Homophobia at the college level has taken on a cruel and unnecessary form that is hurting female athletes and coaches by their own athletic equals by becoming a powerful force in the world of negative recruiting. Negative recruiting happens when an athletic department builds up their own program by diminishing their rivals through criticisms, insults, or innuendos to promising female athletes interested in continuing their athletic careers.
Rivaling athletic departments hoping to gain a promising female athlete will use society's fear about the lesbian athlete to discourage the potential player from participating on a rival's team. Athletic departments will go as far as saying that the coach from the rival school is a lesbian and encourages her players to follow her lifestyle or that the players from the other school are mostly lesbians that stick together by persuading their fellow teammates to participate in lesbian relationships. Potential female athletes and their parents who encounter such information become concerned about the rival school and will oftentimes choose the school with the least amount of lesbian activity for fear of being associated with what society says is wrong.
Negative recruiting tactics not only harm female coaches and their players in their athletic lives but also in their personal lives. Female coaches that are indeed lesbians will conceal their personal lives from their workplace or even hide their sexual orientation for fear that if their identity were discovered they would lose their jobs and harm their athletic departments reputation. Athletes who are lesbians will conceal their identity from fellow teammates for fear of being unaccepted and will try to be something they are not. Hiding their identity will often result in depression and unhealthy behaviors just so that society will not label them negatively. Those that are not lesbian coaches or players have to deal with being wrongfully labeled by rivals and are constantly finding ways to prove their femininity. In some cases, female athletes will discontinue their athletic careers fearing that if they continue to participate in sports society will continue to view them as lesbians.
When Title IX was placed into affect at the high school level and the NCAA moved into college sports a new message was being distributed by society, young females are encouraged to participate in sports so long at they continued to act femininely. This decreased the fear of being labeled a lesbian for participating in sports automatically however it did not decrease the use of negative recruiting among college athletic departments.