In an early morning meeting, Coach Jason McKinney broke the tragic news to the women’s track and field team that the state budget crisis has lead to the dropping of track and field as a sport here at Martin.
As many might have suspected, the state's raised sales tax fell hopelessly short of attaining the necessary funds to sustain the state for even one calendar year. Calling for a return of funds from, of all places, state run colleges and universities, Martin’s brilliantly ignorant administration opted to drop a sport so as to balance out its empty coffers. I run cross country for Martin, not track seeing as men’s track was dropped three years ago.
Many of the men who ran track for Martin before the program was cut have transferred to other schools where they are competing for top conference honors. Men’s track was cut, as women’s has now been, because our sports administration minimizes track and other “secondary” sports in an effort to fully fund our ridiculously pathetic football program.
I do not know if it is ethical to fund athletics in this country the way we do, but this country has chosen to fund athletics nonetheless. UTM has misappropriated the funds and opportunity of its athletic department. Now a women’s sport, one of the increasingly few sports UTM offers, has felt the ax of bias for more mainstream sports. Forget the fact most every Division I university funds at least a women’s track program. Forget that track is tremendously less expensive a sport than football. I would not complain if football brought in the profits of major – or even most mediocre – programs, but our team does not! Forget that UTM is precariously balanced on the guidelines of Title IX set up to ensure at least an attempted equality in sports. Instead, focus on the individuals associated with this track and field program. This morning’s meeting represented a culmination of the fears of any collegiate athlete. The university is the vehicle through which student athletes participate in the competitive world of NCAA Division I athletics.
The goal of NCAA sports is to provide opportunity for student-athletes who want an education and can use their talents for sports as a means to pay for that education.
Of course, I assume that money comes before participating using this logic. The opportunity for participation is enough. The NCAA, especially in track and field, offers those athletes who can make it to this level a chance to compete against the best, learn the limits of themselves through constant striving, and hopefully take the lessons learned through the effort out into the rest of their lives.
This morning, UTM decided to go against all the purity of those ideas, inflicting damage on a team that three years ago felt the same disregard from the administration of this university. Now, these athletes, some of whom are among the top in this conference, are forced to seek transfers and find new universities to pursue their dreams. Now, those athletes not already at the top levels have destroyed their chances of continuing at this level. I have had the distinct luxury of transferring into this sports program. I had high hopes that I might have luckily found a second chance under a coach who is perhaps better than the coach I left when I transferred from a nationally ranked track team in the Big 12.
From experience, finding that second opportunity, even coming from high levels of performance, is all but impossible. Also, how ignorantly rude to force talented athletes who have made an investment in this university to pick up what they have and move on into such uncertainty. Finally, now a great coach in the midst of building a competitive team on a ludicrously small budget has to evaluate his position at a university so hopelessly blind to the successes of some of its best athletes. Dropping the women’s track and field program exemplifies all the inconsistencies associated with a second rate university unconcerned with the affairs of its students or faculty.
What callous ignorance! I pray the coach stays, I pray the track and field athletes no longer associated with this university find greater success elsewhere, and I pray this university acts rationally and in the best interest of all of its programs.
And I pray UTM has stepped over the guidelines of Title IX. Maybe then the NCAA will step in and force the university to attain a fairness it currently cannot reach. Phillip Gordon is a sophomore English major from Milan.