re: Alabama Board Coronavirus Thread

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Don't be surprised if you see some D-1 programs starting to cut costly non-revenue sports too.


Good.

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No, not good. These sports don't exist without football revenue, that is a certainty. But these sports produce nearly all of your Olympic athletes and the participants have really no other avenue to pursue their sport and life after their sport. We aren't Russia or China where our Olympic athletes are state sponsored employees. And these athletes train longer and harder than the "revenue" sports by any measure. Even at the elite high school level a swimmer trains twice a day, 5,000 plus yards per session, 5 to 6 days a week, 24/7/365. All while trying to balance that with class and a social life. So they either evolve into excellent time managers or something has to give. I'm proud that my daughter maintained a 4.61 GPA in all AP and DE classes and was a member and officer in many other clubs and honor societies in high school while swimming well enough to get to Florida High School state finals in multiple strokes and multiple seasons.

Yeah, I'm biased because I've got skin in the game with a kid who could have continued her swimming career at a small college but chose to attend the Honors college in Tuscaloosa instead because to her, education now takes precedence over her love of swimming because she's gone almost as far as her swimming talent can take her. She had a lot of interest from DIII schools and some DII schools, but realized she wasn't getting a D1 offer and she's ready to move on. Matter of fact, one of the schools pursuing her also dropped their swim program last week. What if she had agreed to attend that school to swim? Where would we be now? Scrambling to find a school, that's where. And most schools application deadlines for 2020 are long past.

These things have a huge trickle down affect. I appreciate that football pays the bills and I know they usually resent the money being spent on other programs but that Olympic ecosystem and all the kids and coaches involved depend on football to support their programs. Otherwise, hundreds, if not thousands of kids no longer have a way to attend school and coaches are out of a job. It matters in a lot of ways. I've always been a proponent of Olympic sports programs in college, but even more so since I have experienced the effects of it firsthand. These kids may not be the glamour athletes or the faces of the athletic department, but they are hard core, elite athletes who bust their arse for the love of their sport that most students and Alumni never see or care about. In some ways, doesn't that make them a better representative of the school than the football player that is there just to get to the league and doesn't give a rat's arse about the color of the jersey?