Page:Veronica Ollier v. Sweetwater Union High School District (September 19, 2014) US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.djvu/25

 assessment of &hellip; athletic facilities and programs at [Castle Park].” Further, the district court called Schiff’s site visits “superficial,” and noted that “experience with the non-relevant issue of school finance” did not qualify him “to opine on Title IX compliance.”

Similarly, the district court excluded the proposed testimony of Penny Parker015☺an assistant principal at a different high school who would have testified about the “unique nature of high school softball and its role at Castle Park,”—because her “methodology is not at all clear” and “her opinions are speculative &hellip; inherently unreliable and unsupported by the facts.”

We assume without deciding that (1) Schiff and Parker’s proposed testimony was relevant, and (2) Schiff and Parker were qualified as Title IX experts under Rule 702. Nonetheless, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion when it struck both experts’ proposed testimony. The record suggests that the district court’s determination that Schiff and Parker’s proposed testimony was based on, at best, an unreliable methodology, was not illogical or implausible.

Schiff did not visit Castle Park to conduct an in-person investigation until after he submitted his initial report on the case. And when he did visit, his visit was cursory and not in-season: Schiff only walked the softball and baseball fields. His opinion that the “girls’ softball field was in excellent shape,” then, was based on no more than a superficial visual examination of the softball and baseball fields. Schiff—who Sweetwater contends is qualified “to assess the state of the athletic facilities for both boys and girls teams” at Castle Park because of his “experience on the business side of athletics,”