Post by wrestlingpublicist on Nov 11, 2007 15:33:16 GMT -5
Buck Davis became a Pacific-8 Conference Champion during the glory days of Ron Finley's best Oregon wrestling teams. He wrestled at Oregon from 1973-77.
Then he moved back to "God's Country," central Oregon, where he became the middle coach in a succession of three Duck wrestlers who served as head wrestling coach at Bend High School.
Recently Buck and I renewed our old acquaintance. Here's an email exchange. We discuss Pat Kilkenny's defense of dropping Oregon wrestling: from Title IX issues, to the profitability of baseball, to whether wrestling is an ascending or declining sport in both Oregon and on the national level.
Buck: At a recent central Oregon Duck Club meeting the new athletic director stated several reasons for dropping the program. The first was that the University could not bring back baseball and keep wrestling because of Title IX violations. In fact they would have to add cheer leading to meet requirements. It is my understanding that this may not be so and that there had been some investigation into this statement and it is not true. Do you know?
Dave: Ron [Finley] and Chuck [Kearney] have have met with Melinda Grier, the university's staff attorney who deals with Title IX concerns. The U of O is like most public colleges across the land. We're not in compliance with Title IX. Yet, to this date, no university not in compliance has ever been sanctioned by federal or state authorities.
Ms. Grier told Finley that the proposed situation, cutting wrestling, and adding baseball and cheer, would not, in itself, solve the Title IX deficits the university faces. It just doesn't make it any worse--depending, however, on how much the U of O decides to fund cheer.
It's my feeling that Title IX is being used to legitimize the discontinuance of wrestling.
As the following web site clearly states, Title IX does not mandate cutting of men's sports in order to achieve gender equity.
Title IX (click here)
I hope everyone recognizes this competitive cheer proposal for what it is. It's the least expensive women's "sport" the university could come up with that the baseball boosters could fund. We got baseball back, after many years, because Kilkenny saw potential in an untapped source of potential donors. When John Cain cut baseball, gymnastics, and swimming during his administration, some of the long-time baseball fans who had been steady Duck donors refused to write another check. It has been that way ever since.
When Mel Krause, the former baseball coach, put together his consortium of donors which would provide seed money for the new baseball team, he also promised to underwrite a gender-balancing women's sport. Pat Kilkenny saw approximately 150 new untapped donors who he hoped would not only donate to baseball, but to the general Duck Athletic Fund. He saw nothing comparable in wrestling.
Only one other Division 1-A school maintains a competitive cheering squad as an intercollegiate athletic team, the University of Maryland. Obviously, the Ducks won't spend much on a travel budget. They can fund their kids to go the nationals every year to compete against Maryland and whoever else shows up to cheer unattached.
Competitive cheer is a sham, and those athletic department officials who characterize it as an emerging sport should be ashamed of themselves.
Buck: In the same meeting Pat Kilkenny stated that another reason they could not keep wrestling was that it would cost the university somewhere between 5 and 6 million dollars to add a practice room/locker room to the new basketball arena. I personally asked Pat in the meeting if he was sure of his numbers and he said that they were correct to his knowledge. Ron said he has not seen any plans including the wrestling room and any type of quote as to the cost of adding it. Do you know anything about this either?
Dave: First of all, Pat is ignoring the fact that his predecessor remodeled a perfectly good wrestling room into a glitzy treatment facility for the football team when perfectly adequate facilities for athletic medicine already existed in the Casanova Center. Mr. Moos did it because Bellotti wanted a space-age training room that would wow the daylights out of impressionable 17-year-old recruits. Moos promised the wrestlers a new room in the new basketball building. The room presently on loan from the P. E. department in Esslinger Hall was always designed to be temporary.
