Gender shouldn’t factor in AD hunt

Last week, the Daily Trojan Editorial Board published an article titled, “Next Trojan athletic director should be female,” offering the basic premise that USC needs to hire a women as athletic director to show that gender equity within collegiate athletics is a priority.

I was shocked that this argument was made. USC doesn’t need to hire a woman as its next athletic director. USC doesn’t need to hire a man as its next athletic director. USC needs to hire the best candidate available. Period. End of story.

Gender shouldn’t be a criterion for hiring the next USC athletic director, nor should race, religion, creed, age or any other tangential, unrelated characteristic. Any trait that has absolutely no bearing on one’s performance or ability to fulfill the duties of his or her job has no purpose being mentioned in the hunt for the next AD. The criteria for the search should be based on actual skills related to one’s job: how well they manage, their experience with compliance, their ability to connect with boosters and other things that actually matter when working. Not whether they have two X chromosomes or not.

I’m not a Neanderthal who believes sports should be played the way they were in the ’40s with minorities and women relegated to shadow leagues. I’m all about women’s sports. I can tell you the last five WNBA MVPs or the top 25 recruits in the 2016 women’s college high school basketball as quickly as I can name the 2005 USC starting offensive and defensive line. Those things matter to me (I don’t know why, but they do). The gender of our next athletic director does not.

I’m pro-women in sports. I’m pro-men in sports. What I am not pro is artificially and synthetically manufacturing progress while sacrificing the quality and caliber of our next athletic director. This is not to say a woman couldn’t do just as fine of a job as a man replacing Pat Haden. It is to say that confining the search based on arbitrary parameters to make a broader social statement has the same end results that barring black athletes from baseball did to the MLB.

It dilutes the end product, plain and simple. The intent is certainly not the same. Barring African Americans from baseball was done by misanthropes and racists who were filled with malice. Calling for a female athletic director has great intentions, as gender equity is an important cause. However, this is the wrong way to go about it. Filtering out qualified candidates in an attempt to find a certain characteristic diminishes the caliber of the overall group.

USC has done a great job of advancing and furthering female sports, with the lacrosse and beach volleyball team as most recent examples. A male athletic director did that just fine, just as I’m sure a woman would have. It is not as if women athletes are systemically treated unfairly or they need women coaches to elevate their game. Look no further than Geno Auriemma at the University of Connecticut, a male coaching a female sport, rewriting the record books annually.

Athletics is a business at Power Five schools, and the hierarchy generally is the revenue-producing sports, men’s football and basketball, and then everyone else. That isn’t gender-motivated, that’s economics.

The Editorial Board stated that since half of USC athletes are female, then half of the administration should be as well. Besides grossly misunderstanding the intent and requirements of Title IX, this conclusion holds no rational basis. Why does a female team need to be coached or administered by a man? Or vice versa? I bet most of the athletes would say they don’t care what gender their coach and administrators are, as long as they help them win games and improve their craft.

I understand the desire to have women representing women’s interests. The empirics and statistics are clear in legislation and policy; women do more to advance their own causes than men do. That’s perfectly logical in politics, but not in sports. Sports are a different animal. Gender doesn’t matter in sports. Winning games does.

Sports are not always like life, and that’s why we love it so much. It’s the greatest meritocracy in the world. You put two teams on a diamond, a gridiron, a rink, or a court and the better-prepared, better-coached, more-talented team wins. That’s equity.

Life, in contrast, isn’t fair. Understanding the distinction between the realm of sports and every other industry is something the editorial board failed to take into account. From competing in high school, I can tell you it didn’t matter to me if my coach was a man or a woman, white or black, Jewish or Christian. Did they care about us? Did they come prepared? Did they put in their best effort? That is the stuff that matters in sports.

That is what all of the Trojan faithful wants, an excellent candidate who can help the Trojan program take the department to the next level and further transcend greatness.

If a woman is the best candidate to replace Haden, I would be just as excited as if it were a male. As long as we have someone who will maintain a compliant program, continue to strive for excellence and make sure football and basketball are perennial powerhouses, I don’t care who they are and what they look like.

Man or woman. Black or white. Christian or Jewish. Tall or short. Fat or thin.

These things don’t matter, all that does is winning championships (the right way), and that is my only requirement for our next athletic director.

Jake Davidson is a junior majoring in accounting. His column, “Davidson’s Direction,” runs Mondays.