Title IX
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
40 free Title IX trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Title IX is a single sentence of federal law, passed in 1972, that bars sex discrimination in any education program that takes federal funds. Few statutes so short have reached so far. It reshaped admissions, hiring and campus discipline, and it turned women's sports from an afterthought into a fixture of campus life. This quiz covers the whole story. You will meet the lawmakers and campaigners behind the law, the presidents who signed it and fought over it, and the Supreme Court cases that widened or narrowed its reach. Plenty of questions deal with athletics: the protests, the lawsuits, the rule-makers, and the athletes and coaches whose careers show what changed. The questions suit students, teachers, coaches, compliance trainers and sports fans alike. Some are easy, some will test people who work with the law every day, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Yale women's team stripped in 1976 with Title IX written on their bodies to demand showers?
Rowing
Rowing had no women's locker room at Yale's boathouse, so the crew sat waiting on the bus while the men washed. Their protest in the athletic director's office made newspapers worldwide, and a locker room followed by 1977.
Q 02Which sports body sued the federal government in 1976, calling Title IX's athletics rules illegal?
NCAA
The NCAA lost when its suit was dismissed in 1978. Within a few years it was staging women's championships itself, which finished off the rival association that had been running them.
Q 03Title IX's own text carves out an exemption for college scholarships won in which kind of contest?
Beauty pageants
Beauty pageants were written in by a 1976 amendment, which also protected father-son and mother-daughter school events as long as the other sex gets something comparable.
Q 04Which president signed Title IX into law in June 1972 as part of a wider education bill?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon said nothing about women at the signing: his remarks dwelt on the bill's school busing provisions instead.
Q 05In a 2010 Title IX case against Quinnipiac University, a judge ruled which activity was not yet a sport?
Cheerleading
Cheerleading was still too underdeveloped and unorganized to count, the judge found, so Quinnipiac could not use it to replace the women's volleyball team it planned to cut.
Q 06Which tennis champion started the Women's Sports Foundation in 1974, two years after Title IX passed?
Billie Jean King
Billie Jean King seeded it with $5,000 of her own award winnings, the same year she launched the magazine womenSports.
Q 07Heather Sue Mercer sued Duke University under Title IX after being cut from which men's team?
Football
Football had never had a woman try out at Duke before Mercer, an all-state high school placekicker. An appeals court rejected the idea that contact sports are wholly exempt from Title IX.
Q 08A 2022 court ruling on Title IX and dress codes began when a North Carolina school made girls wear what?
Skirts
Skirts promoted chivalry, the school's founder argued, but the full Fourth Circuit found the rule rested on gender stereotypes, and the Supreme Court declined to step in.
Q 09Title IX was renamed in 2002 for which Hawaii congresswoman, the first woman of color in Congress?
Patsy Mink
Patsy Mink sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, the year the law passed. Congress put her name on it weeks after she died in office.
Q 10Which president's veto did Congress override in 1988 to restore Title IX's reach across whole campuses?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan's veto was the first of a civil rights bill since Andrew Johnson's in 1866, and Congress overrode it within a week.
Q 11Which Indiana senator, often called the father of Title IX, first introduced the measure in Congress?
Birch Bayh
Birch Bayh also wrote two constitutional amendments: the Twenty-fifth, on presidential succession, and the Twenty-sixth, which lowered the voting age to 18.
Q 12Which scholar, dubbed the godmother of Title IX, was once told she came on too strong for a woman?
Bernice Sandler
Bernice Sandler answered by filing complaints against about 250 colleges, using an executive order that barred sex discrimination by federal contractors.
Q 13Which Texas senator's failed 1974 amendment would have exempted revenue-producing sports from Title IX?
John Tower
Q 21How many words long is Title IX's famous opening sentence, a count that titled a 2022 ESPN documentary?
37
37 words did the job, and none of them is "sports" or "athletics". ESPN's four-part series 37 Words marked the law's 50th anniversary.
Q 22Every school covered by Title IX must name at least one employee to serve as its Title IX what?