Did you see my second YouTube video?: Sacred Ground, Broken Trust
Secondly, Finley believes the practice facility is a non-issue because President Frohnmayer could simply tell the dean of the physical education school to permanently cede it to the wrestlers. I would cost nothing. I understand it's perfectly adequate, although it's certainly not an up-to-date facility that would impress a recruit who was being wooed by Iowa or Oklahoma State. But how many of those do we compete for?
Six million dollars for a new room in the basketball building? Well, okay. But once again, Kilkenny has the latitude to pick and choose among numbers. Finley says a new wrestling room could be built adjacent to Hayward Field for about $1.5 million. That's what the Beavers paid for their facility, and approximately what Arizona State recently spent. It could be a pre-fabricated metal building, dressed up on the outside to conform to the university's master architectural plan but Spartan inside. As Chuck Kearney says, the wrestling culture doesn't demand fancy stuff--just functional.
Buck: Pat also said that the university could not afford to keep wrestling as it was a non revenue producing sport and that in two years he expected baseball to be revenue producing. I once again stood up and asked him if it was true that Oregon State baseball was non revenue producing at Oregon State (I know that is operating in the red) and how he could make a statement like that when the team 50 miles north who just won two national titles was not making it. He agreed that the Beavers were operating in the red but he still thought the Ducks would do better. Pat also stated that the present athletic department at Oregon was one of only a few division 1 schools in the nation who do not accept state money or money from the student body that had operated in the black. When asked by other members of the crowd how many sports at Oregon made money he said only men's football and men's basketball. The other 16 or 17 did not. Do you know how much money is spent each year for wrestling and how far into the black the athletic department actually is at the end of a typical year?
Dave: No collegiate baseball program in the United States makes money, with the possible exception of LSU. The Tigers pack 7,000 into every home game in Baton Rouge. LSU is one of a handful of schools that did not reply to a recent survey I conducted of baseball programs in the Pac-10, ACC, SEC, Big 10 and Big 12. The best revenue to expense ratio I found was at Texas A&M, which spends $1.4 million annually and brings in $1.1 million in ticket sales, summer camp income, radio advertising, and sineage in the ballpark. Everybody else loses money and expects to forever. Here are the numbers the Beavers gave me:
Expenditures: $1,303,620
Salaries: $616,429
Scholarships: $357,081
Travel: $225,000
Revenue: $225,000
Net Loss: $1,087,620
The Beavers, defending two-time national champions, budget a lost of more more than $1 million per year, and expect to keep it that way. They don't expect to make any more money from baseball than Oregon does from track. If Kilkenny believes we'll make money on baseball from an expense versus revenue standpoint, I'd like to know what he's smoking.
His gamble is what I previously stated: He thinks baseball supporters, who didn't donate for a score of years, will now open up their pockets and donate beyond the pledged amount, thus making baseball revenue-positive from a Duck Athletic Fund perspective.
That's a hell of a roll of the dice. The elephant in the room is the cost of a stadium. The Beavers, having tasted the big time and wanting to stay there, are leading a fund-raising drive, though their Dugout Club, for $4.5 million in improvements to the baseball stadium.
When Bill Byrne, the former UO athletic director, was at Nebraska, he teamed with the City of Lincoln and the Lincoln Salt Dogs minor league baseball team to built $30 million Haymarket Park, which includes both baseball and softball diamonds. The Cornhusker contribution: $12 million. What's more, Nebraska pays about $700,000 per year to the city for the privilege of using Haymarket Park each season for its baseball and softball teams.
A third example: Texas A&M recently spent about $2 million to install an improved drainage system in its baseball and softball diamonds. It cost $1.1 for Olsen Field, the baseball diamond, and the remainder for the Aggie softball park. Baseball stadiums are expensive to obtain and operate. In all the euphoria about baseball coming back to Oregon, why isn't anybody questioning the cost of a stadium?
A fourth example: The University of Texas has won two College World Series titles in the last ten years. It has the largest baseball budget I've come across: $2,274,430. Revenues total $775,506. Texas doesn't mind losing $1.5 million per year in order to bring baseball glory back to Austin.
