University of Minnesota cutting Men's Track, Tennis, and Gymnastics

Some day the power 5 will break off and do their own thing with football completely away from the NCAA and probably eventually pay players. Is there a scenario in the future that even mens basketball would not survive. I think i read a stat that said 40 percent of teams that make the ncaa basketball tournaments lose money on basketball.

Well they were the only state that voted for Mondale hahhahahahabrahaha!

pinesol wrote:

Independent track has no access to facilities. Those facilities are expensive compared to any kind of revenue possibilities. The local HS track team does a fund-raiser 5K run, not a fund-raiser community track meet. By the way, my local school administration prohibits any outside organization from doing the "and field" part of track and field.

Women only varsity is the most damaging possible. Single sex club has only half as many people to spread fixed costs.

Triathlon would be a case study, as women's triathlon became NCAA sport, but men's did not. So disappointed that USA Triathlon didn't tell NCAA to suck it.

Triathlon is still classified as an emerging sport. USA Triathlon pushed the women's inclusion. They knew they had no chance to get guys. Alas, not sure college triathlon is going to do much to help the sport grow.

Neither Title IXnor football is the problem.

The problem is status-quo largesse.

Everyone has to make a ton of money, be the best, strive to be #1, etc, and thereby “earn their keep”.

Bullcrap. Make it modest—50-70k head coach, 20-30k or volunteer assistant coaches, travel by bus to only neighboring states for meets, stay in dorms or crap motels with negotiated group rate, end athletic scholarships.

Track is the simplest thing. Make it an expense and minimize it, for the betterment of the individual students. Have open intra-school meets regularly from which the traveling team is selected, anybody can participate. Train the best 100 who want it.

No big deal. But oh, no, that’s unacceptable.

F the admin, F the system, F them all. They will end up with nothing, and they deserve it.

Also, stupid students. Organize a club, do intramurals, do it yourselves. So hard, I know. WHATEVER.

I used to love training alongside the team esp in the fall at the old track, while the band practiced in the adjacent lot and the football team on the adjacent field. It was quintessential college, fall season in the Big 10, leaves turning, school sweaters, cheerleaders practicing outside the indoor facility. Beautiful.

Now it’s all dead. Sterile new facility that is never open, has smaller stands than a HS. “Center of excellence” pampering the whiny special ones. No vibe, no atmosphere, no point.

They—YOU—have destroyed something iconic, something special, something classic—they through greed and largesse, you through complicity and blind obedience of authority.

The destruction accelerates.

Touche!

It's the letters of explanation that get me. Full of BS and fake apologies while the so called administrators pocket huge 6 figure salaries.

Clarification in regards to the coaches cost savings: Unless this has changed in the time since I competed, each DI team for track is only allowed to have 3 paid coaches per team and men and women are considered separate teams, so by cutting the men's team, the women's team will lose half of their paid staff and will go back to having only 3 coaches. Most likely Bingle, Hopkins, and Miller keep their jobs and the rest are laid off or moved to volunteer status. I'm pretty sure men's and women's gymnastics and men's and women's tennis have separate coaches, so the men's coaches will be laid off from this.

Regardless, your point still stands and I completely agree with you. This isn't really about covid financial loss nor is this really a Title 9 issue. The women's cross country coach says she has been forced to reduce her roster from 47 athletes down to 30 in the years since she started coaching, but she would gladly add more women (who will each count as 3 athletes for title 9 purposes b/c of indoor and outdoor track) and would not need to increase her budget to do this, if needed in order to balance out title 9 numbers. Someone posted the numbers, and I believe the men's track budget last year w/o xc included was around $1.3 million, but they brought in $300,000 in revenue, so they only cost the school $1 million last year. I'm fairly confident, if given the chance, the coaches could easily find way to reduce spending and fundraise to make enough money to cover operating costs for both the men's track teams and any costs associated with adding women for title 9 purposes to balance out the men. Also, the school was evaluated in a Title 9 investigation by the civil rights dept a few years ago was found to be compliant with 2 of the 3 prongs of ways to comply w/ title 9. A school only needs to meet 1 of the 3 prongs to be compliant, so unless they changed things after that to become now uncompliant for all 3 prongs (which would be very odd actions to make after a lengthy and expensive title 9 invesigation by the civil right dept that led to lots of negative press), I don't think it even matters that they have more male roster sports than the percentages that match the studennt population. (Also, why is a school with a competitive admissions process that turns away a large number of good applicants each year, admitting 5% more females than males?...I doubt they lack qualified male applicants.) This is clearly just a cover to make cuts to teams the greedy admins have wanted to make for years so they can dump more excess money into football spent on fancy stuff they don't really need.

