Polo is a club sport at Virginia, which means that it is funded not by the university but by member dues of $500 a year and alumni gifts. Fortunately, Virginia polo players and alumni can well afford the expense. According to club coach Lou Lopez, alumni paid for the seventy-five-acre Virginia Polo Center, considered the best college polo facility in the United States, with irrigated outdoor fields, an indoor arena, and stabling and paddocks for ponies. Alumni also underwrote the purchase of seventy ponies for between $2,500 and $60,000 apiece. The club honors top recruits with the prestigious, privately funded Raymond Nicoll Polo Scholarship, named after a late Virginia polo player and endowed by his friends.

  Coach Lopez said the polo club has enhanced the state university's geographic diversity by drawing players from Malaysia, Colombia, England, and Hawaii. “Some polo alumni have become major donors to Virginia,” the coach added. “They not only have supported the polo program over the years, but they support the football and basketball teams.”

  Unlike varsity teams, the polo club isn't formally allotted slots in the freshman class. Coach Lopez was coy about his influence, saying, “We try to talk to admissions, as much as they'll listen. We're at their mercy.” (He was also reticent about the Nicoll Scholarship; when I asked about it, he pleaded with me not to mention it in this book, without explaining why.) “I know Virginia has that ability on their side to get admissions help,” said Cornell coach David Eldredge, who submits his own short list of preferred applicants to Cornell admissions.

  Nina Marks, formerly the longtime college counselor at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., said UVA admissions dean John Blackburn personally reads the applications of all polo recruits, because they and their families are regarded as potential donors. “He takes a strong interest in polo recruits,” she said. “Good polo ponies” are expensive. “If you have a string of polo ponies, that makes colleges sit up and pay attention.”

  Carol Wood, a spokeswoman for the university, told me, “While Dean Blackburn's attention is brought to student applicants who play polo, he and his staff review them as they would any other application…. Their polo-playing ability is taken into consideration when their applications are reviewed, just as a student's ability to play for the University's marching band is taken into consideration. It would just be one of a long list of qualities and achievements that our admission office looks at when evaluating each applicant.” She added that students who play polo “are not looked at as potential donors; they are looked at as high-achieving academic students who also bring an interesting athletic talent that adds to the diversity of the student body.”

  Molly Muedeking, club president and a top player, told me that Virginia admissions gives special consideration each year to two male and two female polo recruits, who also receive the Nicoll Scholarship. “It was obvious polo helped me get into school,” said Molly, a lawyer's daughter and Nicoll Scholarship recipient. Molly described herself as a good student with SAT scores in the 1300s but said she didn't rank in the top tenth of her class at Garrison Forest School in Maryland.

  Garrison Forest, one of only two girls” schools in the United States to offer the sport, regularly supplies polo players to Virginia. Its head polo coach, Lissa Green, also starred at Virginia and received the Nicoll Scholarship. “I used polo to help me get in,” said Green, who graduated from a private high school in 1999 with SAT scores in the 1200s. “Getting into UVA out of state is very difficult. I had average grades and didn't participate in student government. Most of my extracurricular activities centered on riding. That little extra push really helped.”

  ALTHOUGH COLLEGES justify a wide variety of admissions preferences under the mantle of diversity, preferences advancing one sort of diversity frequently detract from another. In these conflicts, socioeconomic diversity generally takes a backseat. For instance, Notre Dame and Virginia officials defend the edge given to international fencers and polo players on the grounds of geographic diversity, but this influx of wealthy athletes also reinforces the upper-income tilt of their student bodies.

  By the same token, Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination, has increased gender diversity in college sports while decreasing socioeconomic diversity on athletic teams and campuses as a whole. Although Title IX helped popularize racially integrated and economically diverse sports such as women's basketball in the 1970s, more recently colleges have responded to the law's pressure for equal athletic representation of the sexes by fielding women's teams with large rosters in racially segregated upper-crust sports such as crew and horseback riding. In effect, Title IX has evolved into an admissions giveaway to rich women.

  Passed in 1972, Title IX acquired teeth in 1979, when the federal government adopted a controversial three-part test for college sports. To comply with Title IX, the relative proportions of men and women among varsity athletes must mirror the student body as a whole, the athletic program must fulfill the interests and abilities of female students, or the school must make progress toward equal athletic opportunities for women. In 1984, a Supreme Court decision exempted most college athletic programs from Title IX, but Congress broadened the law four years later, overruling the decision.

  The key fight over Title IX's tripartite test began in 1992, when members of Brown University's women's gymnastics and volleyball teams— which had lost their funding the previous year during a budget crunch, along with two men's teams—sued the university. Brown, under president Vartan Gregorian, argued that the proportionality test amounted to an unfair quota because women are less interested in athletics than men. In 1995, a federal district court found for the women athletes, and two years later the U.S. Supreme Court let the ruling stand. In 1998, Brown agreed to a compliance plan that included making women's water polo a varsity sport.

