I’m not sure anyone here was targeting UND, but it always saddens me to hear of a team’s demise. We know someone who was going there to swim next year, and she is devastated. Something similar happened to another swimmer we know several years ago when the program to which she had committed was suspended (she learned about it via Twitter a couple of weeks before high school graduation), and it worked out well for her in the end. Hoping the same is true of the UND swimmers.
I think they just cut the Women’s hockey team also.
It’s sad. The women’s hockey team was on the ice when a news channel released the info and they found out while they were skating. I know a guy on the swim team and I’m sure it will be hard for him to decide whether to stay for his senior year or transfer. The best think might be to stay, graduate, and then use his final year of eligibility for a grad school.
That women’s hockey team was ranked tenth in the nation when the decision was made, placed eight women on the last Olympic team and was expected to do something similar for the next Games. I get that hockey is an expensive sport, but even in that context this was a pretty remarkable choice by the school. What was the last top ten D1 program in any sport that was dropped in the middle of a season?
I’m sure it was the ratio of women’s scholarships to men, and the cost of the teams. They said they also considered the value totheschool. About 12,000 attend men’s hockey games, about 800 the women’s.
Buffalo just dropped women’s crew, baseball, and men’s swimming. Some of it because of costs of th.ose teams, some because of conferencerequirements. St.Mary’s in California just dropped women’s lacrosse, which was a long term sport, but because it is growing at PAC12 schools, St. Mary’s has to find other D1 competitors because it can’t compete, money or otherwise, with the Pac12.
Ithappens. It happened a lot last week because today is a NLI day, and those committed recruits can’t sign.
Several years ago University of Nebraska - Omaha dropped their D2 wrestling program. The coach was on the way home from the NCAA Championships with the team when he got the call. They had just won the national championship in D2, and the athletic director couldn’t even wait for the bus to get back to Omaha before he told them he cut the program. They dropped football at the same time. Football they dropped because it was too expensive to compete at the D1 level (they were changing divisions). Wrestling got dropped because the AD didn’t like that UNO was considered a wrestling school. They had the talent to probably be a middle of the road D1 just with the guys already on their roster.
Much to my enjoyment, along with that of much of the central US wrestling community, their athletics have never really been successful at the D1 level, except for hockey which was already a successful D1 program before the change.