## Facts

- Quinnipiac University announced it would eliminate women’s varsity volleyball, men’s golf, and men’s outdoor track and field, while creating a women’s varsity competitive cheerleading team.
- Women were approximately 61.87% of the undergraduate student body.
- After adjusting roster data to exclude inflated counts and non-participants, the district court found women comprised 58.25% of varsity athletes, a 3.62 percentage-point gap.
- The district court found Quinnipiac used roster-management targets that inflated women’s rosters and deflated men’s rosters, including double-counting athletes and counting injured or non-competing athletes.
- Quinnipiac treated competitive cheerleading as a varsity sport for Title IX participation counts, but the district court found the program did not meet OCR criteria for counting as a sport.
- Plaintiffs (women athletes and a certified class of present and future female students seeking varsity participation) sued under Title IX.
- After a bench trial, the district court entered a permanent injunction barring elimination of women’s volleyball and requiring Title IX compliance; Quinnipiac appealed.

## Issues

1. Whether Quinnipiac provided substantially proportionate athletic participation opportunities to female students under Title IX’s participation framework.
2. Whether Quinnipiac’s competitive cheerleading program qualified as a “sport” that could be counted for Title IX participation purposes.
3. Whether the district court used a permissible method for counting participation opportunities and determining that the participation gap reflected noncompliance.

## Decision

- The Second Circuit affirmed the judgment and permanent injunction.
- The court upheld the finding that Quinnipiac failed to provide substantially proportionate participation opportunities for women.
- The court agreed that competitive cheerleading, as then organized at Quinnipiac, could not be counted as a Title IX sport.
- The court upheld the district court’s participant-count methodology, including excluding non-participants and correcting for double-counting and inflated rosters.
- The court rejected a fixed “safe harbor” percentage for proportionality and held the 3.62% gap—about 38 missing opportunities—supported a Title IX violation on this record.

## Legal Principles

- Title IX athletics compliance is assessed using OCR’s established participation-opportunities framework (the three-part test), which courts treat as entitled to substantial deference.
- “Substantial proportionality” is a context-specific inquiry; modest percentage disparities may still violate Title IX when they represent meaningful numbers of lost participation opportunities.
- Institutions may not satisfy Title IX through roster manipulation or counting athletes who are not genuine participants during the relevant season.
- An activity may be counted as a Title IX “sport” only if it is structured and administered primarily for athletic competition and meets OCR factors concerning season, competition, and championship structure; emerging activities may fail this standard in their current form.

## Conclusion

The Second Circuit left in place an injunction requiring Quinnipiac to maintain women’s volleyball and to remedy Title IX noncompliance, holding that proportionality cannot be achieved through inflated rosters or by counting competitive cheerleading that does not qualify as a sport under OCR criteria.


Biediger v. Quinnipiac Univ., 691 F.3d 85 (2d Cir. 2012)