Hanover College Accused of Violating Title IX After Cutting Women’s Swim Team
(From the pages of Sports Litigation Alert.)
By Ellen J. Staurowsky, Ed.D., Senior Writer, Professor, Sports Media (Retired), Roy H. Park School of Communications, Ithaca College, staurows@ithaca.edu
In late March of 2026, administrators at Hanover College (Indiana) announced that the men’s and women’s swim teams were being eliminated at the end of the spring semester. Reasons for the decision outlined in a statement posted on Hanover’s website alluded in a general way to budgetary strain from increased operational costs, the fact that the college did not have an aquatics facility on campus, and difficulties the programs faced in maintaining viable rosters (Hanover Athletic Communications, 2026).
In May of 2026, Hanover College’s president, Lake Lambert, received a letter on behalf of the women swimmers from Arthur Bryant and co-counsel explaining that since the college was already out of compliance with Title IX, the cuts had exacerbated that circumstance. They specifically noted that “Under Title IX, schools cannot eliminate women’s teams for which interest, ability, and competition are available unless ‘intercollegiate level participation opportunities for male and female students are provided in numbers substantially proportionate to their respective enrollments’” 44 Fed. Reg. 71418 (Jan. 16, 1996)” (Bryant, 2026, para 4). The women athletes sought reinstatement of the team and a commitment from the institution to bring the program into alignment with Title IX requirements.
A meeting with Hanover’s legal counsel did not yield a change in the college’s position. On August 25, 2026, in Frazier et al. v. Hanover College, four women swimmers formally accused the school of violating their rights under Title IX. They also sought preliminary and permanent injunctive relief to prevent the college from doing any further harm to the program and to preserve it.
Analysis of Hanover College’s Compliance with Title IX Athletics Regulations
One of the most fundamental questions to be answered in assessing whether a school is complying with Title IX regulations pertaining to athletics is through the Title IX three-part test of athletic participation. It examines whether men and women athletes are afforded opportunities to participate in varsity sports at rates proportional to their enrollment in the undergraduate student population. The test extends flexibility to schools in achieving compliance with Title IX’s participation requirements. Should a school fail to provide athletic opportunities proportional to enrollment, they are given a chance to explain how they are working to achieve that goal by demonstrating a history and continuing practice of program expansion or failing that, they can demonstrate the athletic program as offered accommodates the existing interest and abilities of the underrepresented group.
Based on publicly available information submitted by Hanover College in accordance with the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA), other public announcements and documents, the letter sent on behalf of the plaintiffs to Hanover’s president, and the complaint itself, it will be a difficult hurdle for Hanover to successfully argue that it met Title IX’s three-part test either before or after the women’s swim program was cut. As noted in the complaint, at the time the decision was made to discontinue women’s swimming, Hanover was not offering women athletes athletic opportunities proportional to their enrollment. With a gap of over 15%, Hanover would have to add 177 athletic opportunities to close that gap.
And even though the men’s and women’s swim team struggled to maintain robust rosters in the years following COVID, the decision to cut an existing women’s team that did have athletes ready, willing, and able to compete appears to place Hanover in a position of having violated all three parts of the three-part test. As illustrated below in Table 1, Hanover has never come close to offering athletic opportunities proportional to enrollment over the span of more than two decades. The fact that women’s swimming was added in 2018 would not support a finding that Hanover had a plan in place to address sex discrimination in the program. Its recent decision merely amplifies the problem. Although the participation gap has fluctuated a bit between 15% to 20% favoring men athletes at Hanover, these double-digit gaps have been persistent and systemic.
\The swim program had been newly added to the menu of varsity sport offerings at Hanover in the 2018-2019 academic year. As noted in the College’s announcement, there was a drop in participation that happened during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The eight-year history of participation in the program for men and women is documented below. Visually, Graph 2. supports Hanover’s rationale for cutting both the men’s and women’s program for instability in their rosters. That said, given that many other programs in all sports at other colleges and universities and at Hanover rebounded after Covid, this does raise the question of what happened here. The complaint offers some insight in this regard.
When Hanover added men’s and women’s varsity swimming teams in 2018, it did so without benefit of a facility on campus to support the program. Instead, they entered into an agreement with Southwestern High School to use their natatorium as a practice and competition facility. The facility limited Hanover’s program strictly to swimming events because the pool did not have a diving board. Readily available within a 5-minute walk or 1-minute car ride from campus, the option made the teams feasible but not ideal (Hanover Athletics Facilities, 2026).
In 2021-2022, two events further affected the teams. A faulty air filtration system rendered the Southwestern Natatorium unavailable. Seeking another training facility, the teams were left to commute 40 minutes away to a YMCA in another county, where they were unable to hold any home meets and where the only available practice times were at 5:00am and 5:30am. The strain from the additional travel time and early training schedules took their toll on the teams’ rosters, with swimmers from both the men’s and women’s teams dropping out or leaving to go to other schools. Facility concerns persisted over the next three years. For a portion of the 2023-2024 academic year, when the team was not able to use the Southwestern pool because of a pump failure, they made a 25 minute trip to New Washington High School to practice. In 2024-2025, the team traveled 15-20 minutes to Madison High School, where they were only able to get practice times between 5:00am and 7:30am.
