COC DEVISES GAME PLAN FOR FOOTBALL; MONEY, GENDER EQUITY ARE HURDLES.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

College trustees tonight will get an update on efforts to bring back the football program - dropped 15 years ago because of funding shortfalls - and to add sports teams for women students.

The College of the Canyons football team played its final season in 1981 and the program was disbanded the following spring, but two months ago the board of trustees voted to reinstate the sport in autumn 1998 if several conditions could be met.

The most pressing criteria are financial and legal.

To comply with the federal gender equity statute, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, College of the Canyons would add a women's soccer team and possibly women's golf to balance out the addition of football, which would increase the number of Cougars athletes by about 55 men. College of the Canyons could jeopardize $1.5 million in federal funding it receives if the balance between its men's and women's athletic programs is greatly disproportionate and no progress is being made to remedy the inequity.

In the past two months, the college has developed a plan to comply with Title IX, college President Dianne Van Hook wrote in a report to the board.

The trustees also have met with Santa Clarita city officials and trustees for the William S. Hart Union High School District regarding the ramifications of bringing back football - specifically the shared use of Cougar Stadium by high school and COC teams, and use of COC fields by the community and added Cougar teams like women's soccer.

Officials have estimated that resurrecting football would take $145,300 in one-time start-up costs, plus $250,600 in ongoing costs per year. How to pay for that expense was one of the conditions, and Van Hook reports there have been ongoing discussions with the College of the Canyons Foundation about how to fund a football team.

``A plan has been developed by the foundation to expand its fund-raising efforts to include athletics,'' her report stated. ``The foundation will provide a $1 match for every $2 in new funds raised for (the) campaign, with a maximum foundation match of . . . $60,000 for athletics.''

A campus Football Feasibility Committee has spent several months researching whether the college could once again field a gridiron squad.

Currently, COC fields interscholastic teams in men's and women's cross country, track and field, basketball and swimming, along with men's baseball and golf, and women's softball and volleyball. A committee organized to gauge the feasibility of returning football to COC listed women's soccer as the best addition to campus athletics.

Title IX says that the number of female athletes must be in proportion to the number of female students, and likewise for the male athlete-student ratio. Right now, 41 percent of the college's athletes are women but 53 percent of its full-time students are women - meaning there is a 12 percent disparity.

Seventy of California's 107 community colleges have football teams, including Glendale, Pierce, Valley, Antelope Valley, Moorpark and Ventura.