Cal Berkeley Track and Field Survives the axe...

Everyone on campus got an email about this...

So, they are getting rid of America's sport and downgrading one of the nations most dominant teams (Rugby) while saving a marginal sport that they absolutely suck at???

Good thinking.

Wonder how much money these multi millionaires have given. I'm certain they could afford to endow all of the scholarships as well as the coaches salaries.

Why would you be posting on LetsRun when you are obviously NOT a track and field advocate?

Just wondering..

good, baseball sucks. Sooooo boring. And yes, more boring than watching a marathon on tv.

Speaking as a Cal track alumnus, I agree with this post.

cal cuts rugby and no. one. cares.

Title IX run amok. Cal is the epicenter of politically-correct thinking. Have fun with women's Badminton.

Hook 'Em

The rest of the story is that it also includes men's and women's gymnastics and women's lacrosse.

Tuesday's announcement will remove 163 of 814 male and female athletes from varsity status in Cal's current offering of 29 sports. The breakdown is 118 male (61 in rugby, 38 in baseball, 19 in gymnastics) and 45 female (30 in lacrosse, 15 in gymnastics).

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/28/MNL21FKPBF.DTL&feed=rss.news_pageone

I don't know, but I expect that baseball at least is a fairly expensive sport with a lot of travel and a lot of games compared to XC and track, and both it and rugby have a lot of athletes making them a target for Title IX purposes. With XC/track, they get 12.6 men's scholarships and 18 women's, so cutting both would probably hurt their Title IX numbers.

Anyway, I'm glad XC/track survived, but the whole situation is really ridiculous. The elephant in the room is football, with huge expenses, 85 scholarships, huge alumni support, and no women athletes. At a few schools football makes a profit, but I doubt it does at Cal. Deal with football in some way and the rest of the sports would be easy to straighten out.

Agreed - the big elephant in the room is that the highest paid public employee in the bankrupt State of California is Jeff Tedford, coach of the 1-2 Cal Bears, at 2 million dollars. It would not surprise me at all that with assistant coaches' salaries there is 3 million dollars worth of payroll for a team that gets torched by Nevada (at altitude).

That being said, I've heard that Cal football and men's basketball are revenue generating sports, but not necessarily by all that much.

Women's gymnastics were perennial bottom dwellers in the Pac-10 and I don't think the Pac-10 recognizes men's gymnastics or women's lacrosse as an official sport, making them easy targets.

That baseball stadium is a nice piece of real estate, however.

True enough that J Tedford is THE highest paid state of CA employee. #2 is Coach Howland at UCLA. Do you know how far down the list you have to go to find the first NON-UC employee? #20! Janet Frank of the State Insurance Fund. Then 36 more UC employees until the next non-UC guy (a Chief Dentist at one of CA's correctional factilities at $621,000/year). It goes on and on and on. UC employees are far and away the most highly paid state workers. And they want to cut baseball and rugby and gymnastics? Are you kidding me?

Allison Stokke, that is. My hand just naturally jumps when I think of her.

If one were to look at the results from the Pac 10 meet year after year you may have had the impression CAL dropped track years ago and turned it into a club sport.:-)

Curious if people agree if this is the case, but my guess is Rugby, Women's Lacrosse, and Gymnastics was cut due to costs and people not really caring. After that, my guess is they needed to find another men's sport due to Title IX, and baseball got the axe. Glad it was baseball instead of track, but wish they could have just cut Rugby, Women's Lacrosse and Gymnastics, or a sport nobody cares about like Golf or Crew, there's a great baseball tradition in California and it seems strange that Cal wouldn't have baseball.

go bears wrote:

Curious if people agree if this is the case, but my guess is Rugby, Women's Lacrosse, and Gymnastics was cut due to costs and people not really caring. After that, my guess is they needed to find another men's sport due to Title IX, and baseball got the axe. Glad it was baseball instead of track, but wish they could have just cut Rugby, Women's Lacrosse and Gymnastics, or a sport nobody cares about like Golf or Crew, there's a great baseball tradition in California and it seems strange that Cal wouldn't have baseball.

My guess is

Rugby - the fact it has 61 male athletes (very few of which I bet are getting money) and that there are very few NCAA schools that field varsity teams (most have it as a club sport). That makes it attractive from a title ix perspective - even if I bet it does not save a whole lot of money.

Baseball - I wouldn't be surprised if it came down to either Men's t & f or baseball. Most schools would have cut track but they must really need the money since baseball is a much more expensive sport.

Gymnastics (like wrestling) is getting killed everywhere. My guess is soon this will be like track is in the UK a club sport where nearly all of the elites exist outside of the college system.

Lacrosse - bet this saves them a huge chunk of sch. money.

They might want to keep track to help with football recruiting...

The great athletic programs in the NCAA produce alums and student-athletes that win Olympic Medals and IAAF Medals. Cal T&F has won their share of medals. Of course Cal is no USC, UCLA, nor UTA. But Cal is up there with the likes of Cal Poly SLO, Arkansas, LSU, UNC, and Stanford. So the Cal A/D did the smart thing keeping Cal T&F/XC.

weird really weird wrote:

So, they are getting rid of America's sport and downgrading one of the nations most dominant teams (Rugby) while saving a marginal sport that they absolutely suck at???

Good thinking.

Really you have a point, but those types of considerations aren't really made when things like this are being discussed.

FoghornLonghorn wrote:

Title IX run amok. Cal is the epicenter of politically-correct thinking. Have fun with women's Badminton.

Hook 'Em

Let's try this again. You probably don't even know what the term "politically correct" means, or who coined it, when, where and why.

Remember in college when the professors would say "define your terms?"

Other than that, it is inane how when I posted the first thread that CAL track and field was possibly facinf the axe, with LINK, the thread gets deleted.

This thread, with LINK, stating that CAL TF had escaped the axe...gets listed on the front page.

Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing on this site? (Clearly a rhetorical question.)

Happy for the CAL XC/TF guys and gals. --I just wish the gals would add an annual nude run in Redwood Regional...kinda tired of only seeing the dudes run past. ;-)

This is mostly sad because of the incredibly rich history of the program. Does T&F at Cal have much of a history?