UPIG Eliminating Tennis - AFTER FURTHER REVIEW
- Thread starter Willow Grove Dawg
- Start date
Hopefully they made them buy a handful of season football tickets a piece before they took their tennis money
Apparently there is a Walton/Hunt with a kid/grandkid involved in tennis.
Yep. My takeaway from this is if you want to preserve your niche sports at the ncaa level, get ready to put a group together to fund it. And honestly, I'm not sure this is a good thing.
These being university's and whatsuch, I do think it's good for experts in a given field to teach folks who want to learn it at a high level. Does every single school need a "Tennis Dept" in the "College of Athletics"? Probably not. Do they need to compete against other schools numerous times a season, or would a "conference" or two work like it does for the Business Dept or History Dept?
Honestly, it's just always been deeply weird to me how we treat athletics within an academic environment.
High school sports cost schools a lot money that could go to academics and paying teachersyet they do them anyway. Would you advocate getting rid of high school sports?
I'm on board with everything being a club sport unless and until outside groups fund it. Football and men's basketball are just different animals from everything else.
But it's really weird that while some people are mortgaging their future to pay for degrees, there are other people that get to go for free because they can be stuck on a rowing scholarship because we need women's scholarships to balance out football? I mean, that's just one example of weirdness. It's weird that a guy that is good at cross country would get a scholarship to play a sport that doesn't make the school money or provide meaningful marketing opportunities. If enough donors exist that they want to provide money to watch their alma mater's whatever team travel to go beat up on teams from other universities, great. But it shouldn't be a university expense. And in an ideal world where limits were put in place such that profit generated from football wasn't required to get dumped right back in football in an arms race, that profit generated should go to the general fund, not other sports that don't have anything to do with football.
I'd be an advocate of public schools not being allowed to take on debt to pay for stadiums that can't pay for themselves with ticket revenue. (I think private schools shoudn't either, but I don't know who would tell them that other than their donors/parents.
I mean, it's somewhat a fine line. I think having athletics is a great part of a well rounded offering by a school, and it's not much more expensive to have a gym with stands than a gym without, plus you need an assembly place usually, and when you get to a certain size population, if you want everybody to be able to use the facilities, you can't go to the old school set up where the gym has a stage at one end, and it's your basketball court, indoor PE area, assembly room, volley ball courts, etc. But we are generally insane about sports and spend a lot of money on the athletic arms race that doesn't produce real improvement, just relative improvement to competitors.
Definitely not. In fact I'd probably like wider participation if anything. If I could wave a magic wand, I'd want to treat them more like math, chemistry, or choir.
I'm ok with someone getting a cross-country scholarship (assuming the school offers it, obviously) in the same way I'm ok with the university giving out scholarships because a student shows promise and wants to study civil engineering.
Before someone proposes scholarships for any arcane activity under the sun, clearly there are going to be limits to what any one university can offer.
Walton/Tyson/Hunt - sounds like the name of KA pledge at Ole Miss
I'm not bothered by a cross country scholarship by any means, but it's not core to what the university is doing. THe university is in theory there for education, so offering scholarships to students that will benefit and also will return a benefit to the school by slightly increasing the quality of its student body's academic credentials, and hence the prestige seems to make more sense. plus other students benefit from having stronger students around them for the most part.
Except for football weekends, and to a lesser extent basketball and baseball, helping create environments that students want to be a part of, it really doesn't make a lot of sense to benefit such a small percentage of the student population using university funds. Doesn't bother me as it is, but that's why it won't bother me if sports that don't pay for themselves become dependent on donors providing funds specifically for that sport.
1. Unlike MSU baseball & probably UPIG baseball - I seriously doubt that there is significantly more demand to be a 7 figure tennis booster than supply of opportunities to participate.
2. Any booster giving this much money is probably already buying football tickets more than likely a suite or at least club level
I heard it's more of a racket with lots of strings attached. Don't love it, maybe it will serve them well.
well if you look a little closer at Billingsley Tennis Center, you can figure it out
The important thing is its nobody's fault.
Are we starting to see now why Rev Share was such a terrible idea?
It's gone from boosters paying the players, to boosters paying for certain niche sports (and still players at the blue bloods).
Me personally, I think it 17ing SUCKS that we are willing to take away opportunities for small sport scholarship kids and give it to football and basketball players. If rich boosters want to play players fine, but this Rev Share shlt just 17ing blows asss. I mean I guess the schools could just say no but then you may as well shut the program down, you'd get beat so bad.
It's gone from boosters paying the players, to boosters paying for certain niche sports (and still players at the blue bloods).
Me personally, I think it 17ing SUCKS that we are willing to take away opportunities for small sport scholarship kids and give it to football and basketball players. If rich boosters want to play players fine, but this Rev Share shlt just 17ing blows asss. I mean I guess the schools could just say no but then you may as well shut the program down, you'd get beat so bad.