The Ball State women's softball team will get its own locker room, and other women's teams will see improvements as well following complaints about their facilities, Athletics Director Tom Collins said this week.
"The (softball) team will return to campus to a locker room designed as a true team building space," Collins said in a statement published Wednesday.
"Located near the baseball team's locker room, it will include a lounge seating area, wood lockers, and other amenities. One of the additional benefits of these moves is that the women's gymnastics team will also move to a larger dedicated locker room."
Collins made the remarks in a letter to The Star Press following news stories in the Muncie newspaper about facilities for women's teams. The Daily News earlier reported that the university's support for women's teams remains under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
In this week's statement, Collins said that a locker room for the women's softball, soccer, field hockey, cross country and track and field teams had been available in the Health and Physical Activity Building.
"However it is now clear that the locker room was not conducive to cultivating a strong team spirit by having a place to call their own," Collins said.
"Because these teams shared the locker room, I now understand that it was perceived as just another place to hang your cleats and fell into disuse. The locker room had evaporated from awareness to the degree that even the softball coaching staff perceived that the team had no locker room."
Collins said the women's soccer, field hockey and track and field teams will now share facilities at Scheumann Stadium.
The athletic director, defending the school's support for women's teams, said the softball team in the past three years had gotten a new outfield fence, a new field tarp, "an improved infield mix, and paving of the concourse areas and batting cages."
Collins pointed to other improvements made as part of a five-year gender-equity plan. Universities are required as part of Title IX, shorthand for a section of U.S. law known as the Education Amendments of 1972 dealing with equality in women's sports.
"My staff and I take compliance with Title IX seriously because, beyond being the law, it is the right thing to do," Collins wrote.
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