Heather Sue Mercer was an 18-year-old freshman when she first tried out for the Duke University men's football team in the autumn of 1994. A year earlier she had been the regular placekicker on her high school team in New York, and although she had not been offered a college scholarship, she presented her candidacy as a "walk-on" when she arrived at Duke.

Fred Goldsmith's biggest mistake wasn't allowing Mercer to try out for his football team. His top kicker was nursing an injury the following spring, and another kicker did not participate in spring drills. So Goldsmith found a place for Heather Sue.

Goldsmith's biggest mistake wasn't even allowing himself to be swept up in the euphoria when Mercer kicked the game-winning field goal in the annual Blue-White intra-squad game that spring. As her team-mates hoisted her onto their shoulders, Goldsmith does not deny having said something like "welcome your new player". "I shouldn't have said it," admitted the then-Duke head coach, now a North Carolina real estate developer. "I was carried away at the time. I was speaking more as the father of two daughters than I was as a football coach."

When his healthier placekickers returned to the team that autumn, Goldsmith returned to his senses. He informed Mercer that her services were no longer required.

"The biggest mistake I ever made in my life was saying that you were on the team," he told Mercer and her mother as he attempted to justify cutting her from the team.

He was wrong, though. His biggest mistake came in what he said next. "Why do you insist on playing football?" Goldsmith asked Mercer. "Why not try something like beauty pageants?"

Oops.

Those words came back to haunt him last Thursday, when a US District Court jury awarded Mercer $2 million in punitive damages after concluding that Goldsmith and Duke had practised sexual discrimination with the decision to cut her from the men's football team.

Specifically, the football coach and the university were found to have been in violation of Title IX, the federal regulation credited with opening the doors for American female athletes, and the women's sports lobby wasted little time in gloating over the ruling.

Women's Sports Foundation executive director Donna Lopiano predicted that the North Carolina jury verdict will make schools take female athletes seriously when they try out for male teams, "and that's only right. His court decision is consistent with federal court decisions, in that girls need to be allowed to play on boys' teams, especially when there is not a team for the girls."

According to one of Mercer's attorneys, Melinda Lawrence: "Fred Goldsmith chose not to see Heather Sue Mercer as a football player. He chose not to see her skills. He chose only to see her as a woman."

The feminist lobby has greeted the Mercer verdict as some sort of landmark for would-be cross-over female athletes. In truth, it is quite likely to have the opposite effect.

Although Title IX is regarded by some as the Emancipation Proclamation of women's athletics, it is actually a buzzword describing one segment of the Educational Amendments to the 1972 Civil Rights Act. The pertinent phrase reads: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid."

Since literally every college and high school is dependent in some respect on federal aid, the reach of the law is fairly all-encompassing. Every member of this summer's women's World Cup championship soccer team, for instance, was a one-time beneficiary of Title IX.

But the regulation has not been universally popular. Its guarantee of equal participation to co-eds was described by a prominent Notre Dame priest/administrator as a plot by "militant women out to destroy football".

In practice it has more often been other, so-called "minor" sports which have been the victims. Over the intervening quarter-century, schools across the country have dropped men's golf, wrestling, lacrosse, and boxing teams to bring themselves into compliance. And while football, generally the largest revenue-producing sport, has in most cases helped fund the new women's programmes, occasionally that sport has been a casualty as well: when Boston University abandoned football a few years ago it unabashedly admitted it was in order to comply with Title IX.

But here, if you will pardon the phrase, is the kicker. While Title IX says that if an institution sponsors a single-sex team that has no comparable counterpart, it must allow members of the excluded sex to try out for that team, football, which is defined as a "contact sport", is specifically excluded from that requirement.

Nothing in the law required Goldsmith to allow Heather Sue Mercer try out for the Duke football team. But according to Title IX rules, once a woman is allowed to participate, she must be treated equally. Goldsmith claims that's exactly what did happen.

"She was evaluated like a man would have been," said the former coach. "I decided to judge her like a man who was not making a contribution to the team."

In testimony on the witness stand, Goldsmith claimed he couldn't specifically recall dispensing the fateful "beauty pageant" advice, but he did acknowledge describing Mercer as "pretty", an adjective he would have been unlikely to employ to describe any of his other placekickers.

It might also be noted that, while we could all use an extra few million, Mercer hadn't exactly been in the poorhouse since her football career ended. She graduated from Duke in 1998, and holds down a well-paying Wall Street job. She said she will use the award to finance a scholarship for would-be female kickers.

But there, we feels, is the problem: largely as a result of this decision, it's going to be a cold day in hell before there is another female placekicker.

Since they aren't required by law to let women try out for a men's team, what football coach in his right mind is going to give a woman a shot now, knowing that she might turn around and, you know, sue his nuts off if she doesn't make the team?