By: Savanna Peters

Lisa Peterson is the Senior Associate Athletic Director and Senior Women’s Administrator for the University of Oregon. She oversees the female sports programs and communicates with the Pac-12 as a liaison for Oregon. Lisa believes the best part of her job is the interactions she has with the student-athletes.

Compared to your previous work at other colleges, where is Oregon athletics at in female equality?

“The way that Rob operates is that he wants every sport to have what they need to be successful. Does it mean that all the numbers look exactly the same? No it doesn’t… You can’t look across the board and say okay everything is exactly the same because that’s not what it is. When you look at equality, people tend to just look at strict numbers and the data instead of looking at what goes into it. I think Oregon does a really good job of making sure that every sport, no matter what gender, has what they need. Clearly when you look at what football gets it dramatically stands out but 67% of our revenue is generated by football so without it the other 18 sports don’t exist.”

Do you think women’s sports could survive without men’s basketball or football?

“No I don’t. People aren’t going to pay that type of money to come watch women’s sports. Only because I don’t think there is enough interest and it’s not because we don’t try and it’s not because the student-athletes aren’t good; there just isn’t that level of interest, in my opinion, in women’s sports to live off women’s sports alone.”

How does Oregon work to achieve Title IX compliance?

“There are three ways that you can be in compliance… One is that your student body population…mirrors your athletic population. There is another prong that says you are supplying the interest and abilities of your student population. Oregon is expansion. If you show continued expansion… to the underrepresented sex…you are in compliance. So for us…we added women’s soccer in 2008, women’s lacrosse in 2006, acrobatics and tumbling, and then sand volleyball in 2013.”

Where do you see women’s sports in the future?

“I think that the media such as twitter and Instagram has opened people’s eyes to what is happening. People see things because they are on TV, like all the NBA and NFL games. Because of the introduction of the Pac-12 Network and Big Ten Network, people are getting to see women compete. The problem was that people weren’t seeing any of it. I think women’s sports have grown from that perspective and that they’re only going to continue to grow because more and more things are becoming available for people to see.”