Commentary
Whatever hopes people had for a new day at the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) have officially died out. A year into Charlie Baker’s reign and the wildfire threatening to burn down
women’s sports still rages—no thanks to the unsympathetic man at the helm.
If anything, Mark Emmert’s successor has proven to be coldly indifferent to the plight of collegiate women, refusing to even meet with victims of his transgender policy until Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.)
demanded it.
Now, in a stunning turn of events, Baker—a former Republican governor of Massachusetts—is facing
rebellion in his own ranks, as a longtime NCAA committee member resigns in protest.
William Bock, a former general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, quit his post at the NCAA on Friday, Feb. 9, blaming the organization’s
stubborn refusal to protect girls’ sports. Bock’s departure, after eight years, is already sending
shock waves through the sports ranks.
With more than a year left in his current term, Bock says he could no longer stomach the
radical policy.
“Although I may not have agreed with the wisdom of every rule in the NCAA rulebook,” he wrote
in his letter, “I believed the intent behind the NCAA’s rules was competitive fairness and protection of equal opportunities for student-athletes. This conviction has changed as I have watched the NCAA double down on regressive policies, which discriminate against female student-athletes.”
The Washington Examiner, first to obtain the letter, details Bock’s objections to the current requirements, which are based on reduced testosterone levels, not an athlete’s passage through puberty. While
a growing number of international sports bodies recognize that hormones are just one part of the problem, the NCAA stubbornly refuses to adopt tighter restrictions.
It’s puberty, Bock argued, that gives men such a biological advantage.
“... [T]hose changes that you get through development—they don’t go away,” Bock said. “And you’re going to reduce performance by a small amount if you reduce testosterone levels, but you’re never going to bridge the gap between men and women. And so, it’s a ruse to say that testosterone suppression, it’s a level playing field, so it’s not true.”
As someone who’s worked against doping, he insists his mere presence in a “sport integrity role” is compromised when “there’s massive, essentially authorized, cheating taking place and dramatically harming women.” Bock decided that he didn’t want to help the NCAA project this lie of fairness and equity.
“... [I] needed to resign with the hope that maybe [it] will cause other people to look at the issue more closely,” he wrote.
Just this past week, a biological boy literally leapt over the girls’ teams in
New Hampshire’s high-jump championship, robbing young women of their place on the podium. His winning jump, people point out, was 10 inches lower than the boys’ highest mark—but it was enough to trash real girls’ dreams.
No wonder New Hampshire is racing
to join the other 25 states that have protected women’s sports.
Frankly, Baker should have seen the wave of pushback to this agenda and responded, Concerned Women for America’s Doreen Denny
insisted on “Washington Watch.” But, unfortunately, “the NCAA is a coward,” she pointed out. It was a coward under Emmert, it’s “a coward to institutions that are woke. It’s a coward to the culture that wants to convince us that males can take women’s places, because they’re now female—and we know that’s just a farce.”
In the meantime, they should all be taking Bock’s resignation seriously, Denny said, because “his reasons come from his own expertise.”
“He was a part of the U.S. Doping Agency that litigated Lance Armstrong and the testosterone doping scandal that happened. And he said [that] even Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal ... pales in comparison [to] the advantage that males have in women’s sports.”
To see someone like Bock step down should prompt some major “soul searching,” Family Research Council president Tony Perkins suggested.
“His expertise is the wisdom that NCAA leaders should heed, but instead have rejected,” Denny agreed in a conversation with The Washington Stand. “From the start, NCAA’s policy for participation of trans-identifying male athletes in women’s sports has had no justification in law or science. In fact, it is nothing short of institutional discrimination against female athletes. It’s time for the NCAA to admit this and repeal its wrongheaded policy that is robbing collegiate women of equal opportunity in their own sports.”
“We need more people to take a stand and be courageous,” she urged. “And we just have to keep working.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
