| STORM WARNINGS FOR HBCU ATHLETICS? |
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| Sat, Feb 4, 2012 > 9:07pm |
As American higher education restructures due to the economy, HBCUs and their athletic programs are facing the knife tooBy ALVIN HOLLINS JR. Rockstat7376@aol.com In a presidential election year where the old saying “its’ the economy, stupid” has come back into vogue on steroids, one area the nation’s financial belly roll has thrown for a loop is higher education. And among those institutions taking the severest of hits are the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), long the stepchild of American education from a financial standpoint. Those institutions have survived and thrived collectively for well over 100 years despite starting up from behind in the educational race after slavery ended in mid 1800s, and the achievements of their graduates and the schools themselves have become the stuff of legend. The intercollegiate athletic programs of many of these schools contributed greatly to that legacy of persistence against all odds to achieve greatness on every level of sports from the collegiate level to the lofty realms of Olympic and professional competition. Yet today, some of those storied athletic programs, diminished for decades by the talent drain of Black high school student athletes towards larger institutions, find themselves facing virtual extinction, as their host schools fight for their existence in the worsening economy. Last year, St. Paul’s College in North Carolina dropped its’ 100-plus year old athletic program, a program which groomed a young coach, Jake Gaither for his future Hall of Fame run at Florida A&M, because of severe financial difficulties. Last spring, a several Division One HBCUs were hit with sanctions by the NCAA for chronically poor academic performances by athletic teams, suffering loss of scholarships and practice time, with four teams being banished from postseason play for the 2011-12 school year. Those four face further penalties in the coming year, including a one-year loss of Division One accreditation for their entire athletic program if they don’t cut the mustard in the classroom this year. One of those four, Southern University at Baton Rouge, is also in the midst of institution-wide exigency, or a declared financial state of emergency, which has seen faculty and staff layoffs begin in January, with more expected in March as the school wrestles with a budget shortfall which exceeds $10 million this year alone, while having to provide a $2.5 million subsidy to its’ athletic program in the same breath. Just this week, the governing Board at South Carolina State and university president George Cooper revealed that the school was facing up to a $4 million budget shortfall, and that “opting out of the costly Division I athletic program” was among the possibilities being considered for dealing with the deficit, which has the school “on life support,” according to a Board member. The HBCUs that moved to Division One in the late 1970s and early 1980s, are squarely facing the folly of that move now, having had no long term strategic plans to raise additional revenues to fund the minimum of 14 sports, comply with gender equity under Title IX, along with the increasing academic and rules compliance edicts from the NCAA, requiring specialized staffing. So what must happen now is that perhaps for the first time, the academic and athletic divisions of these schools, must unite to determine what role athletics will play going forward in the continued life of the institution, to insure that as much as possible, HBCUs can continue to have the best of both worlds. Alvin Hollins Jr., is a former Assistant AD for Communications at Florida A&M University, and now works as a free lance writer and occasional consultant. |