With only a few days before the start of 2013, it’s time for everyone’s favorite end-of-year tradition: year-in-review lists.
For K-12 sports, the year 2012 was one to remember.
In June, Title IX, the landmark federal legislation that prohibits gender discrimination in any federally financed education program or activity, turned 40.
Meanwhile, nine states—Florida, Idaho, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Wisconsin—passed youth-concussion laws in 2012, bringing the total number of states with such laws up to 43 (plus the District of Columbia). (You can browse each state’s legislation in our youth-concussion-law map.)
Before the calendar switches to 2013, let’s look back at the 10 most-read Schooled in Sports posts this year.
10. Cheerleading Can’t Count as Sport for Title IX, Appeals Court Rules
It’s been debated for years: Is cheerleading a sport? While the debate hasn’t been settled permanently, a federal appeals court ruled in August that colleges can’t count competitive cheerleading as a sport to comply with Title IX. Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, called it a “precedent-setting case,” and said in an interview, “If cheerleading is underdeveloped at the college level, I can’t imagine it’ll be declared otherwise at the high school level.”
9. Steroid Testing Student-Athletes: Worth the Cost?
This post, which actually came from January 2011, looked at the costs of states’ steroid-testing programs for student-athletes. Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey all spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, to test high school student-athletes for steroids, but all three states found very few positive tests compared to the number of students that were tested.
8. 2012 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, By the Academic Numbers
Before the 2012 NCAA men’s basketball tournament kicked off, I highlighted the annual report from the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports that analyzes teams on academic performance. Based on each team’s academic-progress rate, the University of Kansas would have taken home the March Madness crown after besting Davidson (N.C.) College in the championship game. (In real life, the Kansas Jayhawks