Not gonna read thru all the posts but the sole reason why track programs are being cut is because the cash cow football isn’t bringing in the money. People make the lame argument that football loses money. It doesn’t at a P5 program because the TV contracts fund most of the athletic departments. Just look at how athletic department revenues have increased in relation to TV contracts. Even at Group of 5 and non D1 programs the football team brings in unprecedented publicity compared to any other sport.

The U of MN is in the middle of a $4 BILLION endowment campaign.

As of September 2017 they had raised $2.5 Billion. Billion.

Yet they claim poverty.

https://give.umn.edu/stories/u-m-launches-4-billion-campaign

This decision obviously makes little sense from any number of angles, but..........

......If this decision removes Steve Placencia from coaching distance runners, it will be the single best thing that could be done for endurance athletes in the State of Minnesota in a generation. This is not an exaggeration. So much talent, so much potential, so little development, such dramatic underperformance.

I don’t know Plasencia personally, but it has seemed to me that at least for sprints and throws, recently they haven’t seemed to “develop” any athletes.

I remember way back when Sidney was doing sprints and jumps and Lynn was doing throws, some athletes used to really develop, not just over a season but over the years. Idk if their school records still stand, but guys like Tyrone and Keita and some other guys I trained with really had it going, even the discus guy with the headband.

A bit later in the 400 they had 2 very good guys, and more recently Kabia in the short sprints, esp the 60. But development? Doesn’t seem like it, idk why, just my impression.

Of course I have had less contact with the athletes over the years, so maybe my impression is worthless. Today I know none of them. Plasencia gently refused to let me train on the track, and my sense was that everything had gone “official”. Once that happens the organic quality is gone, and the whole edifice becomes a merely administrative exercise. No love.

To me, men’s UMN track died already 5 years ago.

Oh i just remembered Tyrone was at St. Thomas, but he was around, even after he finished competing sometimes he came to do some coaching.

Keita still has PB’s better than the school records, IIRC. Must have been done in different meets. Etc

Tragic

Sorry Gopher athletes

You deserve better !!!!!

They will actually only lose 1 coach since they are keeping XC. You are allowed 2 full time coaches with XC. So they will be able to keep 5 full time coaches. The total cost of the Men's team is a little skewed since cutting the men's program will add expenses to the women's program. Their facilities costs will not go away just by cutting the men, the women's team will now take on all of the responsibility.

12 scholarships and travel and 1 coach probably amounts to $1M.

You can than Title IX.

Look up the 60 Minutes episode on Title IX a few years ago.

this ACT cut men's wrestling at schools in IOWA, while then recruiting females for a rowing team, in a landlocked state!

Not to mention most of the women given full scholarships, never rowed a day in their life, by their own admission!

At the start, Title IX was a good concept. Now? It's ruining college sports. Soon , every college will be like Uconn, women's basketball as their #1 sport. I mean, does anyone actually watch women's basketball? Is the WNBA still in existence?

crooked river wrote:

The assumption was they were Title IX compliant BEFORE covid, so how does cutting more men's teams address Title IX?

That's what I was thinking. For every male scholarship cut, shouldn't a female scholarship be cut? Or does Title IX only require that there are AT LEAST as many female scholarships as male scholarships?

If I’m one of the Minnesota coaches that has an idea about any endowments/donations specifically tied in to the men’s track team, I’d get on the phone ASAP to those donors, because I guarantee you that those people in Minnesota’s athletic fundraising are going to try to convince those donors to steer those monies to the general athletic fund.

out of compliance? wrote:

crooked river wrote:

The assumption was they were Title IX compliant BEFORE covid, so how does cutting more men's teams address Title IX?

That's what I was thinking. For every male scholarship cut, shouldn't a female scholarship be cut? Or does Title IX only require that there are AT LEAST as many female scholarships as male scholarships?

There's also enrollment proportionality. Unfortunately for transparency's sake, administrators can grab for any of a number of interpretations of the statute to rationalize their decisions to the press, attach the phrase "Title IX" as bait for blame-seekers, and escape any hard scrutiny themselves because they didn't make any cuts to sacred football and men's basketball. With the football tv deals and March Madness money, college sports has never been more flush with income than in the previous decade. If you lose that much money to a one-year disruption and cannot justify proportional cuts across all sports then you've bet the farm in a reckless fiscal plan.