While headlines blare news of budget cuts in athletics, a handful of emerging sports for women are quietly making gains. Over the past few months, new opportunities for females in sand volleyball, water polo, and wrestling are bucking the trend of program cuts.

The biggest news is in sand volleyball, which has been officially adopted as an emerging sport for women in NCAA Divisions I and II and will be played in the spring. Although Division I members almost voted to override the addition of sand volleyball at the NCAA Convention in January, supporters of the game believe it will bring increased attention to the sport of volleyball overall.

"This was a heck of a fight, but I'm pretty excited," says Mick Haley, Head Coach at the University of Southern California, the first school to announce it will offer sand volleyball as an official team. "We've just added a tremendous lightning rod to our sport, and more people--sponsors, manufacturers, fans--are going to take notice of both the indoor and outdoor game as a result.

"I don't think the override vote was a direct reflection on the sport of sand volleyball," Haley continues. "I think it was a reflection on the economy and those schools not wanting to add a sport--which I completely understand. But a lot of those schools that voted for the override will add sand volleyball once they realize it's best for the athletes. We're always talking about adding scholarships for women, and the sand game is a great way to do that."

Division II, which approved practice and playing season dates and a scholarship equivalency proposal at the Convention, aims to ease concern over competitive equity issues with a hierarchy financial aid model. This means that any scholarship athlete who participates in both sand and indoor volleyball will count against the indoor team's scholarship limits, ensuring that the five scholarships approved for the sand game will go to new players only.

While Division II is set to begin sand volleyball in 2010-11, Division I pushed its start date to 2011-12 so it has more time to debate the specifics. The membership will likely approve the same hierarchy financial aid model as Division II, though have more scholarships and a slightly longer playing and practice season, at the next Legislative Council meeting scheduled for April 19-20.

At USC, plans for its sand team are beginning to take shape. The school hopes to build a small facility on campus that will accommodate a sand court, and while Haley will serve in a supervisory position, the Trojans will hire another coach with outdoor experience.

Moving from the beach to the water, water polo supporters got great news this winter when the Collegiate Water Polo Association announced it is adding a division for D-III schools. Collegiate Water Polo Association Commissioner Daniel Sharadin expects many more small schools to add women's water polo in the coming years as a result.

"Previously, Division III institutions were often matched up against Division I schools, and in some cases, fully funded programs with eight scholarships," he says. "That's just not an equitable situation, and the D-III athletes went into those contests knowing they didn't have much chance of winning.

Sharadin is also encouraged by the fact that water polo is an incredibly easy sport for schools to add. Most Division III institutions already have a pool on campus, and as a spring sport, water polo won't interfere with the winter swimming season. Equipment costs are also nominal since all a team needs are swimsuits, practice and game balls, and goals.

There is one other major benefit of the sport. "Most games are played in a tournament format on the weekends, so the scheduling is very simple for administrators and the athletes miss very little class time," Sharadin says.

High school-age athletes are also trying out new opportunities through the growth of girls' wrestling. Ten years ago, almost every girl who wanted to wrestle had to compete primarily against boys. While many still are, a growing number of high schools are creating girls-only teams, and Hawai'i, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington now hold girls' state championships. The California Interscholastic Federation will vote on a proposal this year that would expand its girls' wrestling regional championships to a state championship in 2011.

The number of girls-only invitational tournaments held across the nation has also risen in recent years. The United States Girls' Wrestling Association (USGWA) has open girls' tournaments listed every weekend through the spring.

The NFHS last reported the number of female high school wrestlers to be just over 6,000 in 2008-09, but Kent Bailo, Director of the USGWA, estimates there are now over 10,000 high school girls wrestling in the United States. "The 14 NAIA and NCAA Division III schools that have women's teams are a good sign," he says. "But we now need Division I schools to have teams for women's wrestling to truly take off."