Tom Gralish/Philadelphia Inquirer
Temple University killed seven of its 24 intercollegiate sports programs this month, including rowing, whose crews lacked a proper facility for their boats.
If you've ever taken a train out of Philadelphia, you may have seen Boathouse Row, a strip of 15 Victorian boathouses on the banks of the Schuylkill that look made of gingerbread. Those buildings and that river have been the center of rowing in the United States for generations.
Mitchell Leff/Getty Images
Coach Matt Ruhle's football team at Temple is 2-10.
Philly is a rowing town, as much today as it was back in the 1800s, when a dam calmed the Schuylkill's waters, making it perfect for the sport and its delicate, tippy boats. Evidence of the sport's long connection with the city includes the paintings of the American artist Thomas Eakins, who featured rowers on the Schuylkill in some of his most widely known work from the late 19th century.
Temple University is severing ties with that rich tradition. In a decision announced this month, less than 72 hours before final exams, university officials decided to cut the men's and women's crews and five other varsity sports, a move that affects more than 200 student-athletes. The savings for the university will be $3 million to $3.5 million a year, a small slice of the university's $44 million athletics budget.
Gone, starting July 1, will be the men's gymnastics team, which has the highest grade point average of all teams on campus and the 2013 senior male athlete of the year. The program started in 1926. Gone also will be baseball and men's track and field (indoor and outdoor), along with women's softball.
Men's crew has had the same coach for 34 years, Gavin White, and has produced more than its share of Olympians. White is a former Olympic coach and has led his varsity eight-man boat to 20 victories, including 13 straight, at Philadelphia's Dad Vail Regatta, the United States' biggest intercollegiate rowing competition.
But the university had to make some tough decisions, President Neil D. Theobald told me last week, to satisfy the requirements of Title IX, the federal law that mandates gender equity in federally funded institutions. The balance of athletic participation and scholarships needed to be skewed more toward women, he said, so the university was forced to make the adjustments.
Theobald said the university's 2-10 football team and its ambitions to succeed in the American Athletic Conference, which requires expensive travel to places like Dallas and Cincinnati, had nothing to do with the cuts.
"I can say unequivocally, that I never considered football in this decision," he told me.
Whatever his reason, the rampant cut of nonrevenue sports at universities has become a disturbing trend. Sports like rowing — a true amateur sport, with few, if any, chances for money or celebrity — are left to suffer.
Last year, the University of Maryland cut seven varsity sports. In 2006, Rutgers chopped six. The week that Temple announced its cuts, Robert Morris, a private university near Pittsburgh, announced that seven varsity teams were on their way out.
Obviously, none of the sports on the block were football or basketball. It's those sports without a return on investment, like rowing or men's gymnastics, that have proved expendable.
What kind of a business case can you make for a sport like rowing, which is not even one conducive to spectators (because the course is 2,000 meters long), much less one that makes no money for the university? Well, a weak one, if any. But that's the whole point of amateurism, the quality that is supposed to fuel college sports in the first place.
Temple's rowers are a perfect example of what college athletes are supposed to be: unbreakable, unspoiled and unfazed by adverse conditions. While the indoor practice facility for Temple's football team was renovated just last year for $10 million, the crews operated out of a canvas tent that doesn't have heat or running water. The rowers use public portable toilets. Theobald told me that the university cut men's and women's crew because the facilities were so poor and the student-athletes deserved better.
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