At a College, Dropping Sports in Favor of Fitness
By MIKE TIERNEY
ATLANTA — The softball bats and golf clubs have been stored away. All is
quiet, too, at the basketball gymnasium, the volleyball courts and the
soccer field.
Only the tennis team endures at Spelman College, and after the Great
South Athletic Conference tournament the last weekend of April, it will
also be done. Then Spelman, a historically black women’s college with
alumnae who include former slaves and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author,
will become the second college in the last decade to leave the N.C.A.A. altogether, the other being the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn.
Officials at the college, whose 2,100 students make it the size of some high schools, decided last year
to eliminate the athletic department. The college had 80 athletes
spread across seven sports, but the athletic budget was roughly $900,000
for the 2012-13 academic year — from an overall operating budget of
roughly $100 million.
“I was startled,” Spelman’s president, Beverly Tatum, said. “It seemed like a lot of money for 80 students.”
The highly unusual move by Spelman comes when few institutions seem to
be able to resist the lure of intercollegiate sports, even as one
scandal after another has tarnished the reputations of universities
throughout the country.
The decision to shut down Spelman’s athletic program followed the
announced intention of several colleges to leave the Great South,
meaning the conference would have too few members to remain viable. For
Spelman, joining another conference would have meant incurring higher
travel costs, making improvements to the college’s athletic sites and
fielding teams in additional sports.
While watching a basketball game in the Jaguars’ 62-year-old gymnasium,
where a shorter-than-regulation court has necessitated a waiver from the
N.C.A.A., Dr. Tatum began to wonder what the players would do for
exercise after their eligibility expired.
Dr. Tatum had become alarmingly aware of data showing that young black
women were prone to diabetes, heart disease and other ailments linked to
poor diet and exercise. Observing candles being lighted on campus at
10-year reunions in memory of alumnae who had died was chilling and
revealing.
A remedy seemed obvious: disband N.C.A.A.-level sports and reallocate
the money devoted to them toward establishing a wellness program that
could take advantage of the college’s gym, courts and fields.
The college’s board of trustees approved the plan a year ago. The
difficult part was informing the administrators, coaches and athletes.
Sports has long maintained an integral, if muted, role at Spelman since
its establishment 132 years ago in a church basement. So Dr. Tatum was
neither capricious nor joyful with her decision to discontinue sports.
The university’s seven teams learned their fate last year at an
emotional assembly.
“It was a rough day,” Dr. Tatum said. The announcement was met with gasps, displays of anger, cries of “What?”
“I was absolutely shocked,” the tennis player Leah Howard, a junior, said.
Protocol at Spelman calls for sustained applause after a president’s
speech. When Dr. Tatum finished, she told the audience: “I know you’re
not happy. It is not necessary to clap.” She was mostly met with
silence.
Sara Redd was a captain of the tennis team in 2006, when it won its only
conference title. Now she is its coach, the last still active at
Spelman.
She called Dr. Tatum’s original announcement “kind of devastating and
sad,” but now says, “I think it’s a good idea,” provided that students
take advantage of the expanded opportunities for physical activities,
from Zumba to kickboxing.
Germaine McAuley, Spelman’s athletic director and the chairwoman of the
physical education department, echoed that notion, despite her 25 years
of college coaching experience and the breakup of her staff.
“It truly makes sense,” she said.
As part of the new initiative, the physical education department will be
offering additional courses; the campus gym, Read Hall, is undergoing a
renovation to improve its fitness facilities; and fitness and
intramural programs on campus will emphasize activities that students
are more likely to continue after leaving college, like golf, swimming,
tennis, yoga and Pilates. Spelman also plans to promote those activities
on campus more heavily, though not to make student participation
mandatory.
As for the athletes, the underclassmen on the tennis team all plan to
return to the college for the next academic year, according to Ms. Redd,
even as opposing coaches mention the possibility of asking them to
transfer. Ms. Howard, for one, expects to play intramurals, along with
her sister, a rising freshman who intended to play tennis for Spelman
and, even though that is no longer possible, still plans to attend.
The role of athletics at Spelman had been limited. Recruiting was
largely confined to phone calls and e-mails. Scholarships and financial
aid were based on need and academic achievement, per Division III rules.
Incoming athletes generally cited the quality of the education as the
main reason they chose to attend, with sports far from the core of
campus life.
Now Dr. Tatum finds herself fielding calls from other university
presidents who must justify the high price of athletics and its role in
the mission of higher education. Ms. McAuley said she was approached by a
few athletic directors at the most recent N.C.A.A. convention who
suggested that their institutions were looking into the possibility of
ending intercollegiate sports.
“All of us have to look at everything we are doing — what’s the value
being added to the university and at what cost?” Dr. Tatum said.
When Dr. Tatum hears from her fellow presidents, she said, the
conversations usually begin with them saying, “That took some guts.”
Her stock response is, “It would take more guts if it were the University of Michigan.”
By coincidence, Michigan was competing in the men’s basketball Final
Four last weekend, about a mile from Spelman’s campus. On that Saturday,
as the Wolverines prepared to take part in one of the marquee events in
college sports, roughly 800 students jogged or speed-walked five
kilometers on Spelman’s campus.
It was the inaugural event of what Dr. Tatum termed the Wellness
Revolution, her strategy for educating students about sustained physical
activity.
“I envision a culture of movement on the campus that includes greater
physical activity for students, faculty and staff,” Dr. Tatum said,
adding that many of the participants in the 5K “had never done anything
like that before.”
“Now they are asking, ‘When can we do it again?’ ” she said. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sports/at-spelman-dropping-sports-in-favor-of-fitness.html?_r=0
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