The program suffered further disruption when head coach, Blake Braden, resigned his position midway through the 2021-2022 season. According to the complaint, the team went through the second half of the season without a designated head coach.
For the next four years, Hanover employed Jay Crawford, one of the head coaches of the Southwestern High School team, initially as an interim part-time and then part-time head coach. The men’s and women’s swim teams at Hanover were the only teams after Braden’s departure that had no full-time head coach and no assistant or graduate assistant coach. As described in the complaint, Crawford and the remaining team members worked diligently to retain the program despite the fact that they faced resource challenges that none of the other teams at Hanover had to deal with. As noted in the report, just as their facility situation was finally stabilized and the women’s program was projected to have 14 members on the roster for 2026-2027 due to Crawford’s recruiting efforts, the decision to cut the team was announced without any consultation on the part of the vice-president of athletics, Mark Shook.
Remedies Sought
The women’s swimmers in this case seek preliminary and permanent injunctive relief to ensure that they will be able to compete in their sport in 2026-2027 year and that Hanover will develop a plan to address the inequities in its athletic program that discriminate against women athletes through the loss of opportunities and failures to provide equal treatment.
Concluding Thoughts & Questions Remaining
In hindsight, one might ask if Title IX affords the opportunity for schools, if bad programmatic decisions are made or if unanticipated circumstances render a reconsideration of previous decisions, to make adjustments as needed to programs. In this case, it is hard not to wonder what kind of additional risk Hanover athletes (both men and women) assumed by having to travel off campus at such early hours, driving themselves in their own cars to practice facilities. At the same time, when schools fail to comply with Title IX for so long and cannot demonstrate they have a solid and implementable plan to address sex discrimination in their programs, the impact of seemingly obvious justifications for cutting programs require an assessment of context and impact.
As referenced in the complaint, Hanover was contemplating adding women’s flag football to coincide with the anticipated start of a flag football championship in 2028 by the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference. The plaintiffs argue that such a plan does not recognize the hardships they suffered for years due to a lack of investment that would have stabilized their sport in terms of coaching support and resources, lost opportunities women swimmers experienced as a result of the decision to eliminate their sport and the difficulty they faced trying to transfer because of the lack of notice and timing of the announcement.
As persuasive as the plaintiffs are, is there a vulnerability to their argument that they were not aware of any plans to drop the program? The fact that the program did not have a full-time head coach for four years, a definitive plan for progress moving forward, persistent facility problems, and rosters that were slim might have at least signaled that the program was not on firm ground. While the athletes argue in the complaint that the timing of the announcement about the program cut came at an inconvenient time, creating problems for them to transfer, based on the decline in the rosters it seems that transferring was a subject of a fair amount of discussion for years. Unless the women swimmers were going to transfer to schools outside of NCAA Division III, they would have had the opportunity to submit a self-release to explore their options with other Division III programs with comparative ease. Was the hardship as great as the plaintiffs suggest?
Beyond the Title IX considerations in this case, there is the broader issue of small, private colleges using the addition of sport programs as an enrollment strategy. Hanover is similar to many small private colleges navigating turbulent times in higher education. In the end, did the addition of what appeared to be a sport that required little investment yield what the institution thought it would? According to EADA data for 2024-2025, nearly half of the college’s enrollment was comprised of athletes. In tuition driven institutions that have limited budgetary flexibility, the loss of even a few students can be problematic for the institution’s bottom line. Did Hanover realize it’s enrollment goals by adding the swim program? Further, by the time Hanover gets done contesting this case, will it have been worth it or might it have been better to reinstate the women’s swim team and add women’s flag football?
References
Bryant, A. (2026, May 26). Letter to President Lake Lambert, Hanover College. RE: Elimination of Women’s Swimming Team in Violation of Title IX. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6822572f98e45c6579692dd5/t/6a8e32bb53fca521585ed174/1787703995722/Letter+to+Hanover+College+President+re+Title+IX+Violation+5.26.26.pdf
Hanover Athletics Facilities. Southwestern Natatorium. https://athletics.hanover.edu/facilities/southwestern-natatorium-/12?path=mswim
Hanover College News. (2025). Hanover College names new vp for athletics. Press release. https://www.hanover.edu/about/news/2025/hanover-college-names-new-vp-for-athletics/
Hanover Athletic Communications. (2026, March 20). Hanover College to discontinue its swimming program. Press release. https://athletics.hanover.edu/news/2026/3/20/mens-swimming-and-diving-hanover-college-to-discontinue-its-swimming-program.aspx
Tallulah Frazier et al. v. Hanover College. Class action complaint. United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana New Albany Division. Case No. 4:26-cv-219. (2026, August 25). https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6822572f98e45c6579692dd5/t/6a8df67f4cfbc01b0096d703/1787704860700/Hanover+Title+IX+Class+Action+Complaint+8.25.26.pdfhttps://static1.squarespace.com/static/6822572f98e45c6579692dd5/t/6a8df67f4cfbc01b0096d703/1787704860700/Hanover+Title+IX+Class+Action+Complaint+8.25.26.pdf