When Quinnipiac University eliminated its women's volleyball team for budgetary reasons last year and replaced it with a cheerleading team, the volleyballers sued, arguing that the decision violated Title IX. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Stefan Underhill agreed, writing, "The activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students." Underdeveloped and disorganized? Ouch. And while Underhill's decision applies solely to Quinnipiac, it could set precedent at other colleges fighting for their own women's athletic departments -- and their funding.

Few other pursuits run the gamut in public perception that cheerleading does. Field hockey is pretty much just field hockey. But cheerleading, depending on your point of view, is either a serious, demanding sport, that thing people do on the sidelines while the real action is going on, or a bunch of chicks in short skirts and spirit fingers. No wonder Underhill's decision set off a wave of strong reactions on both sides of the semantic divide.

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The volleyball players had sued Quinnipiac University after it announced last year that it would eliminate the team for budgetary reasons and replace it with a competitive cheer squad.

The school contended the cheer squad keeps it in compliance with Title IX, the 1972 federal law that mandates equal opportunities for men and women in athletics.

"Competitive cheer may, some time in the future, qualify as a sport under Title IX," U.S. District Judge Stefan Underhill wrote in his decision. "Today, however, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students."

Quinnipiac has 60 days to come up with a plan to keep the volleyball team and comply with gender rules.

An activity can be considered a sport under Title IX if it meets specific criteria. It must have coaches, practices, competitions during a defined season and a governing organization. The activity also must have competition as its primary goal -- not merely the support of other athletic teams.

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One lesbian coach. Do you believe it?

Coach Murrell herself said that fear is thick for other gay coaches. "There's a lot of negative recruiting going on right now," she said in a recent interview. That is, coaches competing for the best talent will dismiss another program as being a haven for dykes, playing on the homophobia of prospective athletes and their families, and so make their own program supposedly more appealing. Says Murrell: "You may not lose your job because of discrimination, but you may lose your job because all the sudden people are saying, don't go to that program because coach is a lesbian and then boom the program goes downhill. You lose your job because the program is not successful."

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There have always been three ways to comply with Title IX. First, a school can show that it has a representative number of athletes of both sexes involved in athletics: If 50 percent of your students are female, 50 percent of your athletes must be, too, to qualify under this prong.

If members of one sex are underrepresented -- generally, this is women -- then the school can show that it has "a history and continuing practice of program expansion" that is actually increasing the interests and skills of the underrepresented group.

It's the third prong of the test that's causing the controversy. Schools can also comply with Title IX by showing that they're meeting the desires and skills of the underrepresented sex "fully and effectively."

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"When I saw the A-11 offense, I said, 'Hey, that's an altered version of mine,'" says Joshua Penn, head coach of the California Quake. Penn installed his team's offense, which he calls the spread, in 2006, began using it heavily in 2007 and coached the Quake to an undefeated season with it this spring. They lost in the first round of the playoffs.

The IWFL playoffs, that is. To the Dallas Diamonds. The California Quake, who play in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, are a women's pro football team.

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A brawl Tuesday at the Palace of Auburn Hills resulted in suspensions for 10 players from the Los Angeles Sparks and Detroit Shock, as well as Detroit assistant coach Rick Mahorn. In the wake of the brawl, the Shock signed 50-year-old playing legend Nancy Lieberman to a 10-day contract to leave the ESPN broadcast booth long enough to play one game, Thursday night in Houston against the Comets.

So that's three headlines -- brawl, suspensions, Lieberman -- in one week, which is about four more than the WNBA gets in a typical week, even during one of the lulls in the sports year, which we're in now.

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Annika Sorenstam said Tuesday that she'll be ending her career at the end of the golf season. On Wednesday, in a much bigger shocker, world No. 1 tennis player Justine Henin, two weeks shy of her 26th birthday and not injured, said she's walking away from the game effective immediately. She's the first player ever to quit at No. 1.

Imagine if Tiger Woods and Roger Federer had announced their retirements on consecutive days. They'd knock the NBA and NHL playoffs off the front pages for a week.

The bizarre coincidence of the timing of their announcements aside, Sorenstam and Henin's retirements don't have much in common. It would be easy to clump them together and ponder what it is that's forcing the top women out of their sports early. But it might not be all that fruitful. Sorenstam and Henin are separate cases.

Sorenstam is 37 and at a more logical point in her career to step away than Henin, especially since she's soon to be married for a second time and says she wants to have a baby.

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That is, until you look at the actual impact. Title IX has revolutionized high school and collegiate sports (and, as a result, professional sports). Before Title IX, 290,000 girls participated in high school athletics, reports the Chronicle; now, more than 2.9 million girls dig their cleats into AstroTurf, dribble across a muddy soccer field and take part in all other manner of sport. The number of women participating in intercollegiate sports has risen from less than 32,000 to 180,000.