  As the Brown case made its way through the courts, the NCAA in 1994 endorsed nine “emerging sports” for women that nervous colleges could sponsor to show progress under Title IX: crew, synchronized swimming, ice hockey, team handball, water polo, archery, badminton, squash, and bowling. (The NCAA added equestrian events to the list in 1998 and rugby in 2001.) Of these, crew was the quickest fix because of its roster size; each shell required eight (or sometimes four) women, and one team could float a lot of boats at various levels of competition, from novice to varsity. Also, there was an abundance of affluent ex-rowers to fund crew scholarships.

  Dubbed “women's football” because it helped counterbalance the biggest men's sport, crew became such a widespread immunization against Title IX violations that the NCAA authorized a national championship in women's rowing in 1996 and made it a full-fledged sport a year later; even heartland schools such as the University of Kansas introduced the traditionally coastal sport. The NCAA also allowed colleges to provide a maximum of twenty full scholarships or the equivalent in women's crew, more than any sport except football. Because few high schools nationwide had girls” crew teams, colleges began awarding scholarships to tall, strong women without any rowing experience. From 1992-93 to 2002-3, the number of varsity women rowers in college more than quadrupled, from 1,555 to 6,690, the greatest percentage increase of any sport. Also reflecting the impact of Title IX, the typical women's crew team over the same span grew from 31 to 47 members, while the average men's squad fell from 39 to 30 participants. The University of Wisconsin women's crew team boasts as many as 150 rowers, including its lightweight squad. Unlike heavyweight crews, which are mostly recruits, lightweight teams often rely on walk-ons.

  After the boathouses came the stables. Equestrian events, another upper-crust sport with an expandable roster, were soon second only to crew in Title IX-inspired popularity. From 1998-99 to 2002-3, the number of varsity riders nearly doubled from 633 to 1,175, and average squad size rose from fifteen to twenty-seven. Brown, the University of Georgia, and Texas A&M University are among schools that galloped into the equestrian arena and began giving admissions preference—and in some cases scholarships—to horseback riders. Many of the riders come from the suburban or rural gentry and bring their own horses to college.

  “The reason we exist is to balance out the football team,” Collins Daye, assistant coach on the Georgia equestrian team, told me. The team was given varsity status in 2002 and now has sixty-five members, who divvy up the fifteen full scholarships allowed by the NCAA. Ms. Daye said that Georgia has admitted riders with a 1050 SAT score, 150 points below its average. “Like anybody that functions within athletics, we can generally pull in students that are lower than the school standards,” she said. “They aren't dumb kids, they still have a 3.5 GPA.”

  Texas A&M, another selective public university, has seventy women on its equestrian team, which started in 1999. In addition to facilitating admission of her top recruits, Coach Tana Rawson told me, she also has the power to reverse rejections of less sought-after applicants who might fit into her team. “There's a handful of girls we talk to every year, they don't get into A&M,” she said. “Then we'll either go watch them ride, or get some more videos and assess their riding ability as best we can and decide, ‘Are they right for our program?”” If they are, she continued, “we can write a letter to admissions and just state that they will be on the equestrian team and ask that they can be reconsidered to be admitted again. That's not a problem. The admissions office will bend a fair bit if they will be valuable on an athletic team or if we decide to give them a scholarship.”

  Title IX has fostered yet another high-toned sport—women's squash. To “advance its commitment to gender equity” and improve “financial aid opportunities for women,” Stanford University announced in 2005 that it would field the first varsity women's squash team on the West Coast.

  As colleges added genteel women's sports, they also grappled with Title IX's proportionality test by discontinuing working-class men's sports that lacked wealthy patrons. For instance, Southern Methodist University in Texas started a women's crew team in 1999 and an equestrian team in 2003. The following year, it eliminated a racially and economically integrated men's track and field program that consistently ranked in the top ten nationwide and had produced forty-seven individual national champions. The men's golf team at SMU was left unscathed.

  The most frequent target of cutbacks was wrestling. Although public high schools nationwide compete in wrestling, a sport with a long tradition and small cost, colleges pinned it to the mat. According to NCAA statistics, 130 colleges dropped men's wrestling teams between 1988-89 and 2002-3 while only 23 added them, by far the biggest net loss of any sport. The National Wrestling Coaches Association sued the U.S. Department of Education, seeking to void the proportionality standard, but the case was dismissed in 2003. Nor did the NCAA identify women's wrestling as an “emerging sport,” even though it was a plausible candidate.

  “Title IX has reduced socioeconomic diversity,” said Lloyd Peterson, a former admissions officer at Yale, which eliminated varsity wrestling. “At the end of the day, you start whacking off some of the blue-collar sports. Most of the country club sports have small numbers. All Yale needed was two fencers to win a national championship. You hang on to those sports, the NCAA is happy, the alumni are happy. The alumni's kids all play squash. So we gave up wrestling. Who's upset about that? Kids from Pittsburgh. They're not going to make any noise.”

  At one private university, an affluent ex-wrestler did save his sport— but the price wasn't cheap. Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, cut its fifty-seven-year-old varsity wrestling program in 2001-2 even though a former wrestling team captain, insurance broker William Graham, offered $500,000 to promote gender equity. The university rejected his gift, saying it wasn't enough to underwrite two women's sports needed to offset wrestling under Title IX. Three years later, Bucknell restored wrestling after Graham raised his donation to $5.6 million, enough to expand the women's crew team and support other women's sports.