You asked about the wrestling budget at Oregon: a measly $629,000 out of an annual budget of $37 million. Considering that Oregonians make up 70% of the wrestling roster, according to figures I published a few days ago, that's quite a bargain.
Buck: Pat also stated that wrestling was a dying sport in Oregon. Now I don't know if he meant the university or the state. Wrestling in the state is healthy with to my knowledge only football and basketball having larger participation numbers. Wrestling at the University has struggled but could be turned around overnight with just a few changes.
Dave: According to numbers published by the Oregon School Activities Association, last year 4,659 boys wrestled in Oregon high schools that reported their figures to the OSAA. That make wrestling the second most popular boys sport during the winter season, behind only basketball, which had 7,019 participants.
Regarding boys sports for the 2006-07 school year, wrestling ranked ahead of cross country (3,008), swimming (1,688), tennis (2,142), and golf (1,964).
Wrestling ranked behind football (14,808), boys track (8,085), boys basketball (7,019), baseball (6,184), and boys soccer (5,955).
As for whether it's a "dying" sport, once again Mr. Kilkenny has chosen to emphasize the numbers he cherry picks. He ignores others.
Here are four-year trends for the state of Oregon.
2006-07: 4,659
2005-06: 4,990
2004-05: 4,866
2003-04: 4,704
Note that wrestling dropped last by more than 300 participants last after steady increases in the previous years. But look at the figures for boys basketball:
2006-07 : 7,109
2005-06: 7,538
2004-05: 7,388
2003-04: 7,302
Notice that boys basketball participation declined by 400 last year. Does that make basketball a "dying" sport?
Now let's look at the national trends for boys wrestling: Wrestling did indeed suffer a 19-year decline from its height of participation in 1975-76 of 355,160. It reached its low of 216,453 in 1994-95--a loss of slightly less than 135,000 participants. So, if Mr. Kilkenny looks at these numbers only, yes, at one point wrestling was on the decline.
However, from its low point in the mid 1990s, boys high school wrestling has increased to 243,000 ten years later in 2004-05--the last year for which nationwide figures are available.
So, is wrestling dying?
If Mr. Kilkennny chooses to focus on net loss from its height at the three-quarters mark of the twentieth century, I suppose he can make a case. But from my perspective, a gain of almost 30,000 participants over the last ten years indicates a sport on the rebound.
Buck: All of these statements seem suspect to me and I hope that the decision was made based on them because they seem to be easily refuted. If they are true then we need to know.
Dave: The numbers have been massaged to make the case for what Mr. Kilkenny and, I suspect, Ms. Bumgartner wanted to do: get rid of a sport they don't understand, look down upon, and consider "unfashionable."
The nation's college wrestling coaches didn't make themselves particularly popular with athletic administrators when they filed a lawsuit against the NCAA a few years ago, alleging a misinterpretation of Title IX and discrimination against their sport. Their litigation did not succeed. Now it's payback time.
Also, as [former Oregon assistant] Bill Bragg once said to me, wrestling has a blue-collar image that makes it somewhat unpopular with the rising middle class, which doesn't want its children to sniff armpits.
And, quite frankly, the wrestling establishment is to blame for failing to promote its sport properly. As Hank Hosfield, a UO wrestling alumnus who came after you observed, wrestlers never realized that their love for the sport itself wouldn't sell itself with the general public. The public concentrates on individuals and teams.
Ask a member of the general public to name a wrestler, and he'll probably say Hulk Hogan. The few who can name a college wrestler probably name Dan Gable. Why? Dan cut through the fog of a sport the public doesn't understand and made people remember who he was. There were other potential Dan Gables out there, but we never promoted them properly.
If we win this struggle, we can't let our guard down. They'll try to cut wrestling time and time again, as they tried unsuccessfully three times when Ron Finley was coach. We in the wrestling community have to do a better job of projecting and defending our sport.
