Male Athlete Sues University of Minnesota for Illegal Sex-Based Discrimination After Team Canceled

A pupil gymnast astatine the University of Minnesota is suing the schoolhouse for sex-based favoritism aft it chopped the men’s varsity gymnastics squad due to the fact that it believes excessively galore men enactment successful field sports fixed that pistillate students outnumber males.

The complaint initiating the lawsuit, Ng v. Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota, lawsuit fig 21-cv-2404, was filed past week successful U.S. District Court successful the District of Minnesota.

Evan Ng is being represented escaped of complaint by Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a Sacramento-based nonprofit nationalist involvement instrumentality firm, with the assistance of lawyer Samuel Diehl of CrossCastle PLLC.

Ng, 19, has been a competitory gymnast since helium was six years old. By the property of nine, helium was competing connected the nationalist Future Stars Junior Elite (JE) squad and became a five-time JE nationalist qualifier and an all-around Regional Champion successful 2019.

“It’s a athletics similar nary other,” Ng said successful a connection provided by PLF.

He passed up a much lucrative fiscal assistance connection from different assemblage to be the University of Minnesota and vie connected its 118-year-old gymnastics team.

But his dreams were crushed erstwhile the schoolhouse decided to destruct men’s gymnastics aft the 2020-21 schoolhouse year.

“Losing the squad hurt, but the crushed stung adjacent more,” according to a PLF-provided narrative.

“It wasn’t mediocre diversion performance—the Golden Gophers finished with a play precocious successful wide points, and nationalist titles connected parallel bars and inactive rings. Nor was it subpar world performance—the squad had the highest grade-point mean of immoderate athletics for the outpouring 2021 semester, with 5 members earning 4.0s.”

PLF lawyer Caleb Trotter told The Epoch Times successful an interrogation that the determination to bash distant with the squad was made successful October 2020 “but it didn’t go effectual until April of this year, erstwhile the play ended, which ironically, [is when] Minnesota hosted the NCAA championships for men’s gymnastics.” The squad finished 5th nationally “and past erstwhile that was implicit their programme was nary more. They adjacent sent 1 of their athletes to the Tokyo Olympics this year.”

At the aforesaid clip arsenic the schoolhouse chopped men’s gymnastics, it besides chopped the men’s tennis team, and the men’s indoor way and tract teams, helium added.

According to PLF, the school’s archetypal assertion that it was getting escaped of the squad for fiscal reasons was false. Eliminating men’s gymnastics would prevention astir $825,000, but the gymnastics program’s endowment of much than $900,000 mostly covers the team’s scholarships.

The assemblage nixed the squad based connected its leaders’ content that the national Title IX instrumentality requires parity betwixt the sexes successful collegiate sports.

Title IX refers to Public Law 92-318, oregon the national Education Amendments of 1972, which amended 4 national education-related statutes. Recipients of national fiscal assistance, which is virtually each assemblage and assemblage successful the United States, cannot discriminate connected the ground of enactment successful their programs and activities, including athletics.

The assemblage chopped the squad based connected its misguided knowing that “Title IX requires it to person statistical parity betwixt its ratio of antheral and pistillate athletes for that ratio to beryllium identical to its antheral and pistillate ratio of undergraduates enrolled successful the university,” Trotter said.

“Our presumption is that that creates impermissible sex-based quotas that interruption the Constitution, the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, but besides the Title IX statute itself,” helium said.

“They’re fundamentally looking astatine individuals arsenic numbers connected a ledger, and they request X fig of men, they request X fig of women.”

For the 2020-21 schoolhouse year, men were a greater percent of athletes (49.76 percent) than successful wide undergraduate enrollment (46.77 percent), meaning successful the university’s eyes, antheral athletes were supposedly overrepresented by 2.99 percent.

But that tiny disparity should not trigger reddish flags, according to PLF, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights recovered thing incorrect with the university’s 1.47 percent overrepresentation of women athletes successful 2018.

The schoolhouse would person to conscionable “a precise precocious burden” to prevail, Trotter said.

Title IX does not accidental what the assemblage claims it says, helium said.

“The statute itself says immoderate statistical imbalance is not grounds for a uncovering of discrimination.”

The Epoch Times reached retired to the University of Minnesota for remark but had not received a reply arsenic of property time.