In 1979, Penn State's men's basketball team played in Rec Hall. The women's team played in the White Building.

In 1979, the men's team had closed practice; the women's team did not.

The women's program did not even have a training table.

In 1979, things were different between the two programs.

But now, more than 25 years later, Penn State women's basketball coach Rene Portland said that all that has changed. The Lady Lions now play in the Bryce Jordan Center like the men do, and the two teams get identical treatment right down to their locker rooms and coaches' offices.

"We've gone from the outhouse to the penthouse, but we're not in the penthouse completely," Portland said, adding that her program is "living proof" that Title IX is working.

However, on March 18, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued a clarification to the third prong of Title IX, which will essentially give universities a standardized way to measure interest in women's sports.

The OCR's clarification says that universities can now use student surveys to evaluate the interest in women's sports. If results indicate that students have no interest to add another women's sport, then the university could choose not to add any sports and still be in compliance with Title IX.

One complaint of this new system is that an unreturned survey can be counted as a vote of no interest. This being so, women's athletic programs across the nation could be in danger.

Susan Delaney-Scheetz, Penn State's associate athletic director and senior women's administrator, said that the change will not affect the university but could potentially influence other schools.

"For us to send out a survey and say we didn't get a response enough back for interest, we would never be able to use that," she said. "But I would imagine that some schools would be able to take advantage of this and probably use it so that they wouldn't have to add women's teams. And conversely, then by not having to add women's teams in a strict budget, they wouldn't have to drop men's teams to add women's teams."

Portland agrees that the clarification will not affect Penn State but also said that it will not affect women's sports at all. She said it is just another "piece of paper" that will have no bearing whatsoever.

"People know that [women's programs] are supposed to be treated the same," she said.

Title IX states that no program receiving federal funding, including athletics, can deny opportunities to individuals on the basis of sex.

But, since Title IX was enacted in 1972, collegiate athletic fields have become the central battleground for debate. Proponents of the law argue that Title IX has clearly been pivotal in the advancement of women's sports, while people on the other side of the picket lines say the law has been the reason many men's sports have been cut.

To be in compliance with Title IX, universities must meet one of Title IX's three "prongs." The first prong is providing proportional opportunities to male and female athletes, the second is showing a clear evolution of women's sports, and the third is accommodating all interests.

Up to this point, schools primarily used the proportionality prong, which says that all athletic opportunities must be in proportion to the number of men and women enrolled at a university. For example, Penn State's student body is 46.4 percent female and 53.6 male, as of fall 2004, according to the university. That means that 53.6 percent of the athletic opportunities at Penn State must be offered to males and 46.4 percent to females.

"Most institutions will end up using the proportionality because that's grounded," Delaney-Scheetz said. "You can easily decide: Do you meet it or don't you meet it."

However, universities have been asking the federal government to set measurements of interest so they can use the third prong (accommodating all interests) more.

"Up until this point, there's never really been a finite rule attached to how do you accommodate interest," Delaney-Scheetz said.

The clarification gives schools what they were looking for -- a way to gauge the interest level in sports. However, the change has been criticized for being too simple.

"That system is flawed ... you have really got to look at why students came there in the first place," Delaney-Scheetz said. "I think that's where the Title IX proponents' side is coming from, is that you just can't evaluate the students that are already there. You need to go into other institutions around you to see what interests they have, of what students are coming to their institutions, and you have to look at the high schools to see what interest is also there."

The Department of Education did not return several messages to comment on the clarification.

Delaney-Scheetz said it wouldn't make sense for Penn State to use the third prong because the school has been way ahead of other schools when considering the amount of athletic opportunities offered, citing the success of women's varsity and club sports on campus.

But for every person that praises Title IX, there is a critic, even at Penn State, who believes it has unfairly hurt men's sports.

"You've got guys taking it on the chin left and right. Whoever dreamed it up had to be second cousin to an idiot," Penn State men's track and field coach Harry Groves said. "Abe Lincoln said you don't get rid of one set of slaves by creating another one. That's exactly what they've done. They got the women out of trouble and put the guys in it."

Groves said the clarification will not bring any resolution to the Title IX debate. Rather, the only route to a Title IX solution goes through the highest judicial authority.

"They're wasting their time until they go through the Supreme Court," he said.

Groves also said that universities should abide by Title IX but publicly disagree with it. Once enough people disagree, he said, the law would be changed for the better.

But no matter the effect it has had on men's athletics, Title IX has drastically changed the face of women's athletics.

According to the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport, the number of women participating in sports has rocketed from 31,852 in 1972 to 150,916 in 2001.

