The goal of 1972’s Title IX’s legislation was to advance women’s intercollegiate athletics.

The consequence in meeting the law’s requirements has been the loss of more than 400 men’s athletic teams, which have been eliminated as a result of universities needing to become NCAA compliant.

One innovative approach has been to potentially reclassify typically female-oriented activities such as dance and cheerleading as sports. However, a judge has just struck out one school’s attempt to do just that:

A federal judge in Connecticut has again ruled that competitive cheerleading is not a sport, and Quinnipiac (KWIHN’-uh-pee-ak) University remains under an injunction that requires the school to keep its women’s volleyball team.

Several volleyball players and their coach successfully sued the university in 2009 after it announced it would eliminate volleyball for budgetary reasons and replace it with a competitive cheer squad. The judge issued the injunction at that time.

On Monday, the judge ruled that upgrades to cheerleading — now called acrobatics and tumbling — still do not make it a sport, and said that even with the addition of a women’s rugby team, the school must keep volleyball out of Title IX restraints that ban sex discrimination in federally funded school programs, including sports.