  The University of Virginia did not discard any men's sports. Instead, to comply with Title IX, it added women's crew in 1995 and women's golf in 2003, reinforcing the largely white profile of its female athletes. University data show that two women's teams, basketball and track, have substantial minority representation. In 1998-99, 9 of 23 track athletes and 7 of 14 basketball players were African American. But of 142 varsity athletes in other women's sports that year, 134 (94 percent) were white; the other 8 consisted of 2 each of blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and international students. All 9 members of the women's golf team in 2004-5 were white.

  Although Title IX is intended to ensure gender equity, the elevation of women's crew to a varsity sport also led to what some male rowers considered reverse sexual discrimination. Since both men's and women's crew had previously been on equal footing as club sports, the change subordinated the men's club to second-class status, without official admissions slots, athletic scholarships, or university support. The Virginia men's rowing club rents the boathouse, which it owns, to the women's team; it also raises money through donations, raffles, and rowers doing yard work and other manual labor for Charlottesville residents.

  “The fact that we can't recruit and have to raise all that money puts us at a disadvantage,” said Chad Richard Ellis, cocaptain of the rowing club. “I really don't think it's fair to us that we have to go out and compete against varsity crews.” While the UVA women's crew competes in California regattas, he said, the men's club only goes as far west as Ohio. “Our accommodations are quite different” on the road, he continued. “We're pretty big guys, and we end up having four guys to a room. That means two guys, each six-four and two hundred pounds, sleeping in a double bed. I'm sure the women at most have three to a room.”

  The university introduced women's golf after receiving $1.4 million for golf scholarships from a private donor. In light of the gift, adding women's golf “makes financial sense in UVAs continuing effort to comply with Title IX,” a university report concluded. UVA hasn't been shy about exploiting the affinity of the rich for golf. At a 2004 fund-raiser sponsored by the Virginia Athletics Foundation to benefit the golf programs, alumni paid $250 apiece to play a round with the men's and women's golf teams. Team parents have also contributed to a planned facility for putting and chipping practice.

  As a top recruit on the inaugural women's golf team, also sought after by Notre Dame, Wake Forest, and other schools, Leah Wigger received a full athletic scholarship to UVA. A dentist's daughter who learned the game at Audubon Country Club in Louisville, Kentucky—“My parents are fortunate enough to belong; I was able to go out there anytime I wanted”—Leah hopes to play on the professional tour. As a freshman and sophomore, she was UVA's top female golfer and was named to the all-conference team. Leah, who attended a Catholic high school, told me she had strong grades but a disappointing SAT score, which she declined to disclose. “I would say I'm not a very good standardized-test taker. My academic talent is a little better than what the test shows. I do feel I wouldn't have got into UVA without golf.”

  AFTER MORE than thirty college coaches tried to recruit Ty Grisham, he accepted a baseball scholarship at the University of Virginia in 2001. The school got more than an outfielder. Ty's father, John Grisham, best-selling author of The Firm and other legal thrillers, had often donated money to help renovate the scruffy ballparks where his son played ball. Sure enough, once his son was on the team, he stepped up to the plate with more than $1 million to renovate the university's decrepit stadium.

  But the coach who had ardently pursued the novelist's son soon cooled on the freshman. Ty batted only ten times in a little more than two seasons and finally quit the team in 2004. His son's experience has left the elder Grisham wondering why his son was wooed by the Virginia coach in the first place. “There were some schools that wanted my son, and there were a handful that wanted me,” said the elder Grisham. “It's no secret I've given a lot of money to youth baseball.”

  In college athletics, money doesn't just influence a school's choice of which sports to sponsor or eliminate. It also intrudes on a realm usually considered a bastion of meritocracy—the selection of players. Not only do rich students have access to more sports than lower-income applicants, and thus more opportunity to leverage athletic skill into college admissions, but they also have a better chance than other athletes of equal ability to be recruited or picked for the varsity team.

  While coaches pursue top players based on their abilities, some borderline candidates are helped by factors other than physical prowess. Children of wealthy alumni and donors sometimes are given slots on teams even if they're out of their league athletically, in the hope that their parents will renovate a locker room or a sprinkler system. In some ways, the recruitment process is akin to a sandlot baseball game where two children choose sides. Hoping to win, the captains pick the best players first. But, after divvying up the good players, they'll give an edge to the kid who brought the bat and the ball.

  For some privileged players, who are marginal academically as well as athletically, a coach's interest may tip the scale with the admissions office. Others likely would have been accepted anyway but still divert roster slots and sometimes scholarship money from equally skilled players. Although they often are frustrated with their lack of playing time, they benefit from the prestige, networking, and career opportunities that come with a spot on a college sports team.

  Parents “pull strings or they donate so they can call their kid a student-athlete even though the kid's not actually out there performing,” Curtis Brown told me. He's a former college baseball coach who works for the Baseball Factory in Columbia, Maryland, which links high school prospects with college teams. “They're able to tell somebody, ‘My kid plays baseball at the university” That person they're talking to has no clue that the kid is the seventh option in the outfield.”