East Carolina cut its swim and dive program. Alumni are fighting back against the decision
When Ryan Brennan and his East Carolina swim and dive teammates joined a Zoom call on the morning of May 21, they were expecting an “athletic compliance meeting.”
They’d been notified of the meeting May 18, the same day the school confirmed its intent to cut one or more athletic programs in a special board meeting.
All of the school’s sports teams had a meeting, but Brennan said he and most of his teammates were still nervous.
Within five minutes of ECU athletic director Jon Gilbert joining the call, 68 athletes faced a harsh reality. East Carolina had cut men’s and women’s swimming and diving, as well as men’s and women’s tennis.
“I immediately just lost it and broke down and started crying,” Brennan said. “It was really emotional for all of us.”
Alums of the program were also emotional. Though there had been some whispers on swimming message boards and rumors floating among local swim coaches, for the most part people were caught off guard.
“As a non-revenue sport, it’s an ongoing theme that you kind of always feel if there’s financial trouble, you’re going to be the next ones [to go],” Lindsay Takkunen, an ECU alum, said.
Citing an already unstable athletic department budget pre-COVID-19, Gilbert said factors that went into the decision included “financial commitments (scholarships, operating costs)” and “the facilities currently being used and the cost to maintain and improve those.”
“No athletic director wants to eliminate sports programs,” Gilbert told the News and Observer. “However, based on the large deficit and the reduction of future revenue, ECU could no longer support 20 programs.”
That didn’t take away the shock, sadness, disappointment and anger.
“It still just doesn’t feel real,” Kate Moore, another alum, said.
Revenue could be lost
East Carolina had 11.5 scholarships apiece for the men and women’s swimming and diving programs in the 2018-19 school year. In all, the university awarded $773,152 in swimming and diving scholarships that year among the 25 male and 23 female swimmers.
The Save ECU Swim and Dive campaign notes that a “significant amount” of money used for scholarships comes from the East Carolina University Educational Foundation, aka the Pirate Club. But that argument is murky. The Pirate Club paid more than 60 percent of $8.8 million in 2018-19 scholarship costs for all programs through contributions to the general athletic scholarship fund. That is divided more or less evenly among sports. Within that, there are $550,000 worth of endowments earmarked for specific sports. The swimming endowment distribution for 2019 was less than $15,000. By cutting the programs, the athletic department will realize savings on almost all the swimming scholarship money.
Still, while it might trim costs for the athletic department, Moore and Takkunen say cutting the programs will likely have a negative financial impact on East Carolina as a whole — an analysis backed by an independent assessment done by sports economist Andy Schwarz and shared with the N&O.
The explanation is complicated but basically says that a university operates most efficiently and profitably when it is at full capacity — when its dorm rooms and classrooms are full. So losing students — even ones who are on partial or full scholarships — loses the university money.
“In my opinion, the math does not really work,” Brent St. Pierre, an alum and Raleigh Swim Association coach, said. “I don’t think they really save that much.”
And losing students is likely, as many of the swimmers and divers feel they now have no choice but to leave. Rachel Strickland, for example, is considering transferring.
The Clayton native and former Marlins of Raleigh swimmer describes herself as a homebody. She chose East Carolina not just because of the swimming scholarship she was offered but because it’s close to home.
“I’m very supportive of the efforts to try to save ECU swim and dive, but I also know that I’m not ready to stop swimming yet, so I am going to move forward in my swimming career and probably transfer somewhere else,” Strickland said.
Many programs have already filled their rosters, so Strickland said she no longer has the luxury of just looking at schools in North Carolina. She has to keep her options open.
Paul Silver, one of the head coaches of Marlins of Raleigh, spoke with Strickland shortly after the program cuts were announced.
“She chose East Carolina for a reason, because it fit what she wanted,” Silver said. “She wanted a school that was close by, that had the academic things that she wanted as well the swimming. So she’s just devastated.”
Strickland isn’t the only one. Brennan has entered the transfer portal. Takkunen said all of the swimmers are considering transferring, at least to some extent. Alumni have been trying to help find these swimmers new homes by reaching out to coaches with other programs.
“Obviously, we’re still so hopeful that we can save the program but at the same time, these kids, it’s too late in the game for them to just sit around and wait as well,” Moore said.
East Carolina’s program cuts don’t just affect its now-former swimmers, though. St. Pierre says it affects swimmers all around the state.
“[It] just lessens the number of opportunities our kids have to swim in this state, which means more of them are going to end up moving out of state,” he said.
Facility debate
East Carolina’s Minges Natatorium was built in 1968, and its most recent renovations happened in 2013-14, when an overhaul of the water filtration system and other improvements were completed. According to the Minges Natatorium page on the ECU athletics website, those renovations made Minges “one of the nicest collegiate aquatic facilities in the state.”
