W&M Cuts Men's Track & Field - WARNING All NCAA Track/XC Programs Now at Risk

They are are more than twice the size of Patriot League schools such as Bucknell and Colgate, yet those schools have 20+ sports. William and Mary also has a 1 billion dollar endowment. This is mismanagement, plain and simple.

Sad.

Looking forward to the 2021 CAA Men’s Dual Meet Championships

They can run up to 5 races in uniform during the indoor and outdoor seasons combined.

rojo wrote:

I just got a text about this and said, "No way."

I immediately added in "WARNING All NCAA Track/XC Programs Now at Risk" to the title as that's what I'm thinking. When a team that has made NCAAs 26 times gets cut, then it's a big deal. Now I know the xc team wasn't cut - just track. But who has a good xc team without track?

Anyone know the rule about how many track races an xc runner can run if the school is xc only?

Some might think a way forward for our sports post-covid would be to have lots of xc only programs where they also are allowed to run track as it's way cheaper than a huge track program, but that may not fly in the BLM era given the racial discrepancies of the sports.

In all seriousness, wonder if UNCW and Northeastern try to get out of the CAA, since they still have men’s programs? Essentially their men’s programs will be like Independent teams with no conference championship. Who knows, maybe they’ll be cool with that

fact checker 642572498 wrote:

They are are more than twice the size of Patriot League schools such as Bucknell and Colgate, yet those schools have 20+ sports. William and Mary also has a 1 billion dollar endowment. This is mismanagement, plain and simple.

Sad.

It is sad. But Bucknell and Colgate are private. W&M is a public school, so there's that.

The bigger scam is that track and field at W&M was not that expensive and pretty much self-funded by donations. This move is more about the ambitions of AD Samantha Huge who sees football and basketball as her meal ticket to a bigger school. One of the track coaches has already been repurposed to basketball conditioning,

This couldn’t be more true.

southtown wrote:

This move is more about the ambitions of AD Samantha Huge who sees football and basketball as her meal ticket to a bigger school.

^^^^ Interesting point. The administrators that truly care about the kids don't move up. You get rid of the low profile programs and then quickly jump ship to another job.

To be honest, when I first read this, one thing I also thought was, "Is the AD really planning on cutting all these programs or is the AD hoping for a surge of alumni donations?" I imaginethe alumni donations as state schools are way less than private but many track teams raise hundreds of thousands annually.

Your vision is very limited. There are over 1300 colleges and universities with xc and track, not just the 300 in D1. The vast majority of people in the sport in college ARE paying to play. Where do you think the funding comes from for those sports to operate at the D2, D3, NAIA and mid-major D1 levels? Also if you take away the scholarships given to foreign athletes then that expense goes away.

I used the example of Japan because yes there would be some very good clubs form and just as NCAA Athletic Departments have sponsors right now the same would happen for individual sports. City to city, state to state there would be no limit on what you could do.

You don't need the structure of the NCAA or NAIA for our sports.

In the future D3 track and xc will be seen as the big show while d1's nirca system will be the slowest of the 3 ncaa divisions. There will be a few d1 teams, but the competition at that level will be so sparse that most the d1 athletes would wish they could compete at d3 nationals.

This absolutely blows for the W&M xctf community, but I think the whole "WARNING" business is a bit misplaced.

Cross and track programs are ALWAYS at risk in Division 1. Both teams are often considered cheap ways to boost department averages and add diversity, and if the program is solid there is a lot of hardware/accolade opportunity, especially in track and field with all its events and configurations. Outside a VERY small handful of schools, women's teams basically exist to fulfill title 9 ratio obligations for a men's team at the school (sometimes even the men's xctf team).

Basically, the team is there to pump numbers up, but they aren't there to sell tickets or cable packages. This means that what the team does comes at a cost to the school. A low cost relative to how many accolades a good program will accumulate, but a cost all the same.

If an AD's goal is to balance a budget, they are going to take a look at the expense of a track program very closely, and may decide it's not currently worth it for what it's currently bringing in.

Her brother was a state champ in X-C in high school. Pretty sure he ran in college somewhere.

Terribly disappointing. Loved competing against them back in the day when Drenth was the coach.

fact checker 642572498 wrote:

William and Mary also has a 1 billion dollar endowment.

Sad.

Almost all the money in an endowment is marked for specific programs and/or individual colleges within the university (ie the School of Engineering). It is a contractual agreement between the university and the donor(s). Do you want to be the one to make a call to a donor and say "Hey, you know that $3 million you gave to the College of Education and specifically to the English Department? Well, how'd you like that go towards the track and field program instead? I'll just send you over a new agreement right now"

Why play the race card?

it's your first time visiting this website, isn't it?

As an alum, this is pretty sad.

Clearly things haven't been the same for the XC team since Gibby left, which is unfortunate.

I agree that the endowment comment misses the point. Unless that money is earmarked for athletics, it would be hard to access it for this purpose. Even then, I would think it would need to be earmarked specifically for the XC/Track programs given W&M's recent focus on football and basketball.

To that end, I do wonder about the AD's ambitions and wonder how much W&M's spending on football facilities over the last 10 or so years and recent commitment to revamp the basketball arena contributed to this decision? For sure in the early 2000s both were outdated and in need of some sort of upgrade - I was at the semifinal football game that ESPN had to truck in lights to because we didnt have them at our stadium - but recently it seems like even the smaller schools that can't afford it and don't need it (I-AA for football, CAA for basketball) are participating in the arms race that you see in Power 5 conferences to keep building the biggest and best facilities. The return on investment simply can't be there, and I fear this will lead to more decisions like this one, cutting programs that otherwise could survive but for huge commitments to football and basketball facilities where the need isn't there.

Regardless, this sucks.

It’s a ploy.

You may be right.

Public funding or private donors or student fees. Not the athletes themselves except in rare circumstances with no real record of success. This is common knowledge.

Which would be a negligible amount relative to all of US collegiate runners.

Those sponsors are attracted to the visibility potential on campus and on tv through football and basketball teams, take those away and the pool of sponsors dries up.

You clearly haven't had real experience in US college athletics.

I ran for William and Mary several years ago. I'm pretty surprised to see this news, because my understanding was that the majority of the program was financed through fund-raising from a certain wealthy alumnus that lived close by. Maybe things have changed since I was there, but I don't think the program was costing the school very much at all. I would be curious to see where the athletic budget is primarily focused (other than football of course). While the men's track team had a pretty serious downturn starting in 2011, there were other teams at the school that were far worse. Also I find it curious that they decided to keep men's XC, because they must be aware that the XC program will nose-dive more than it already has without men's track. I guess this is all just shows that the athletic department at WM cares absolutely zero about athletic performance. I get that there is some sort of institutional excitement generated by big-name sports and that can help get alumni donation dollars, but with a billion dollar endowment are they really hurting for it? I just wonder if they really did their homework on this one or had to make a rushed decision.

You must have forgotten about Galen Rupp, Craig Mottram, Chris Solinsky, Alberto Salazar, Frank Shorter, Steve Prefontaine