Cutting the Field

By WELCH SUGGS

About 3:30 every spring afternoon, a college athletics department hits rushhour. Kids are getting taped up in the training room. The sharp "ping" of aluminum bats echoes from baseball and softball fields. Soccer and lacrosse and volleyball and track and wrestling and field-hockey teams are jogging, stretching, throwing balls around, getting warmed up.

It's a happy place, an excited place. An athlete getting ready for practice has hardly a care in the world. She leaves exams and pressures and college life behind when she walks into the locker room and puts on her cleats. He gets ready to learn some of the most valuable lessons he can get in college.

Why does Ben Lukowski run track for West Virginia University? "I guess for the poetic reasons -- how fast can you go, what are your limits," the freshman says. "In team sports, you can kind of hide, but on the track, it's all on you."

Mr. Lukowski is one of the last few men wearing West Virginia track uniforms who will know that feeling. The athletics department abruptly announced last month that it was dropping its men's cross-country, indoor and outdoor track, and tennis teams, as well as its coed rifle squad.

The Mountaineers are hardly alone. Seven colleges this year have announced plans to drop sports, mostly men's teams and mostly the nonrevenue "Olympic" sports. Within a week of West Virginia's announcement, three other colleges also said they were trimming their athletics programs to 16 teams, the minimum required to stay in Division I-A of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (one institution has since reconsidered).

Having a team dropped is tough, even tragic, for individual athletes. However, the ramifications of these colleges' actions reach far beyond their campuses. If varsity sports are being pared to the minimum, what does that say about the reason colleges have teams in the first place?

"Why is athletics part of college?" asks Marsha Beasley, West Virginia's rifle coach for the past 14 seasons. "To me, it's because athletics offers educational opportunities you just can't get in the classroom. Teamwork, performance under pressure, concentration, all those things you and I know about.

"The thing is, athletics is becoming more about advertising and PR for the university. When you say Duke, what do most people think of? Basketball, not the wonderful medical school and the other things the school has to be proud of."

Sports wasn't supposed to be like that. But increasingly, colleges in Division I are stripping away "minor" sports and focusing on "major" ones. Football and men's basketball teams have always gotten the vast majority of budgets, despite having poorer records in the classroom than Olympic-sports teams. Now, though, the money chase is forcing colleges to give up many of their success stories.

By the Numbers

According to a just-released NCAA study, the number of male athletes peaked in 1984-85, two years after the association began sponsoring women's sports. That year, the association's members averaged 254 male athletes each, and Division I colleges had 318 apiece. (Both the NCAA and Division I have added numerous members over the past two decades, so using average numbers of athletes controls for that growth.)

By 2001-2, the final year in the study, those numbers had shrunk to 205 and 264, respectively. Over that time, the number of female athletes has grown by half, from 98 to 150 per college throughout the NCAA and from 115 to 205 in Division I. However, after exploding in the early 1990s, the growth in the number of female athletes has slowed considerably in the last few years, as has the number of teams per college.

The number of teams and opportunities for football players has continued to grow, while men's basketball teams have remained stable. (Over time, far more colleges have had basketball teams than football teams, and the number of players needed hasn't changed.) In other men's sports -- call them minor, Olympic, nonrevenue, whatever -- the news has been much more bleak. Colleges have dropped scores of swimming, track, and wrestling teams, among other sports. Cynics joke that every men's gymnastics team in the country can boast of being in the top 20.

In many cases, this has been about colleges deciding to comply with the strictest possible standards of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds. A "safe harbor" for Title IX compliance is having the percentage of athletes who are women be roughly the same as the percentage of undergraduates who are women, and for many institutions, the simplest way to achieve that is to get rid of male athletes. Not those in football or basketball, though. Coaches say they need 85 scholarships and 100-plus athletes for each team.

Now women's sports are starting to feel the pain, too. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst eliminated women's gymnastics, water polo, and volleyball in 2001. The University of Tennessee at Martin announced last month that it is dropping women's track. Women have lost significant numbers of gymnastics and swimming teams over the past decade.

So the problem appears to go beyond the endless debates over gender equity.

Costs and Results

On average, Division I-A and I-AA teams spent $4.2-million on football in 2001-2, according to data published under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act of 1994. They spent another $834,000 on men's basketball.

