Women's athletes say the writing is on the locker room wall. It's just a matter of when Department of Athletics administrators get around to reading it.

That writing is Title IX, part of a 1972 law which mandates "equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes." Such equal opportunity, some female athletes and a few of the department's bolder coaches say, is not provided by the Harvard athletic experience.

The evidence of unequal opportunity, the athletes say, is all around them. Men's teams travel more. A women's lacrosse player, wandering into the training room after a day spent being battered and bruised at Ohiri Field, has to wait, as a matter of course, for the men's hockey and football teams to leave. Walk into Bright Hockey Center in the evening, and watch the women's hockey team practice. Stroll in during "prime time"--from 2 to 7 p.m., when most students have free time for extracurriculars--and find the men practicing.

"I've felt that women aren't treated equally in terms of sports teams," says senior Rachel Schultz, Co-Captain of the women's lacrosse team, a perennial contender for the national championship. "You see it in the training room--[women athletes] have to wait for the football and hockey players to leave first."

Athletics department administrators don't quite see it the same way. In a December interview, Director of Athletics Bill Cleary '56 said his department provides the same opportunities to all sports and gives no preferential treatment to men's teams.

"No one should have any doubt about the support we give to women's athletics teams," Cleary said.

Still, the dispute within the Athletic Department over women's sports has been bitter and, at times, personal. The day after The Crimson ran an article on the treatment of women's teams, Carole Kleinfelder, the women's lacrosse coach and an outspoken critic of the department, found her truck tires slashed in the parking lot of the Gordon Indoor Track and Tennis Center--an act Kleinfelder believes was likely a response to her criticism of the department.

The ultimate source of the dispute may be the law itself.

"Equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes" is a phrase subject to as many different interpretations as the strike zone in major league baseball.

At Harvard, Cleary says, the proof of equal opportunity is in the operating budgets for men's and women's teams, which, according to him, represent equal funding. What are those figures? That, Cleary says, is a secret.

But in February, The Crimson obtained an internal department report which showed that more than twice as much money was spent on men's sports as on women's.

The report also cast doubts on official explanations of a fair and balanced operating budget. In fact, the document says that the department spends significantly greater amounts of money on four high-profile sports three of them men's teams because they bring in more revenue.

The report tries to explain the differences by noting that the percentage of money spent on women's sports 32 percent approximates the percentage of athletes who are women--35 percent. But Kleinfelder and Title IX experts say they find that argument disingenuous in part because the student body is 42 percent women and in part because recruiting and admissions largely determine the number of Harvard athletes.

"It's a self-fulfilling prophecy," says Patty Flannery, a New York-based attorney who specializes in Title IX cases. "If you say the interest isn't there and don't provide the opportunity, who's going to want to play that sport?"

The report also details discrepancies from team photography to practice time at Bright Hockey Center. At the hockey center, for the time between October 1991 and January 1992, the men's hockey team practiced for 157 hours, including 132 hours during prime time. The women's team, in contrast, had 46 hours on the ice, with just six hours in prime time.

Contributions to Friends groups (alumni organizations that make regular donations to specific sports), also heightens differences between men's and women's athletics. According to the report, men's teams receive three times as much in friends' contributions as their female counterparts.