Then he moved back to "God's Country," central Oregon, where he became the middle coach in a succession of three Duck wrestlers who served as head wrestling coach at Bend High School.
Recently Buck and I renewed our old acquaintance. Here's an email exchange. We discuss Pat Kilkenny's defense of dropping Oregon wrestling: from Title IX issues, to the profitability of baseball, to whether wrestling is an ascending or declining sport in both Oregon and on the national level.
Buck: At a recent central Oregon Duck Club meeting the new athletic director stated several reasons for dropping the program. The first was that the University could not bring back baseball and keep wrestling because of Title IX violations. In fact they would have to add cheer leading to meet requirements. It is my understanding that this may not be so and that there had been some investigation into this statement and it is not true. Do you know?
Dave: Ron [Finley] and Chuck [Kearney] have have met with Melinda Grier, the university's staff attorney who deals with Title IX concerns. The U of O is like most public colleges across the land. We're not in compliance with Title IX. Yet, to this date, no university not in compliance has ever been sanctioned by federal or state authorities.
Ms. Grier told Finley that the proposed situation, cutting wrestling, and adding baseball and cheer, would not, in itself, solve the Title IX deficits the university faces. It just doesn't make it any worse--depending, however, on how much the U of O decides to fund cheer.
It's my feeling that Title IX is being used to legitimize the discontinuance of wrestling.
As the following web site clearly states, Title IX does not mandate cutting of men's sports in order to achieve gender equity.
Title IX (click here)
Title IX is designed to create parity in athletic opportunity and quality of experience for men and women. It is a school's choice to cut men's programs in an effort to comply with the law or to meet budget constraints. However, Title IX is not intended to be a zero-sum game. Title IX is intended to ensure equality for both males and females.
I hope everyone recognizes this competitive cheer proposal for what it is. It's the least expensive women's "sport" the university could come up with that the baseball boosters could fund. We got baseball back, after many years, because Kilkenny saw potential in an untapped source of potential donors. When John Cain cut baseball, gymnastics, and swimming during his administration, some of the long-time baseball fans who had been steady Duck donors refused to write another check. It has been that way ever since.
When Mel Krause, the former baseball coach, put together his consortium of donors which would provide seed money for the new baseball team, he also promised to underwrite a gender-balancing women's sport. Pat Kilkenny saw approximately 150 new untapped donors who he hoped would not only donate to baseball, but to the general Duck Athletic Fund. He saw nothing comparable in wrestling.
Only one other Division 1-A school maintains a competitive cheering squad as an intercollegiate athletic team, the University of Maryland. Obviously, the Ducks won't spend much on a travel budget. They can fund their kids to go the nationals every year to compete against Maryland and whoever else shows up to cheer unattached.
Competitive cheer is a sham, and those athletic department officials who characterize it as an emerging sport should be ashamed of themselves.
Buck: In the same meeting Pat Kilkenny stated that another reason they could not keep wrestling was that it would cost the university somewhere between 5 and 6 million dollars to add a practice room/locker room to the new basketball arena. I personally asked Pat in the meeting if he was sure of his numbers and he said that they were correct to his knowledge. Ron said he has not seen any plans including the wrestling room and any type of quote as to the cost of adding it. Do you know anything about this either?
Dave: First of all, Pat is ignoring the fact that his predecessor remodeled a perfectly good wrestling room into a glitzy treatment facility for the football team when perfectly adequate facilities for athletic medicine already existed in the Casanova Center. Mr. Moos did it because Bellotti wanted a space-age training room that would wow the daylights out of impressionable 17-year-old recruits. Moos promised the wrestlers a new room in the new basketball building. The room presently on loan from the P. E. department in Esslinger Hall was always designed to be temporary.