Neither football nor basketball teams pay their own way except at the very largest and richest colleges, the ones with huge stadiums and lucrative television contracts. Some athletics directors argue that their teams are powerful advertisements for their universities and thus should be credited for the time they spend on television, but therein lies the other problem.

Barely half of Division I football players earn their degrees within six years of entering college, according to the NCAA's latest report. Only 43 percent of basketball players do.

Yet 58 percent of track athletes graduate and so do 59 percent of all other male athletes, better by far than male students who aren't on athletics scholarships. (Female athletes are far better across the board -- 65 percent of basketball players, 66 percent of track athletes, and 71 percent of all other athletes earned degrees within six years.)

And these sports don't cost an awful lot.

A Difficult Day

West Virginia's athletics program has been in a cost-cutting mode for the past several years, at least in second-tier sports. Tuition costs are spiking at the university, and the athletics department pays for players' scholarships.

"We've made budget cuts -- we eliminated some scholarships, eliminated some positions, mainly graduate-assistant positions," says Terri L. Howes, the Mountaineers' senior woman administrator. "And it got to the point where one coach said, 'If we do any more cuts, we might as well cut the program.' That really got us thinking."

So Ms. Howes, Ed Pastilong, the athletics director, and other senior staff members quietly began trying to trim $500,000 from the department's annual budget, which now stands at around $24-million.

"When we made our evaluations, we looked at every sport, with the exception of our 'priority' sports," says R. Michael Parsons, deputy athletics director, referring to football, men's and women's basketball, women's gymnastics, and women's soccer. "We looked at women's teams, and we had to look at what the impacts were going to be. We looked at the competitiveness of the program, the viability of the sport on a local, regional, and national level, and the student impact, and obviously trying to minimize that as much as possible."

Without any leaks to coaches, students, or reporters, Mr. Pastilong took the plan to the university's president, David C. Hardesty Jr., and its Board of Governors in April. Upon receiving their approval, the athletics department moved quickly.

On April 16, Ed Dickson, West Virginia's head men's tennis coach, got a call from Ms. Howes. He was to be in Mr. Pastilong's office at 11:45.

"I asked her what it was about and she said, something to do with the budget," Mr. Dickson recalls. "Then other coaches started coming around, saying things like, 'I think somebody's going to get cut.'"

That didn't make it any easier. "I had five minutes to think about it, so I asked, 'Is this about Title IX?'" he says. "We've added a huge program [women"s rowing], we're dropping mostly men's sports, so a red flag goes up there. They said, 'Yes, but there are a lot of other reasons, and basically it was a financial decision.'"

Then came meetings with athletes on the teams being dropped, rifle first, followed by track, cross country, and tennis. One of Mr. Dickson's players had transferred to West Virginia from Bowling Green State University when its tennis program was dropped. "Ian said, 'I knew what was coming by the look on your face,'" the coach recalls. Some shocked members of the track team initially walked out of their meeting, though they eventually returned.

The thing the athletes and coaches did not understand -- and still do not -- is why. Was it gender equity? The cuts reduce the number of male athletes by 114, or 29 percent, based on 2001-2 figures. That would put the representation of varsity athletes at West Virginia at 55 percent men and 45 percent women. The undergraduate student body is 54 percent male and 46 percent female.

However, West Virginia could have made a case that it was complying with Title IX by means beyond strictly the numbers. The university has added women's soccer and rowing in the past five years, and a graduate program has done surveys of the student body and West Virginia high-school students to determine if other sports were needed, concluding that the department is satisfying the interests and abilities of female students.

Ms. Howes and Mr. Parsons say the cuts were made because of finances. The Mountaineers eliminated $600,000 from their annual budget by dropping the three sports. However, the cuts will be phased in over time because the athletics department will honor scholarships for athletes who wish to remain in Morgantown until they graduate. And the $600,000 is a pittance in a sports budget of more than $24-million.

Some athletes think their sports were dropped to finance salaries for the football and men's basketball coaches. Rich Rodriguez, the football coach, received an extension in December to a contract that pays him a reported $700,000 a year, and John Beilein was hired to coach the basketball team last year at a salary of $550,000. Both coaches replaced legends -- Don Nehlen in football and Gale Catlett in basketball -- who worked, according to Mr. Parsons, "at below market" salaries.