"Title IX for women's athletics has been extraordinary," Penn State women's track and field coach Beth Alford-Sullivan said. "You look at the growth and the development within our sport for women and for young people, and you can't deny that that's a direct result of the Title IX law that went into action."

Alford-Sullivan, a true lover of sport, can sympathize with sports that are adversely affected by Title IX.

"I certainly can understand the frustrations that Title IX has caused for repercussion within sports and within athletic departments," she said. "Hopefully, there's a neutral solution that will be able to accommodate everybody in the future."

That football receives the bulk of men's scholarships is another situation that causes problems. However, it grosses too much money to be cut in most cases. Because football can use up to 85 scholarships, other men's sports receive fewer scholarships than their female counterparts. For example, men's track and field gets 12 scholarships -- the women's team gets 18.

Another way men's sports are hurt is by receiving fewer scholarships than the number of starting spots to fill. Wrestling only receives 9.9 scholarships to field a starting lineup of 10.

Penn State wrestling coach Troy Sunderland said that number is simply not enough.

"When you consider the 10 weight classes, and depending on how many kids you have on a team, 30 or 40 kids on a team ... if you do the math, a lot of kids are paying their own way to come to school here," he said.

Title IX hits close to home for fifth-year senior Josh Walker, the captain of the wrestling team. When choosing which school to attend, Walker considered both Bucknell and Penn State.

He's happy now that he chose Penn State; Bucknell cut its wrestling program three years ago, and is only now in the process of restoring it.

"One of the best experiences of my life, probably the best, has been wrestling here at Penn State," Walker said. "If I had been denied that because of some stupid interpretation of a rule, I would be upset. I would have missed out on a large part of my life."

Walker has never been on full scholarship even though he is a captain and has racked up 85 career wins, second on the active roster. He said that in most instances, captains would receive full scholarships. However, he said he is not bitter.

"It's discouraging that we don't have more than 10 scholarships to give, but it never discouraged me because I felt like I was in the same situation that everyone else on the team was," he said. "The discouragement was that overall the whole team suffered and wrestling suffers as the result of only being able to give 9.9 scholarships."

Walker, who would someday like to be an athletic director, has done significant research on Title IX, and has even written a letter on behalf of Penn State wrestling to the White House. He said the best way to solve the problem would be to go back to how the law was interpreted in 1972.

"It basically is just a push that women receive the same benefits that men do, the same equipment, stuff like that," Walker said.

"You can't look at it as a proportionality aspect. Just because there might be more women enrolled at a college than men doesn't mean that there's more women that want to play sports than men. And the same is vice versa ... it can discriminate both ways."

Walker does not want to see his sport suffer, nor would he like to see any other sport suffer.

"No one wants to see another sport get cut," he said. "I go to women's sports and cheer for them and they come and cheer for us. That's how it is here at Penn State."

Delaney-Scheetz said that when looking to improve Title IX, people must take a "grassroots" perspective. She said that many sports such as wrestling and men's gymnastics are now being cut in high schools.

"Some high schools dropped [wrestling] because of health reasons with the weights that young men were trying to meet or the diseases that were being picked up on the mats. Even before Title IX, you had universities dropping those sports," Delaney-Scheetz said.

"High schools have cut sports. High schools have gone to pay for play. So, it's difficult for us to say we're going to add X and Y sport but have no basis for that sport as a feeder system around here from the high schools around here," she continued.

She also added that some sports might be dropped because of the athletic conferences in which they participate. Some conferences have a few sports on which they focus, and when schools move into conferences, they tend to focus on the same sports that the conference does. Currently, many conferences do not make wrestling a high priority.

In fact, the Big Ten is the only conference that still fields a full 11-team wrestling conference.

Delaney-Scheetz said that Penn State does its utmost to fund all programs, providing the NCAA maximum for every sport offered, but added that people still find it easiest to blame Title IX for cuts instead of asking whether it is really a budget problem or something similar.

"Here at Penn State we try to be fair to all of our student athletes, and we've tried our darnedest to make sure that as we try to increase opportunities for women, we are not going to decrease opportunities for men," Delaney-Scheetz said.

She said that other problems exist when adding sports, such as finding qualified officials to referee the sport and coaches to run the programs.

In her mind, though, Title IX has helped women's sports immensely.

"We are seeing that the more opportunities you do give for women, they will take advantage of those opportunities," Delaney-Scheetz said, adding that nobody is ever happy with any change to how Title IX is handled. "It's a very hard subject, and one that causes a lot of grief."

And even with the Department of Education's move to clarify Title IX, it seems as if that grief will continue to cause debate with no real end in sight.