Winters at the University of Delaware are dark, gray, cold and empty. With the majority of students enjoying a two month hiatus, for those that remain it’s an uneventful month marked with frigid treks to class through a campus stripped of its typical hustle. However, for Chris Warren, his teammates and their coach of 30 years, the 2011 winter session was not quite as dull.
“It was a day that I could sleep in. I woke up to about a dozen texts from my teammates at about 10am telling me to check my email,” Warren said. “We were blindsided.”
That email, in no expense of words, stated that UD’s men’s cross country and men’s track and field teams would be cut at the end of the 2011 season. Cut. A program with over 100 years of history, led by a coach adorned by the Delaware running community was gone, swept away in the middle of the winter.
“Either we had to continue the periodic expansion of programming for women in order to be responsive to their interest and ability, or adjust the current offerings to provide equitable and substantially proportionate participation opportunities for our men and women. Continued expansion of our athletics program is not feasible in this financial climate, and given that reality, the university made the only decision it could,” then-athletic director Bernard Muir said in a statement given at the time.
The decision was put differently to head coach Jim Fischer, in a meeting the day prior with Muir and other university officials that lasted just ten minutes.
“They said, ‘we’re cutting your program and you’re retiring and we’re gonna announce it tomorrow.’ I didn’t have any inkling that this was taking place.” Fischer said. “No one asked if there were some alternatives.”
Later in the day the team met with Muir, who would jettison to Stanford 18 months later.
“The decision was made and it was clear there was no overturning it,” said Warren, who now serves as Delaware Military Academy’s cross country and track and field head coach.
Delaware’s story is an oft-cited example of the perils of the NCAA athletics system, which many believe prioritizes revenue-earning sports like football and basketball over student-athlete experiences in fringe sports like running.
Runners at the time refuted Delaware’s reasoning, that Title IX and financial limits tied the university’s hands. Corey Wall, a senior on the 2011 team who is now a member of the Central Park Track Club believes there was a larger idea behind the cuts.
“It’s not Title IX,” Wall said at the time to the Huffington Post. “Their plans are to continue to get rid of teams like swimming and tennis and get down to the teams they care about [like football and basketball].”
Michael O’Brian, a junior on the 2011 team, agrees. “We had all the stats backing us,” O’Brian, now an assistant coach at Delaware Technical Community College said. “We were the cheapest team to fund, had the highest GPA, one of the smallest rosters and most importantly we were in compliance with Title IX of which the athletic department cited to be one of the reasons for the cut.”
Universities can be compliant with Title IX, the 1972 federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federal-funded educational institutions, by satisfying one of three prongs. Universities can have the proportion of women to men competing in athletics match the undergraduate population, demonstrate a history of expanding opportunities for women or prove that women’s athletic interests are accommodated.
The school has not once been found non-compliant with Title IX. In the spring of 2011 Delaware played its first season of women’s golf. While 100 men donned blue and gold on the sidelines of Tubby Raymond field on football Saturdays, the men’s cross country team roster in 2010 featured 12 names.
As a freshman, Warren was a spot away from making the racing team at the team’s annual time trial. Warren, like the many droves of runners prescribed to Coach Fischer’s philosophy, still trained hard with the team to make the official squad the next season. When the school said the roster was to be cut from 16 to 12 members and had to be set in July, Warren was once again on the outside looking in.
“Those on the bubble weren’t chosen,” Warren said. “I ran 35-40 miles a week going into freshman year. I realized that wasn’t going to get it done at the collegiate level. [Sophomore year] my highest mileage week was 80 miles.”
Warren would go on to run a lifetime best of 14:32 in the 5k as an individual athlete, a time fast enough to win each of the last three CAA championships.
In the 2009-2010 academic year, Delaware’s men’s cross country and outdoor track and field teams had a combined operating expense of $49,540. In October, the News Journal reported that Delaware spends $59,114 per each football player on average and $86,208 on average for its 63 scholarship players, at the time.
As Delaware tried to explain to its runners why the teams had to go, a $22 million addition was being made to the Bob Carpenter Center, featuring new practice facilities and meeting rooms for the basketball, volleyball and football teams. In 2013 the track inside the fieldhouse
Delaware is not alone. Just in the mid-atlantic region, the University of Maryland, the University of Richmond, and Temple University have had their running programs come under siege since Delaware’s programs went to bed in 2011, many citing Title IX and financial concerns like Delaware.
Even prior to the Blue Hens’ departure from the running scene, CAA-counterparts Towson University and James Madison University lost their programs in 2004 and 2006, respectively. The CAA currently has just six men’s cross country teams and three men’s track and field teams. There are 12 football teams.
Larry Pratt, Delaware’s throws coach of 49 years says that a lack of experience and understanding of the sport of running among athletic administrations is possible cause for the trend. Unlike most sports, collegiate cross country and track and field teams do not compete head-to-head against other schools. In the spring track season, most meets are not scored by team ranking until the championship races at the end of the season.
“If you don’t have a win-loss record, then it’s not a sport, there’s a feeling it’s a club. A now it is a club,” Pratt said.
Pratt argues that part of the reason that dual meet or triangular meet scoring is not feasible at the division 1 level is because universities cut down roster sizes. With less runners on each team, it is very difficult to have second and third place scorers in every event, according to Pratt.
Fischer contends that universities tend to see running as an easy way to balance their Title IX numbers and their budgets. When you cut track and field, you cut three programs and seemingly effect less athletes than if a school were to cut multiple other programs, according to Fischer. Fischer retorts, however, that his programs were “pretty efficient”.
“Our kids bought their own shoes,” Fischer said.
In January, 2015 both the men’s cross country and outdoor track and field teams at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, a prominent CAA member, were axed. UNCW officials said that the move was made in an effort to “right-size” the school’s athletics portfolio. It appeared that four years later another team had bite the dust.
However, in June it was announced that the team would be preserved for another year due to successful fundraising efforts. In three months, the team raised $255,781. Unlike a similar case at Maryland, where fundraising efforts supported their track and field team for two seasons until it’s eventual death, at UNCW, the team earned permanent reinstatement in August, 2015. It was one of the first cases of a successful revival of a Division 1 program.
Efforts to reverse the university’s decision have been plentiful but futile. Immediately following the decision, the team filed a Title IX complaint with UD’s Office of Civil Rights, but nothing came of the complaint. In 2015, Mike Grieco, the father of Joseph Grieco, a runner on the dissolved teams, submitted a complaint to the Delaware Division of Human Relations claiming UD violated the state’s Equal Accommodations Law. Again, nothing came of the complaint
Warren believes the Delaware running community has accepted the decision.
While working at Delaware Running Company, a local running store that has locations in Greeneville and on Newark’s main Street, Warren met a man who sent a letter to new athletic director Chrissi Rawak, urging a reversal six years later. Rawak told Blue Hen Sports Cage, a weekly show on Delaware’s student radio station WVUD, in October that the university had no immediate plans to add to its athletic offerings.
“While there isn’t a group movement, there are individuals doing what they can.” Warren said.
Written by Brandon Holveck, Assistant Sports Editor at The Review
Sources
Chrissi Rawak Radio Interview (link)
Huffington Post Article (UD Title IX)
News Journal Articles (Bring Back UD Track) (Football Crossroads)
Runner’s World Article (Administrator’s Prespective)
Al Jazeera Sports Article (UD Focus Piece)
UNCW Articles (Booster Success)(Booster Dependence)
Football Roster (Roster)