"The administration hasn't been totally honest with us," says Zach Sabatino, a freshman distance runner. "They haven't given us a clear reason."

Cutting to the Bone

By dropping five sports, West Virginia is down to 16 teams, the NCAA minimum for Division I-A universities. Cuts at California State University at Fresno also have reduced its offerings to 16. Having the fewest sports allowable seems to be a trend.

"The NCAA, as the governing body of collegiate sports, must take some responsibility in the continual erosion of nonprofit, nonrevenue Olympic sports," Richard Aronson, director of the Collegiate Gymnastics Association, says in an e-mail message. "So far, they have looked the other way and we continue to lose sports. And the end is not in sight."

Such cuts have accompanied skyrocketing costs in facilities and revenue sports, as well as in scholarship bills, nationally. Universities in the Big Ten and the Ivy League have a longstanding tradition of offering "broad based" athletics programs with scores of sports, but colleges with fewer resources are having a hard time keeping up. So they focus on the sports with some chance of generating a profit, namely football and men's basketball.

"We need to have a successful football team because football generates significant revenue," Mr. Parsons says. "If [the athletics department is] going to be self-sufficient, we need a winning team because that means more television appearances, bowl games, better season-ticket sales the next year. We want to compete in a lot of different sports. But in this day and age, that takes an increasing amount of resources."

And that's left a large portion of athletics programs at risk.

"Right now, in the sports culture we live in, people favor the entertainment sports over the participation sports," says Bob Fraley, track coach at Fresno State since 1980. "People are willing to spend money on entertainment, but participation sports cost money. There's very little return as far as the gate, but there are huge returns when it comes to fitness and serving the educational needs of your community. Right now, those things are not highly valued in education.

"When I got my start, everything had very much of an educational philosophy. You knew you had these programs that were supported by California taxpayers. They didn't ask you to make money, but they expected you to educate kids and provide a program that taught educational values, fitness, and that went all the way through the communities."

Fresno State announced in April that it would drop men's cross-country and indoor track. It would have dropped outdoor track as well, but Mr. Fraley agreed to retire early and coach without pay to help save the team for a few years.

Sports like track, tennis, and swimming, and even basketball, were started at American colleges in the second half of the 19th century as ways to train the body as well as the mind. Influenced by German theories of physical well-being as well as the "Muscular Christianity" movement that criticized Victorian effeteness, colleges began offering these sports as part of a curriculum that evolved into what is now known as physical education.

Football and rowing started as student clubs that were taken over by college administrations, particularly in the Northeast in the 1880s when they discovered that hundreds and even thousands of people would watch students "agitate a bag of wind," as a president of Cornell University once put it.

By the 1920s, both "entertainment" and "participation" sports were firmly entrenched at American colleges. Women competed in most of the same sports, but on an intramural level that usually was firmly controlled by physical-education departments.

And nothing much changed for much of the century. Spurred by Title IX, college athletics departments created thousands of varsity teams for women in the late 1970s, but growth in women's opportunities slowed until the mid-1990s, when the threat of lawsuits and government actions prodded colleges into another expansion of women's sports. In 1998, the average number of women's teams per Division I college exceeded the average number of men's teams for the first time. Now, top-level institutions have an average of 9.1 men's teams and 10.2 women's teams.

A Different Direction

Thus far, little has happened in response to the downsizing of minor sports. A few male athletes have sued colleges under Title IX, but the courts have almost uniformly been unsympathetic. In other countries, private clubs provide sports opportunities for everyone from toddlers to Olympic athletes, but very little of that exists in America.

A beautiful new building on the West Virginia campus provides some indication of the direction sports are taking in this country. Perhaps a mile from the university's aging Coliseum, the new Student Recreation Center literally gleams: Floor-to-ceiling windows reflect sunlight in every direction.

Inside the $34-million facility are seven courts for basketball, volleyball, and badminton, with high ceilings and parquet floors that amplify the bounce of balls and the squeak of sneakers.

