Help, the admins at my school are cutting scholarships. How can I respond and fight back?

Sadly this is the reality at a ton of schools in the ncaa system right now. Look at the back half of most mid major conference and most of the teams are in that situation.

No need for scholarships. Just have kids pay full ride and walk on. No biggie.

Do you mean athletic grants? This all has to stop. The civilized countries of the world send their teenagers and those in their early twenties to college tuition free. Fully fund public universities and truly show private colleges the meaning of demand and supply. Many private colleges will go out of business. Some will be bought by federal government. Some private college will merge with other private colleges and the big 12, not the athletic conference but the eight Ivy League schools, C.I.T., M.I.T., U. of Chicago and Stanford will survive on their endowments.

* 1550 years ago, who would have predicted Roman Empire would fall;

* 125 years ago, who would have predicted England would be just another meaningless little country;

* 35 years ago, not even in the wildest dreams of Reagan and H.W. Bush could they have predicted Soviet Union would fall in a few years.

No way will this continue forever. A hand full of 6'4" 275 lbs, guys who sprint 40 yard dash sub-4.6 attend college for free but everyone else has to borrow up to 1/4 million to complete their education. No. Fox News and MSNBC can make many of you today argue about gay marriage, trans issues and abortion so no one demands free college, but if we look at my three examples, changes do occur.

What is sad are the big sports ( football and basketball) kids get some huge NIL deals. They should be paying for tuition. Now the NCAA wants to provide these kids legal counsel for NIL deals. How about making them pay their own legal fees?

Be sure to fight this one in the press. Public shaming seems t be the order of the day to get admins to change.

Start the phone calls to wealthy (and non-wealthy) alums.

Solicit donations for endowed scholarships (returnable to donator if the sport is ever cut should be a contingency in writing).

The Title IX and the "dreaded" race card seem to have been played effectively in recent/similar situations as well.

Just a few ideas....

Your job is fluff that's why it's being reduced. Go become a doctor, engineer, plumber, etc if you want security and sense of worth.

Great luck with that. Akron unceremoniously killed their XC program a couple years ago, at a bad time of year for the coaches and runners, and the overall reaction was....yawn. Clayton Murphy publicly railed against the university for a couple of weeks and estranged himself from any future involvement there, and the university never even bothered to respond in the public space because nobody really cared.

I love T&F and am a life long runner, but nobody in the public cares about running unless they are personally involved with it. Universities in the US have suffered painful decline concurrent with the growth of the Grand Oligarchy, which is made of people who couldn't care less if the university system in the US falls to pieces. Further, with education at all levels under constant attack here, any athletic staffers not supporting FB or BB may well find themselves in peril in the next several years.

People care, but are powerless against the corporate forces that have taken over sports in our country. Football and basketball are no longer sports, they are money-making corporations.

College administrators have become puppets of the money-making corporations, they no longer stand for education, community, or altruistic pursuits, they are simply feckless pawns to big money.

Yes, welcome to the Grand American Oligarchy, as noted above. The oligarchs and the national political party they control is on a decades-long mission to destroy publicly-funded education in the US.

From preschool to publicly-supported universities, efforts are underway to wreck all of it, which won't matter for the top .5% who will enjoy fabulous elite education that only they will be able to access.

For college coaches at a small handful of elite universities, there will be more than plenty for even the most esoteric sports like sailing. For everyone else, peanuts and coal in your stocking at christmas.

Thanks for the advice. We are a community college and don't have many alums for our program. Press also probably wouldn't do much since we are a small, mostly unknown school.

Sounds like you have no leverage. And I’m rather surprised you have scholarships to begin with.

Your only hope is math: show that scholarship and non-scholarship athletes are bringing net-$ that will be lost if the program is cut (this may or not be true, you’d have to put in your particulars and estimate how many athletes would not come absent scholarships and the program).

This is your best bet. Plenty of NJCAA schools have aid; and savy admin still view it as net gain.

If you have out of staters/area students who are paying partially they are bringing money into the school, and would almost certainly not be there if not for the program/scholarships.

Yes, this is the way to do it and at any admissions driven school… I have heard of some schools giving teams lots of aid but saying they can’t give kids full scholarships… if you tell them please give me 5 scholarships and I will get 15 kids to come to school on partial scholarships the math just makes sense.

Put on your big boy pants and start fundraising.

I think the advice here is sound, especially if you can show that kids go to your college to do track, all other things equal. With 20+ events, you can attract a lot of kids, even ones not on scholarship. There is a a local JC near me in Florida that thrives off of softball walk-ons (it has scholarships) . Softball is really good down here and many want to continue to play. The tournaments in Clearwater are a huge deal and I am sure they make JC a special experience.

Yeah but those big fellas continue on to build our roads and other heavy lifting.

Of course school should be free. Unfortunately its a scam

This exactly. I'm Canadian and in the university system were very few ppl get any money for sports let alone academia.

I remember starting university and coming to XC as a walk-on, whereas some giant mf of a dude in my dorm got a free ride to be on the basketball team. What happens? he breaks his ankle in frosh and never plays again but gets free education and the baastard at least had the sense to get an education out of it. Was proud of him for that but still jealous of all that money.

Seeing it is a community college you are not going to get high school boys who can run sub 16:30 or high school girls who can run sub 19. You are going to have to attract average high school runners. The problem there is, 80% of average high school cross country runners have no interest in running in college as they feel the time put into it is not worth it. I would tell my athletic Director when I had my first job which was at a small school that if the baseball, soccer or basketball coach held tryouts this coming Saturday, 50+ kids would show up. If I held a tryout zero kids would show up. That’s the difference. Kids will walk on or play those sports for virtually no scholarship but most average kids are not going to run for free …. So your challenge is how can you entice them to your school? The best way is to work your tail off for your sophomores and find them scholarships. Then you can go to the high school average senior runner and say come here for the low tuition, work your tail of in XC-Track and I will do everything I can to get you a scholarship to a four year like I got my five sophomores this year. Good luck