Coordinator
Coordinator is a required post, and the school must make that person's name, address and telephone number available to everyone.
Q 23Which Education Secretary withdrew Obama-era Title IX guidance on campus sexual assault in 2017?
Betsy DeVos
Betsy DeVos followed up in 2020 with formal regulations, which bound schools more tightly than guidance letters and required colleges to hold live hearings.
John Tower's exemption was dropped by the conference committee. Congress instead adopted Jacob Javits's wording, which told regulators to make reasonable provisions for the nature of particular sports.
Q 14Which college gave its name to the 1984 Supreme Court ruling that narrowed Title IX's reach?
Grove City
Grove City argued it took no federal funds at all. The Court said its students' grants counted, but only for the financial aid office, which left most athletic departments outside the law.
Q 15Which Ivy League school lost a landmark Title IX case after demoting women's gymnastics and volleyball?
Brown
Brown argued that women were simply less interested in sports than men. Two courts rejected that defense, and the university was ordered to restore the teams.
Q 16Which association ran women's college championships during Title IX's first decade before folding?
AIAW
The AIAW proved women's sports could pay when its 1973 basketball final drew over 3,000 fans and turned a profit. That success drew in the larger men's governing body, which soon replaced it.
Q 17Which basketball star became the first woman to get a four-year athletic scholarship from UCLA, in 1974?
Ann Meyers
Ann Meyers claimed another first in 1979, when she signed a contract with the NBA's Indiana Pacers.
Q 18Which future Tennessee coaching great got no athletic scholarship in 1970, two years before Title IX?
Pat Summitt
Pat Summitt's brothers each had an athletic scholarship, but her parents had to pay her way through college. As a young head coach she washed the team's uniforms herself.
Q 19National Girls and Women in Sports Day began in 1987 to honor which Olympian who had died a year earlier?
Flo Hyman
Flo Hyman led the United States volleyball team to silver in 1984, then collapsed and died during a match in Japan from undiagnosed Marfan syndrome.
Q 20Which men's college sport lost 171 teams between 1981 and 1999, cuts its coaches blamed on Title IX?
Wrestling
Wrestling coaches took their complaint to court in 2002 and had it dismissed. A 2023 study found that the savings from cutting men's teams mostly went to bigger men's programs.
Q 24What salutation gives its name to the 2011 federal letter on campus sexual violence and Title IX?
Dear Colleague
Dear Colleague letters carry less force than formal regulations, yet this one led schools to add staff and rewrite their procedures. Critics objected that it skipped public notice and comment.
Q 25Under Title IX's proportionality test, women's share of a school's athletes should mirror what?
Enrollment
Enrollment is the yardstick for the first of three alternative tests. A school can also comply by showing a history of expanding women's sports or by fully meeting women's interest.
Q 26Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools in 1992 first let Title IX plaintiffs win what from schools?
Money damages
Money damages raised the stakes. Before the unanimous ruling, the most a court could do was order a school to stop discriminating.
Q 27Geraldine Cannon won individuals the right to sue under Title IX in 1979 after a rejection from what?
Medical school
Medical school age limits were the issue: Cannon was 39, and the University of Chicago said it turned away applicants over 30, a policy that weighed more heavily on women.
Q 28The Supreme Court's 2005 ruling for Alabama coach Roderick Jackson extended Title IX to cover what?
Retaliation
Retaliation counts as sex discrimination, the Court held 5-4. Jackson had been removed as a girls' coach after complaining that his team got worse funding and facilities than the boys.
Q 29Which former Arizona state senator wrote the Supreme Court's 1999 Title IX ruling on student harassment?
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for a 5-4 majority that a school can be liable when it knowingly ignores one pupil's harassment of another. The case began with a fifth-grader.
Q 30Roughly how many girls played U.S. high school sports in the school year before Title IX passed?
About 300,000
About 300,000 girls played, against nearly 3.7 million boys, so girls were roughly 7 percent of high school athletes. By 2016-17 the girls' figure had grown more than tenfold.