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It's unclear what kind of gender test Sounderajan underwent exactly. For me at least, a "gender test" sounds like an evaluation of stereotypically feminine traits, conjuring up images of apron-clad female athletes whipping up cookies for a panel of judges, or a white-gloved inspector rating their housekeeping skills. (Particularly when most of today's headlines have blared something to the effect of "Female athlete fails gender test.") But it seems safe to assume that Sounderajan underwent something along the lines of the sex testing instituted by the International Amateur Athletics Federation at the time of the 1960 Rome Olympic Games. At the time, there was hysteria over the possibility of male athletes masquerading as females and competing with an unfair strength advantage.

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Keith Michael Bukowski had sued Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, which maintains a policy not to allow boys to compete in girls' sports, on the grounds that the policy violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution as well as Title IX. He claimed that since his high school had no male gymnastics team he was being discriminated against. The court concluded that Bukowski failed to show that WIAA, a nonprofit organization of public and private high schools, was either an arm of the state (and therefore could be sued for the constitutional violation) or a federally funded organization (and thus subject to Title IX).

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But its days may be dwindling. Lately the so-called boy crisis in public schools has become every lazy media outlet's topic du jour, fueling the perception that girls get better college preparation than boys. That theory has been officially debunked with genuine research -- race and class turned out to be two of the real culprits for educational disparities, not gender -- but the Bush administration has yielded to the overblown boy crisis hysteria anyway.

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Reuters, again: The U.N. reports that violence against children is a worldwide norm. Examples range from physical punishment in the schools of 106 countries around the world to ongoing traditions of female genital mutilation and forced marriages. And the U.S. isn't exempt -- as the New York Times recently reminded us, in many states and counties across the U.S., principals paddling children is still the norm.

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But even I was surprised to read, in yesterday's New York Times, just how huge women's professional football has become. Yep. Women's professional football. Eighty teams, three leagues; passionate players. Love it. (That, and the fact that the Times piece appeared in Sports and not, say, Styles.)

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Deford certainly has evidence for his observation. But what about his conclusion? "Oh, my," he sighs. "We had hoped when women started coming into sports in large numbers after the passage of Title IX that they would improve the institution, investing it with the finer feminine values. So far the results seem to indicate that instead sports has won, and womanhood has lost."

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The Times describes Española as "a way station on a major Mexican heroin route, where officials say drug abuse is so ingrained that grandparents teach parents and parents teach children to do drugs, where state troopers carry the opiate antidote Narcan to revive addicts who overdose, and where a Rio Arriba County commissioner once protested a crackdown saying, 'We're not going to declare war on our own relatives.'" It is one of the poorest areas in the nation.

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But if you read this giant feature in the Boston Globe, you'll find that "injuries for high school and college cheerleaders have more than doubled since the early 1990s ... with the estimated number of emergency-room visits spiking from fewer than 12,000 in 1991 to about 28,000 in 2004." The article continues: "And no other sport comes within shouting distance of cheerleading in terms of major injuries, such as spinal and head trauma ... Of the 101 catastrophic injuries sustained by female high school and college athletes between 1982 and 2004, 55 percent resulted from cheerleading -- more than every other sport combined."

As Dr. Frederick Mueller, director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, told the Globe: 'There's no doubt that [cheerleading] is the most dangerous women's sport.'"

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1. It's nice to see women compete over something other than bachelors. (And yes, underneath its jock-burlesque trappings, roller derby -- while we won't see it in Turin -- actually is a sport.)

2. These girls are HOT. (Brandi Chastain's bra moment: how quaint it seems now!) But they're naturally, if punkily, so. And the camera doesn't leer.

3. I would totally hang out with these people. Unlike these people.

4. The show is not trying to prove anything About Women. It's not trying to say "See? When women play sports, it's really about friendship!" (One team is resolutely nonbonding.) Or "See? Women can be both tough and feminine!" Or "See? When you get women together, they fight!" It just shows these gals -- all different, none turned into a type -- doing their thing.

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Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal funds, was signed into law -- let's give the devil his due -- by Richard Nixon in 1972. Twenty-one years ago there were, according to the General Accounting Office, fewer than 295,000 girls participating in sports at a high school level. There are currently slightly more than 2.7 million. Can anyone argue that this has not radically changed America for the better?

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So writes Colette Dowling, author of "The Cinderella Complex," in her entertaining feminist argument about women's strength: "The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality." "By making themselves physically equal [through exercise and self-defense training]," Dowling writes, "women can at last make themselves free."

I loved this book. Dowling describes the achievements of the first woman to play men's pro baseball, the girls' soccer team that beat all the boys' teams in the 1993 Ohio games, a 10th-grader who made the all-state Georgia football team. Katherine Switzer dodged irate officials to compete in the all-male Boston Marathon. Bev Francis changed the face of women's bodybuilding by refusing to limit the size of her muscles to appropriately feminine proportions. Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs. These stories are so inspirational that I would like to believe every word Dowling says -- but some of her argument is just wishful thinking.

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