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

Does anyone on this site know how the club teams work in England and Japan. Do they receive support from their colleges? Do the athletes pay a fee? Are the coaches paid?

Academic and Athletic pots of money are separate. So you can do that.

This article support that way of thinking as well.

And while I know that academic and athletic budgets are separate, it is really short-sighted. If you are the CEO of an organization, you look to increase the value of the entire org, not just certain departments at the cost of others.

You are correct about the money that W&M will get from tuition from students who want to run there. But W&M is not a school that struggles to attract applicants so I expect when they analyzed that point they just figured they could admit other applicants who would not want to run when they got in. But I may be wrong here.

A massive problem w/ the NCAA system is it keeps our sports XC and TF dependent o NCAA football and basketball revenue.

Ultimately this is a fatal flaw as we see this year with the US pandemic and the related politically motivated mishandling , the Trump gaslight express hoping a deadly virus would only kill off blue states and spare his base.

The future of athletics will be a return to club teams and decentralized control. This may be a painful transition but ultimately one necessary and best for the sports we care about.

rojo wrote:

Can you tell me what program at William and Mary sells tickets or cable packages? Does a single program at W&M actually make money? Men's basketball probably would be it if I had to guess. Maybe their football team which seems to draw like 8-10k a game and probably picks up a few hundred k by agreeing to get destroyed by someone like Virginia Tech every year.

Neither football, nor men's or women's basketball makes money according to page 8 of the audit posted here:

rojo wrote:

GrahamStephan22 wrote:

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.

And I've never understood the logic of it loses money so it should be cut comes from. Do you thin the English department makes money?

Rojo, I regret to inform you what universities have been doing to their English departments for the last decade.

Of course it was a cost cutting issue. There are any number of costs which must be allocated to the cost of education, which was not put into consideration. Neither was the fact that many don't go to a school like W & M on full pay tuition status.

By no means by any fair accounting system is the W & M track program a profit making enterprise.

I don't mean to imply that the program is not worthwhile, but it costs the school money, like almost every other track program.

rojo wrote:

Time to wake up wrote:

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.

Japan? They have a huge collegiate system. The #1 race in all of Japan is the collegiate Ekiden.

And in Japan, there isn't pro football, basketball, hockey, MMA, boxing, indoor football, lacrosse, etc. competing for slices of the sport sponsorship pie. They have baseball, soccer, sumo, and running and little else.

As for that collegiate ekiden? It draws Super Bowl level tv ratings. When was the last time a running race in the US, at any level, had a bigger tv audience than college world series regional games? Sponsorship $$ follows eyes, nobody's watching our sport here and the NCAA is the greatest charity development system possible in the US.

W&M rejects students who would otherwise attend. They aren't losing out on this tuition, it will be paid by less deserving students not involved in athletics.

Agree, though higher education isn't about excellence anymore. It's about competition for tuition-paying customers and preserving or increasing revenue.

Titan wrote:

Too many sports for a small school.

But Track should be a mainstay in a college athletic situation.

Agreed. They are keeping Golf, Field Hockey, and LaCrosse and cutting Track & Field? The only sport with more international penetration than Track & field is perhaps Soccer. Whatever happened to "being part of the international community"?!?!? And again, I repeat, they are keeping LaCrosse?!?!?!

It is time for Title IX and most of the other regulations placed on academia to go. All they do is cost students money and limit their opportunities during the education that they pay too much for already. This is very much the Democrats fault; they have ruined the institutions they love via massive amounts of regulation and excess student loan guarantees. The only group it really helps are the lawyers and banks. It is time to end the madness.

College track and field doesn't really need to go to club status. It can go back to the way it was back in the 60's and early 70's when most programs were run on a local competition level and budgets to suit that type of competitive level. The Mets in New York, the Big Five in Philly, the New England's and many other competitions were centered along local or regional geographic lines rather than these stupid basketball conferences that make little to no sense for the sport of track and field. Even in the midwest and the south regional competition was the norm. Most schools had limited national travel or budgets to do so. Nothing wrong with that at all. Why does track have to align with basketball conferences?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ridiculousness-of-conference-tournament-locations-in-6-maps/

talks about tornament locations, but also shows how far apart conference teams are from each other. Track and Field should not and does not need to be tied to basketball conference alignments.