Did you see my second YouTube video?: Sacred Ground, Broken Trust
Secondly, Finley believes the practice facility is a non-issue because President Frohnmayer could simply tell the dean of the physical education school to permanently cede it to the wrestlers. I would cost nothing. I understand it's perfectly adequate, although it's certainly not an up-to-date facility that would impress a recruit who was being wooed by Iowa or Oklahoma State. But how many of those do we compete for?
Six million dollars for a new room in the basketball building? Well, okay. But once again, Kilkenny has the latitude to pick and choose among numbers. Finley says a new wrestling room could be built adjacent to Hayward Field for about $1.5 million. That's what the Beavers paid for their facility, and approximately what Arizona State recently spent. It could be a pre-fabricated metal building, dressed up on the outside to conform to the university's master architectural plan but Spartan inside. As Chuck Kearney says, the wrestling culture doesn't demand fancy stuff--just functional.
Buck: Pat also said that the university could not afford to keep wrestling as it was a non revenue producing sport and that in two years he expected baseball to be revenue producing. I once again stood up and asked him if it was true that Oregon State baseball was non revenue producing at Oregon State (I know that is operating in the red) and how he could make a statement like that when the team 50 miles north who just won two national titles was not making it. He agreed that the Beavers were operating in the red but he still thought the Ducks would do better. Pat also stated that the present athletic department at Oregon was one of only a few division 1 schools in the nation who do not accept state money or money from the student body that had operated in the black. When asked by other members of the crowd how many sports at Oregon made money he said only men's football and men's basketball. The other 16 or 17 did not. Do you know how much money is spent each year for wrestling and how far into the black the athletic department actually is at the end of a typical year?
Dave: No collegiate baseball program in the United States makes money, with the possible exception of LSU. The Tigers pack 7,000 into every home game in Baton Rouge. LSU is one of a handful of schools that did not reply to a recent survey I conducted of baseball programs in the Pac-10, ACC, SEC, Big 10 and Big 12. The best revenue to expense ratio I found was at Texas A&M, which spends $1.4 million annually and brings in $1.1 million in ticket sales, summer camp income, radio advertising, and sineage in the ballpark. Everybody else loses money and expects to forever. Here are the numbers the Beavers gave me:
Expenditures: $1,303,620
Salaries: $616,429
Scholarships: $357,081
Travel: $225,000
Revenue: $225,000
Net Loss: $1,087,620
The Beavers, defending two-time national champions, budget a lost of more more than $1 million per year, and expect to keep it that way. They don't expect to make any more money from baseball than Oregon does from track. If Kilkenny believes we'll make money on baseball from an expense versus revenue standpoint, I'd like to know what he's smoking.
His gamble is what I previously stated: He thinks baseball supporters, who didn't donate for a score of years, will now open up their pockets and donate beyond the pledged amount, thus making baseball revenue-positive from a Duck Athletic Fund perspective.
That's a hell of a roll of the dice. The elephant in the room is the cost of a stadium. The Beavers, having tasted the big time and wanting to stay there, are leading a fund-raising drive, though their Dugout Club, for $4.5 million in improvements to the baseball stadium.
When Bill Byrne, the former UO athletic director, was at Nebraska, he teamed with the City of Lincoln and the Lincoln Salt Dogs minor league baseball team to built $30 million Haymarket Park, which includes both baseball and softball diamonds. The Cornhusker contribution: $12 million. What's more, Nebraska pays about $700,000 per year to the city for the privilege of using Haymarket Park each season for its baseball and softball teams.
A third example: Texas A&M recently spent about $2 million to install an improved drainage system in its baseball and softball diamonds. It cost $1.1 for Olsen Field, the baseball diamond, and the remainder for the Aggie softball park. Baseball stadiums are expensive to obtain and operate. In all the euphoria about baseball coming back to Oregon, why isn't anybody questioning the cost of a stadium?
A fourth example: The University of Texas has won two College World Series titles in the last ten years. It has the largest baseball budget I've come across: $2,274,430. Revenues total $775,506. Texas doesn't mind losing $1.5 million per year in order to bring baseball glory back to Austin.
