Is U of Maryland the worst big conference track team ever?

I work near College Park and pass by their bloated football stadium on my commute.

UMBC always has good athletes despite not having many scholarships. In the past 10 years they've had probably 5-10 All-Americans. I'm sure it's tough for them that a lot of MD athletes would rather go to a bigger team out of state or to UMD and waste away.

Not quite the same but 50 years ago when Gonzaga was in the Big Sky they finished last in cross country every single year they were in the conference.

The best running program in MD is probably Navy, but only barely over Johns Hopkins(who is Division 3, divisions don't matter kids!!!)

I believe Johns Hopkins is D1 for Lacrosse (D3 for other sports) as an indicator of how big Lacrosse is in the state of Maryland.

I thought U. of MD was traditionally strong for men's basketball.

Maryland would get their butt handed to them if they ran in the MAC!! Have you seen the quality of runners that have come out of Eastern Michigan over the years?

You guys keep saying the HC is a nice guy I find him to be a deuche bag from my experience with him.

On top of having the top athletes not be interested in the program, they don't have a lot of interest in recruiting the top talent in the state! I coached two 13.6 110H/ 36 300H that had a lot of interest in going to Maryland but they never got a response from the coach.

I think the most telling part of the thread is even on Letsrun where everyone argues everything not a person has tried to defend Maryland.

Well someone called their coach a nice guy.

But former athletes, club runners, college runners, fans, high school coaches, parents, etc. have all come together here and agreed they stink.

They must really stink

Are you insane? There are 100 guys in D1 ahead of the top D3 runner in the 5k.

Agree, weird to see everyone agree on a LetsRun thread, that should be case and point.

I also think any AD that cuts a sport should be fired. Shouldn't the job be, more or less, to prevent that. Especially a sport as inexpensive as XC. The XC program doesn't need to maintain any facilities, you already have the same athletes and coach for track, people will compete without a scholarship. It's hard to imagine saving any money by cutting it, and cutting a sport for title IX purposes shouldn't be allowed, it's completely against the point.

Why should they be fired if they save the school money and it doesn't change enrollment or applications? They should get a bonus.

In marylands case they did fire their AD. Kinda.

They had a ton of debt as an athletic department and the AD led a huge expansion to their football stadium. They built a ton of luxury suites.

But no one cares about Maryland football and most companies would prefer suites instead at Washington/Baltimore NFL teams. So those suites stayed empty and didn't pay for themselves.

Around 2010 time their revenue sports were horrific and they had massive debt. So the AD left (not fired I guess). The AD that came in led the cutting of sports to try and get the budget under control.

They then joined the Big10 and got a MASSIVE paycheck and promised to bring back those cut sports. But they have not as far as I know....

I was on the Men's XC and Track & Field teams when this was happening. There are definitely a lot of logical reasons not to cut a program like track/XC, but unfortunately it was almost all a money issue. If I recall correctly, the Men's program(s) were cut (though Track is back in a limited capacity) along with Men's Tennis, Men's AND Women's Swimming, and Women's Water Polo. Often, it didn't come down to how much was spent on which sport, but more how much was being spent on the sports that donors were putting their money towards. Even though the UMD Football team has not been national level in recent history, you still have to consider the revenue they are producing for the school between ticket sales, vending profits, merchandise, parking, etc. Even if they are spending $10 million, (roughly the figure in 2011 when sports were cut) they are still pulling in between $12-13 million every season.

I realize this gets us into a larger argument, but athletic programs are businesses at their core. As a former student athlete at Maryland, I can say that we (track) FOR SURE were a lower tier than say Football, Basketball and Lacrosse. However, as a great coach at Maryland once said "It's all about points". Sadly, the majority of the athletes that were given the scholarships did not end up contributing to the point total at conferences, regionals, etc. Not to say that weren't exceptions, because those exceptions are ultimately keeping the coaching staff employed. The bad optics of the last twenty years of seasons reflects back to donors, who are less inclined to donate to "bad management", therefore perpetuating the decline. For an idea of some of the donors/former track members, feel free to Google "Al Carey".

There is no secret formula that will make the team better. You can blame it on the coaching, or the athletic department, or the athletes, or whatever, but it's going to take an organized effort on multiple to fronts to save what is left of a once well reputed program. Once that starts to happen, I'll be the first to cut a check.

A few years ago, UMD head coach Valmon hired a female distance athlete's dad to run with the girls. You can't make this stuff up. The other coaches were probably hired on their looks. Seriously this is probably the worst power 5 program, and could be very good with loads of talent in the immediate area. Their XC team has as many drinks a week as mileage, and they all get hurt.

hell, from my experience competing w/ the UMD running club they seem more serious than the actual team.

Athletic Programs aren't really businesses, especially since most of the school's are nonprofits.

Also, Athletic programs and schools use accounting tricks to downplay their athletics profits:

bannersociety.com

Be skeptical when big college athletic departments act broke

Matt Brown

Official numbers need to be taken with several grains of salt.

Open link

I don't buy the money argument for cutting most teams at least at power 5 schools, if the money's not there it's probably due to mismanagement. Also, why not let a team fundraise for themselves, as opposed to cutting the team.

TLDR
--most of the expenses listed as part of an athletic scholarship are overstated and sometimes purely fictional transfer prices.
--Athletic department revenue from merchandising, for example, might be underreported because the revenue gets shared with other university departments first.
--A single year’s expenses might be substantially inflated because a construction project, previously kept off the books, is added all at once.
--Other transfer-price accounting rules, from utilities to some facility upgrades, might be counted as expenses without accurately representing true costs.
--Some athletic departments donate all surplus straight to the university.
--Tennessee pretended it got a $12mil from the university when it really got $1 mil in student fees which it repaid by profiting $6mil
--coaching salaries have exploded, facilities are constantly renovated (even if the research says it doesn’t even really help recruiting), and accounting might show dubious losses. Economists call it “gold plating,” or covering everything you have in gold because you have nowhere else to put the gold

--UAB cut its football team even though it was breaking even or even slightly in the positive

Positive they surely wouldn't even be the best team in MD, even considering the different divisions. For comparison Towson, who doesn't have a men's program either and just had a lot of turmoil and head coach turmoil and drama etc won the ECAC's once again.