Being tied to basketball conferences seems overly expensive and takes away from local competition and interest in the sport. All this has been discussed many times and no one listens or is interested in making things better. The death blow really came when NCAA qualifying resulted in teams traveling all over the country trying to attain qualifying marks or, in the case of XC, qualifying spots with having to compete outside of their regions for "points".

The other issue is that ADs and College Presidents are lazy and fail to understand the significance of what track and field has to offer their student athletes. Many years ago at one of the NCAA Annual meetings, the topic of diversity of participation, both for women and minorities was brought up as a way to keep programs from falling to the sidelines. That concept and selling point was never seriously followed up on and continues not to be talked about to this day, for the most part.

Back when I competed in college the AAU and NCAA got into a major pissing contest and the NCAA eventually won, to the dismay of many coaches, who did not care for the manner in which the NCAA dominated how things were to be run. Well, we can see the ramifications of the power of the NCAA and their lack of concern for track and field.

If one were to look closely at the W&M issue, I would bet dollars to donuts that it may well come down to Title IX issues not in balance there, as well. Every school faces this and very few ADs or Presidents have figured out how to make this work so no student-athlete (male or female) is penalized because of the stupidity and or laziness of Athletic Departments and their failed philosophy of providing intercollegiate athletics to their student body.

Tribe wrote:

As a former WM runner, this is incredibly sad. We had a great tradition - runners like Paul Vendergrift, Bryan Hyde, Steve Swift, Matt Lane, Anders Christiansen, Jacob Frey, Sean Graham...All Americans and all went on to pro careers. Several represented the US. Hyde ran in the 96 Olympics and was the American Collegiate record holder in the 1500. I think Lane was the NCAA athlete of the year. Just really sad to hear

You don't need to run for an NCAA program to become an elite runner. This is running. No special facilities needed. Good pair of shoes and coaches can post programs online. You really don't need all of the logistical support programs like NCAA football and basketball requires.

DeckStacked wrote:

Titan wrote:

But Track should be a mainstay in a college athletic situation.

Agreed. They are keeping Golf, Field Hockey, and LaCrosse and cutting Track & Field?

While I agree let's put some of the blame where it is deserved. Golf, FH, and Lax all have games/matches with winners and losers. T&F does not. Duals, tri-meets are rarely if ever run and invitationals go unscored. Who guided this path without knowing it would bite them in the a$$. Add in traveling all over the country, many times including athletes with average to below average high school marks, and it is cost effective to cut T&F. What are the coaches doing to make the sport indispensable? Are they working on endowments, growing support on all levels, ......?

T&F has sat back idle while other sports invented and reinvented themselves. No longer is the "we are the prime Olympic sport" accurate or important to anyone outside the sport itself. There is plenty of blame to go around and much of it is right in our faces.

I can agree with this. The generation growing up now would be just as happy to watch Olympic Call of Duty as track. Track and xc have gone out of their way to make themselves b tier sports all the way down to the club level. You know our sport is a joke when three of the biggest races of the fall occur on 1-2 weekends (club nats, honolulu marathon, CIM). Actually besides CIM, Honolulu, and LA, there are not any serious marathons on the west coast of the US that would attract even a sub elite field during a 9 month period.

Back to the topic at hand: colleges have done a great deal to make track an inaccessible sport to fans. Instead of hosting meets, a lot of schools would just rather fly to california multiple times. W&M did host a meet or two (one was usually a joke with no event longer than 3k), but the timing of these meets was poorly planned - one fell on the weekend of shamrock marathon, the biggest event in virginia. This precluded local distance guys from coming up and making it competitive.

Great point. The CAA is spread out from SC to MA, and definitely a basketball conference. UNCW and CofC are at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to funding, so they don’t travel as much as the remaining schools, which have much larger budgets. Mix in the fact that the CAA doesn’t have an indoor conference meet, the only times a lot of these schools see each other, is at their XC and outdoor championships. Hard to build interconference rivalries like that, at least in XC and T&F.

Agree with this. I know several DII programs that fly to California a minimum of 3 times for track meets.