You asked about the wrestling budget at Oregon: a measly $629,000 out of an annual budget of $37 million. Considering that Oregonians make up 70% of the wrestling roster, according to figures I published a few days ago, that's quite a bargain.
Buck: Pat also stated that wrestling was a dying sport in Oregon. Now I don't know if he meant the university or the state. Wrestling in the state is healthy with to my knowledge only football and basketball having larger participation numbers. Wrestling at the University has struggled but could be turned around overnight with just a few changes.
Dave: According to numbers published by the Oregon School Activities Association, last year 4,659 boys wrestled in Oregon high schools that reported their figures to the OSAA. That make wrestling the second most popular boys sport during the winter season, behind only basketball, which had 7,019 participants.
Regarding boys sports for the 2006-07 school year, wrestling ranked ahead of cross country (3,008), swimming (1,688), tennis (2,142), and golf (1,964).
Wrestling ranked behind football (14,808), boys track (8,085), boys basketball (7,019), baseball (6,184), and boys soccer (5,955).
As for whether it's a "dying" sport, once again Mr. Kilkenny has chosen to emphasize the numbers he cherry picks. He ignores others.
Here are four-year trends for the state of Oregon.
2006-07: 4,659
2005-06: 4,990
2004-05: 4,866
2003-04: 4,704
Note that wrestling dropped last by more than 300 participants last after steady increases in the previous years. But look at the figures for boys basketball:
2006-07 : 7,109
2005-06: 7,538
2004-05: 7,388
2003-04: 7,302
Notice that boys basketball participation declined by 400 last year. Does that make basketball a "dying" sport?
Now let's look at the national trends for boys wrestling: Wrestling did indeed suffer a 19-year decline from its height of participation in 1975-76 of 355,160. It reached its low of 216,453 in 1994-95--a loss of slightly less than 135,000 participants. So, if Mr. Kilkenny looks at these numbers only, yes, at one point wrestling was on the decline.
However, from its low point in the mid 1990s, boys high school wrestling has increased to 243,000 ten years later in 2004-05--the last year for which nationwide figures are available.
So, is wrestling dying?
If Mr. Kilkennny chooses to focus on net loss from its height at the three-quarters mark of the twentieth century, I suppose he can make a case. But from my perspective, a gain of almost 30,000 participants over the last ten years indicates a sport on the rebound.
Buck: All of these statements seem suspect to me and I hope that the decision was made based on them because they seem to be easily refuted. If they are true then we need to know.
Dave: The numbers have been massaged to make the case for what Mr. Kilkenny and, I suspect, Ms. Bumgartner wanted to do: get rid of a sport they don't understand, look down upon, and consider "unfashionable."
The nation's college wrestling coaches didn't make themselves particularly popular with athletic administrators when they filed a lawsuit against the NCAA a few years ago, alleging a misinterpretation of Title IX and discrimination against their sport. Their litigation did not succeed. Now it's payback time.
Also, as [former Oregon assistant] Bill Bragg once said to me, wrestling has a blue-collar image that makes it somewhat unpopular with the rising middle class, which doesn't want its children to sniff armpits.
And, quite frankly, the wrestling establishment is to blame for failing to promote its sport properly. As Hank Hosfield, a UO wrestling alumnus who came after you observed, wrestlers never realized that their love for the sport itself wouldn't sell itself with the general public. The public concentrates on individuals and teams.
Ask a member of the general public to name a wrestler, and he'll probably say Hulk Hogan. The few who can name a college wrestler probably name Dan Gable. Why? Dan cut through the fog of a sport the public doesn't understand and made people remember who he was. There were other potential Dan Gables out there, but we never promoted them properly.
If we win this struggle, we can't let our guard down. They'll try to cut wrestling time and time again, as they tried unsuccessfully three times when Ron Finley was coach. We in the wrestling community have to do a better job of projecting and defending our sport.