Sports
The Southeastern Conference sponsors championships in nine men's and twelve women's sports.
- Baseball – Men's
- Basketball – Men's
- Basketball – Women's
- Cross-country – Men's (except South Carolina)
- Cross-country – Women's
- Football
- Equestrian – Women's (Auburn, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas A&M only)
- Golf – Men's
- Golf – Women's
- Gymnastics – Women's (Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, and Missouri only)
- Indoor track and field – Men's
- Indoor track and field – Women's
- Outdoor track and field – Men's (except Vanderbilt)
- Outdoor track and field – Women's
- Soccer – Women's
- Softball – Women's (except Vanderbilt)
- Swimming and diving – Men's (except Arkansas, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, and Vanderbilt)
- Swimming and diving – Women's (except Mississippi State and Ole Miss)
- Tennis – Men's
- Tennis – Women's
- Volleyball – Women's (except Vanderbilt)
Under SEC conference rules reflecting the large number of male scholarship participants in football and attempting to address gender equity concerns (see also Title IX), each member institution is required to provide two more women's varsity sports than men's. The equivalent rule was recently adopted by the NCAA for all of Division I.
The SEC will sponsor a team championship in women's equestrian (performance horseback riding) for the first time during the 2012–13 athletic year. Currently, four SEC members—Auburn, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas A&M—sponsor equestrian; these four teams have combined to win the last eleven national equestrian championships.
While South Carolina and Kentucky field men's soccer teams, the conference does not sponsor the sport; both schools joined Conference USA for men's soccer in 2005. Conference USA also hosts the University of Alabama and the University of Tennessee as single-sport members for women's rowing, which the SEC does not sponsor. Florida and Vanderbilt both have women's lacrosse teams, and those teams compete in the single-sport American Lacrosse Conference. In rifle, a sport officially classified by the NCAA as a men's sport but with fully coeducational competition, Kentucky (coed) and Ole Miss (women only) are members of the single-sport Great America Rifle Conference.
Missouri is the only member to currently sponsor wrestling, in which it is a member of the Mid-American Conference. The SEC sponsored wrestling from 1970 to 1979, but discontinued the sport after the 1979 season. No other SEC member has sponsored the sport since LSU discontinued its program in 1985 in order to comply with the gender equity requirements of Title IX.
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Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“In the past, it seemed to make sense for a sportswriter on sabbatical from the playpen to attend the quadrennial hawgkilling when Presidential candidates are chosen, to observe and report upon politicians at play. After all, national conventions are games of a sort, and sports offers few spectacles richer in low comedy.”
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“Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)