No opponent’s buzzer-beater could rip the heart out of a crowd at Gersten Pavilion like the bombshell Loyola Marymount athletic director Craig Pintens dropped on his own athletes on Jan. 23.
The Lions’ A.D. stood before the more than 80 students who made it to the meeting that Tuesday evening – members of the rowing, women’s swimming, track and field and men’s cross country teams, all summoned by a brief, seemingly innocuous email three hours earlier – and informed them that, after this school year, their sports will be discontinued at LMU.
In all, those teams roster 115 athletes. And they employ six coaches and two assistants – who learned their fate 15 minutes before the affected students did.
Alena Sharp, a sophomore swimmer, described the scene on a Zoom call with me last week: “Our athletic director walks in and he looks kind of somber. But from my perspective, it was more so just, ‘This is going to be really awkward. Let me get this over with.’ And then he stood there and he gave us the information.
“At first, there was just silence. And then it felt like you could hear tears start to fall. Like this sob that just started to echo and echo … and it was like, ‘I’m not dreaming, this is not a nightmare. I’m actually being told that I’m not going to have a place here anymore.’”
A teammate who didn’t make the meeting but who was walking by as it was letting out said what she saw looked like a Greek tragedy.
“People went out of Gersten crying and screaming and kicking things … crumbling to the floor,” said Gracie O’Connell, another teammate. “Teams were huddled up together and hugging, devastated.”
It wasn’t any fun for Pintens, either. But he wanted them all to hear it at the same time, and for them to hear it directly from him, so, yes, he stood there and gave them the information.
“I mean, you’ve just changed their lives dramatically,” Pintens said last week, via Zoom. “There’s a lot of emotion in that room and rightfully so. I’ll never forget that. It’s an awful feeling. And professionally this is not something that you want to do, or relish, it was just extremely difficult. But at the same time, we felt it was the best decision for our institution.”
And here we are. College athletics in 2024. A mess. A hot, tragic mess.
THE DECISION
Why is LMU, the Jesuit university in Los Angeles, cutting these six sports?
LMU isn’t out of Title IX compliance and isn’t facing a fiscal emergency, said Pintens, who has reported raising more than $5 million in 2022-23, part of three consecutive years of record fundraising.
He said the decision is, in a sense, his attempt to do what the NCAA has failed to do for years and rip off the band-aid in the face of pending, overdue changes.
“We think,” Pintens said, “it is in the best interests of our institution to be well positioned for whatever might come in the future, because we want to compete at the highest level that you can compete at from a Division I-AAA perspective – across the board, not just in basketball.”
Pintens said he wants to streamline his department to be able to focus its resources – coaching and support staff; the NIL money raised by LMU’s collective, Magis Lions; and potentially, eventually, additional scholarships or direct compensation – in a way that bolsters its 14 remaining programs.
That does include men’s basketball – the revenue-generating sport that’s trending upward at LMU, more successful in two of the past three seasons than in any since 1990 – as well as endeavors such as men’s soccer and women’s beach volleyball. Those teams, respectively, finished among the final eight teams in last season’s NCAA tournament or have finished in the top five nationally the past three seasons.
“We want to win a national championship,” Pintens said. “And we’re trying to position ourselves, not just for the now, but for any future changes that might occur.”
Earlier today, LMU Athletics announced plans to refocus efforts to support 14 intercollegiate sports teams. Six programs will be discontinued at the end of the 2023-24 competitive season. For more information, see the announcement.https://t.co/J7jDy7WIW8 pic.twitter.com/sEpESprmB5
— LMU Athletics (@lmulions) January 24, 2024
But those athletes affected by the cuts – and many of their peers on unaffected teams – find that sentiment misguided. Said Sharp: “People don’t come here for that. They come here … for the academics provided at a small liberal arts institution. If they wanted a powerhouse school, they probably could have made it there.”
And others find Pintens’ explanations overly vague: “I respect that he has a job to do, but I don’t respect that his decision was not tangible,” said Joey Caterinichio, who flew from Anchorage to L.A. to meet in person with the athletic director about his decision, which will doubly affect her daughter, Ryann Dorris, a member of both LMU’s swimming and track teams.
“There was no climate survey, no student survey, no monetary financial assessment sent out. Nothing to the alumni, ‘Hey … in the changing landscape, we need to raise more money.’ There wasn’t anything about performance. There wasn’t any warning given. All he could do was … point to NCAA committee work that has not been adopted or ruled on as guidance.”
OUTLOOK MURKY
Because the United States has no overarching sports governing body with the power to arbitrate between competing factions, to force consensus between 350 Division I schools with budgets between $10-$350 million, or, say, step in and prevent the demise of the Pac-12 Conference, the proposals outlined in NCAA president Charlie Baker’s letter in December are about as close to a road map as an A.D. like Pintens has to work with.
And what’s ahead? From the looks of it, a new world, wherein schools finally do right by the athletes who are making them money … but do dirty the athletes who aren’t.
For months, I’ve been reading about how progress likely will be bad for the so-called Olympic sports, for which our colleges have become a de facto developmental system.
Maybe you also caught the discussions about eliminating automatic qualifier bids into the NCAA Tournament … and how that could result in the discontinuation of some programs?
Or you read about Baker’s proposed in-house revenue-sharing system that would decrease the role of outside collectives and theoretically force money into the Title IX framework … and how that would likely result, as Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde wrote, in “a reduction in the number of Olympic sports being offered at schools willing to make this level of investment.”
Maybe you, like Victoria Jackson, think about this all the time. She’s a former NCAA 10,000-meter champion and a sports historian and clinical associate professor at Arizona State, and she believes in the sports system we’ve built – and that we have it in us to figure out a better way to pay for it. A couple of ideas she offered: Tax sports bettors or, better yet, tax the NFL, which benefits handsomely from the free, exclusive farm system that is college ball.
Maybe you, like Russell Dinkins, talk about this all the time.
A former Princeton runner, he’s the executive director of the Tracksmith Foundation and a champion of college sports programs that are on the ropes. He says schools look at it all wrong: “College athletics should be viewed as a component of a holistic collegiate experience, in the same way we view the arts. No one is expecting a university orchestra or theater program or dance program to pay for itself; it’s an investment.”
But maybe you hadn’t thought much at all about whether such cuts will be sold as predictable costs of progress or how far they’d trickle down – or whether they’re an excuse for the people behind a bad business model to make sure the rich stay rich.
Maybe that’s because you’re a non-scholarship college athlete with a full course load and, in Sharp’s case, a part-time job. So maybe the first time you really mulled over all these shifting complexities was in the 48 hours after learning your college swimming career had just been upended.
And maybe, because you’re an athlete who isn’t easily deterred, you’re not inclined to give up on the sport you love at the school you love – especially because transferring is going to be tough, considering other swim programs have mostly filled out next year’s rosters. Never mind the headache of transferring credits.
So you promote a change.org petition, a GoFundMe page, and an Instagram account, all to “Save LMU Sports,” to try to create public pressure that maybe will get Pintens and other LMU officials to reconsider.
And maybe it won’t work, but maybe it will. Because about the only thing that’s certain about college sports today is how much has yet to be determined tomorrow – and that they’re worth fighting for.
