Loyola Marymount Cuts XC & Track

You didn't read his post. He was complaining about the scholarship money, not the opportunity to compete. I sympathize with athletes who wanted to compete but I was merely addressing this poster. Imagine your employer cuts your job but agrees to continue paying you until retirement age and you complain about not getting paid. Your complaint would be unwarranted.

what are the cost savings of this, really? the track setup is sunk cost, it's already built. XC tends to just run around open fields or the track. they are in a fairly tight west coast conference for travel. all the XC meets and most of the TF meets are in CA. only so much equipment for TF and XC. they retain women's XC which means it's not a half savings but probably more like 30-40% -- you still have to pay for the women plus the general expenses of having a XC team at all. (we sometimes shared buses with the women.)

if the idea is move to the pac 10 there is no real pac 10 left to go to. you could merge it with the WCC and it's the same level opponents, plus 2 good ones, with a nicer prestige name. i don't think that actually helps recruiting or competitiveness. let's be honest, the kids wanted PAC 10 to play UCLA or stanford. not LMU and USF. it'd be like buying AOL for the history.

i see them flapping their gums about being more competitive and consolidating but they hired a NBA level coach and had the cinderella team and that topped out elite 8.

my general impression of their athletic offerings is country club but i doubt it's that rich of a school. my sense is a lot of schools are varying athletic offerings to attract a variety of student types, some of whom might have more to pay than others. sorry but to me TF seems like a far cheaper sport to chase success in. hire a name coach. TF salaries aren't incredible. then have him or her recruit off their name. you have that dude going to cal poly from stanford. i think it would far easier to fish for individual national champions who want to come live in LA than to try and put together a competitive basketball team, or baseball, or whatever crazy idea they have in their head.

presumably when someone speaks of the 7 other schools they could have attended (and played), their sole beef is not the scholarship. you do grasp "scholarship as enticement," no? they took the bait. they got switched. you then say, but it's a nice switch. how is that not about playing ball also?

the poster is hammering about the scholarship because having taken the bait he fears he cannot get the same response anymore from the other options she had where he believes she would have received the same level award. which implies it's more about PLAYING than taking the money.

I doubt that he is a real life impacted person since he didn't realize that the scholarship would continue or that males don't receive scholarship.

to spell it out, dude says you offered my kid full ride. you're stuck on that part. but then implies 7 others did roughly the same at the time. relying on that full ride offer and liking LMU they take them in particular up on it. LMU pulls rug. now she can go back to the others, but they may no longer have full rides on offer. but the fact she's team shopping again underlines she wanted to play, not just receive a pension.

the scholarship matters insofar as from that particular place it's a poison chalice that leaves you deciding do i play sports at all? or do i accept a lowball offer due to my predicament? and that lowball situation then has real life financial consequences. dad writes a check. kid takes out student aid.

to me such decisions should have to be made like 2 years ahead barring an actual financial collapse. it's spring semester and some schools' application processes are closed. scholarships are already being carved out. the people being recruited for next year should get a year of their sport. you shouldn't be able to do this past august of last year.

I would put the men's track/cc budget at $1.5 Million per year. It will take a few years to fully realize the savings though.

or, you're misreading the thrust of his post. my kid wants to play her sport in college. college A offers full ride. but so do B C D E. commits to A. A pulls sport. KID IS NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR LITTLE PENSION OFFER. kid goes back to B C D E and finds out in the meanwhile they have made their commitments for this year. if kid A wants to play B C D E, the full rides are all gone. you can be a pedant and point out, well, you can take A's full ride and not play, but you're missing the "not play" part.

methinks the part you're also missing is this is rowing and not volleyball or softball, and there may not be endless purveyors of scholarships around still.

Honest question, since I do don't know how this works at the collegiate level, but how much revenue would a XC team like LMU generate? Is it more than just ticket sales? Do you get a share of all school sports clothing, or does it have to be XC specific?

i mean, did you play college sports? were you recruited? key factor in my decision was where could i play. vs. walk on. vs. it's over. and if my selection had pulled the rug on me in the spring of my senior year, it would have caused me a mess. did i miss a deposit/acceptance deadline? did i tell them no? have they expended their scholarships?

as it is i had the drama where my soccer coach left before senior year, in august. like days before camp. anyone who got recruited by him? you're playing for the assistant now. you know, the one you never met.

i think barring the unforeseen personnel decisions should be made the previous academic year, and program terminations should be like 2-4 year windups.

It is a 4 year wrap up. They will honor the scholarships.

The decision is unfortunate for the impacted athletes but the decisions to continue the scholarships for 4 years is all that can be done. It is a life lesson that things do not always work out the way that we expect. Companies downsize frequently.

The value of a scholarship offer for a sport is far greater than the 'same' scholarship offer for not doing the sport. Instead of access to discipline-specific coaches, training table, transportation, teammates, and facilities (you still have general student body facilities), you just get free tuition and possibly room and board. You also lose the cameraderie and lifelong bonds with your teammates, the attachment to the program, and the assets of references and networking associating with the sport. You gain resentment at the university for the bait and switch.

This lowkey sucks, My friend just went on a visit then to find out the program is shutting down, and my high school teammate and childhood friend is in her first year after getting recruited and will probably have to transfer if she wants to continue running.

They aren't eliminating women.

Loyola Marymount Cuts XC & Track

Okay, yes this happens. What is a solution? Perhaps a rich donor could start a cross country program somewhere? Give an idea to the problem, do not just complain!

This, sadly, is the right take.

Increasing costs per sport, more attention to the ball sports and little else, increased travel costs due to the stupid new mega-conferences...

combined with the fact that courts have already ruled that you can comply with Title IX by slashing both men's and women's teams as long as it gets you closer to substantial proportionality....

you can easily see many universities getting closer to the minimum numbers of teams (as set forth by NCAA rules), or at least paring down the number of Olympic sports.

There is no savings. LMU is going to take the money from the canceled sports and use it to bolster the budgets of the remaining sports. They will honor the scholarships of athletes that had their sport cut, but they can count on 90% of those athletes transferring out. A handful of juniors and seniors might stay to compete a degree and those tuitions will be picked up by another university fiscal pot, not the athletic department.

To answer another upstream query, LMU does not have a track facility. They rent practice time at a nearby community college.

That's great for the school if 90% transfer out. I hope you are correct. Then it is a win for the University akd nobody is harmed.

$1.5 is saved by canceling track. It doesn't matter what they do with it. It was saved.