A massive natatorium provides a whirlpool, lanes for lap swimming, and a huge area to play water polo or merely to play. The facility is open to all West Virginia students, and about 4,000 of them take advantage every day.

Varsity sports have evolved into such specialized activities that an "ordinary" student would have little chance of walking up to a coach and being allowed onto a team in any sport. As such, they seem to have evolved into irrelevance at a place like West Virginia. Recreation centers are becoming hubs of healthy activity for all students.

That's a little disheartening to Jeff Huntoon, the Mountaineers' head track coach. "Sure, there are numerous club-level opportunities, but that's for flag football or pickup basketball," he says.

"You and I can go out and play pickup basketball, but is that really top-level basketball? Of course not."

Intercollegiate sports offer rare opportunities for athletes to prepare mentally and physically for an all-consuming event. That's a process that teaches lessons for life, says Mr. Dickson, the tennis coach. And it pays dividends for athletes that go far beyond wins and losses.

"All sports teach you those things," he says. "With the individual sports, it's so obvious when you're lacking, because you can't hide on a team somewhere. I go down the list of my players who came through here, and what they're doing now, and it's pretty damn impressive. If out of college they're teaching pros somewhere, I consider that a failure, in most cases."

Tough Timing

West Virginia's timing made life difficult for many athletes. By mid-April, most other colleges had already offered all their available scholarships and team slots to other incoming athletes. So many of the sportsless Mountaineers will stay on the campus for a year, training and evaluating their options. The university is keeping the rifle range open for a year specifically for that reason.

Others have arranged to transfer, and some others are done with sports, deciding to stay in Morgantown and finish their degrees.

Some will feel the need to keep going at some level, even if it isn't in the professional ranks, Mr. Dickson says. They will stay in shape, they will have a better quality of life, and they will remember the intense desire and concentration it takes to be successful in life way beyond sports.

In a generation, though, significantly fewer athletes could have the opportunity to learn those lessons.

GOING, GOING ...

Following are Division I institutions that have dropped sports since 2000.

Bowling Green State U.
March '02
men's swimming
indoor and outdoor track
tennis

California State U. at Fresno
April '03
men's cross-country
men's indoor track
men's soccer*
women's swimming*

Canisius College
November '02
football
men's and women's tennis
men's and women's indoor and outdoor track
rifle (coed)

Dartmouth College
December '02
men's and women's swimming*

Fairfield U.
February '01
football
men's ice hockey

Florida Atlantic U.
May '03
women's water polo

Florida International U.
January '03
men's soccer*

Howard U.
May '02
baseball
wrestling

Iowa State U.
April '01
baseball

Jacksonville U.
April '01
men's indoor and outdoor track

Marshall U.
April '03
men's indoor and outdoor track

Michigan State U.
May '01
men's gymnastics

Northern Illinois U.
April '02
men's and women's swimming

Northern Iowa U.
April '02
men's and women's swimming*
men's and women's tennis*

Portland State U.
February '01
men's golf

Radford U.
April '01
women's gymnastics
men's lacrosse

San Diego State U.
April '00
men's volleyball

St. John's U. (N.Y.)
December '02
football
men's cross-country
men's and women's swimming
men's indoor and outdoor track

Tulane U.
March '02
men's track

U. of Kansas
May '01
men's swimming
men's tennis

U. of Massachusetts at Amherst
March '03
men's and women's gymnastics
men's indoor track
men's tennis
women's volleyball
men's and women's water polo

U. of Miami
February '00
men's swimming
men's rowing

U. of Minnesota-Twin Cities
April '01
men's and women's golf*
women's gymnastics*

U. of Nebraska at Lincoln
May '01
men's swimming

U. of Richmond
February '01
synchronized swimming

U. of Tennessee at Martin
May '03
women's track

U. of Toledo
April '03
men's swimming
men's indoor and outdoor track

U. of Vermont
September '01
men's indoor and outdoor track
men's and women's gymnastics
women's volleyball

U. of Washington
July '00
men's and women's swimming

Virginia Military Institute
April '01
men's golf
men's tennis

West Virginia U.
April '03
men's cross-country
men's indoor and outdoortrack
men's tennis
rifle (coed) * Teams later reinstated.

SOURCE: Chronicle reporting

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education