However, in a press conference on May 21, interim chancellor Dr. Ron Mitchelson expressed the opposite.
“From an NCAA competitive athletics perspective, it’s an inadequate facility and it’s not a priority for investment,” he said.
Stephanie Coleman, associate vice chancellor of budget and athletic fiscal affairs, told the N&O that Minges costs the university approximately $92,000 per year to operate and maintain. In 2014, the school completed a feasibility study looking at the facility’s locker rooms, office space and ADA compliance. A basic upgrade would cost ECU upwards of $1 million.
“We kept going back to swimming and tennis largely based on the state of their athletic facilities,” Gilbert said. “I’m not sure we’ve had a major renovation to the aquatics center for a long time and the state of the locker room and offices are probably not up to Division I standards.”
Greg Earhart, the executive director of the College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association of America, countered those claims in a letter addressed to Moore.
“Minges Natatorium exceeds all NCAA recommendations related to facilities,” Earhart said. “Minges likewise adheres to USA Swimming minimum recommendations for competition.”
Earhart also pointed out the success ECU’s swim and dive teams have had at Minges.
“It is an older facility, but it’s extremely well kept,” Moore said. “You know, we’ve had a lot of very, very fast swims in that pool when we’ve had our dual meets there.”
Moore even went so far as to say Minges is a “perfect pool for a collegiate dual meet.”
The Pirates hosted three dual meets at Minges in the 2019-20 season, with the men’s and women’s teams each winning two. Both teams finished with winning records, and the men’s team won its fourth American Athletic Conference title in six years.
“It doesn’t seem to deter athletes from wanting to come here,” Brennan said. “We still win in Minges.”
The Pirates aren’t the only ones to use Minges Natatorium.
East Carolina Aquatics, the youth swim club that 2012 Olympic gold medalist and Charlotte native Lauren Perdue belonged to, uses the facility for practices and meets as well.
“Our pool is by far one of — if not the best — pool east of 95,” Moore said. “It definitely serves a very large community.”
Minges, which is institutionally owned, will remain open in the short-term, as Mitchelson said the school still needs the pool for academic purposes.
Already seeing success
Not ready to let go of a program that’s impacted them and the local community, ECU alums and former coaches have started the Save ECU Swim and Dive campaign.
The group of around 10, including longtime former coach Rick Kobe, has been collecting pledged donations and petition signatures. Per a press release by the campaign on June 8, more than $500,000 has been raised in pledges.
Now, the group is calling for a meeting with ECU administrators.
“We just want to talk,” Brennan said. “We want a seat at the table. There was no conversation given to us and that’s what we feel like we deserve given tradition and history of the program.”
The campaign has enlisted the help of William Rinehart, who served as campaign manager for University of North Carolina Wilmington’s 2013 campaign to save five sports under consideration of being cut. Ultimately, then-Chancellor Gary Miller decided to not cut any of the programs, which included men’s and women’s swimming and diving, men’s indoor track and cross country and softball.
That is the key difference between the situations at UNCW and East Carolina: Gilbert and Mitchelson already ruled on the cuts, and don’t seem to want to negotiate.
Gilbert said he had communicated with “numerous individuals, past and present, associated with the swimming program over the past month.” He also noted that Mitchelson informed the program’s coaches that the decision would not be reversed.
In the May 21 press conference, Gilbert talked about the difficulty of making these types of decisions.
“The decision to eliminate four sports programs today goes against everything that I believe in and was taught in intercollegiate athletics,” he said. “This is not something that I take lightly.”
The financial impacts of COVID-19 are being felt by athletic departments at other universities and colleges, too. According to Sports Illustrated, 30 programs at the Division I level have been cut over the past eight weeks. That number is much higher when all levels of collegiate athletics are included.
Appalachian State cut its men’s soccer, tennis and indoor track and field programs. Akron University cut men’s golf, men’s cross country and women’s tennis. Brown University cut 11 of its 38 programs, and athletes are now pursuing legal action.
University of Alabama-Huntsville dropped its men’s hockey team from an NCAA Division-I program to a club sport. The school also cut its men’s and women’s tennis teams. However, after the hockey program raised over $500,000 in donations, athletic director Cade Smith said the program would continue competing at the DI level for 2020-21.
Current East Carolina swimmers are helping contribute by writing to the Board of Trustees and sharing video testimonials on the campaign’s social media. Strickland said that her letter emphasized how thankful she was for the program, and how much like a family it had become to her.
Moore said the next step in the campaign is trying to get administrators on the phone. There’s also a plan to take out TV and digital ads.
“We’ve got hundreds of swimming and dive alumni who have come on board and said, ‘We can’t lose this,’” Takkunen said. “We can’t lose this legacy team. We can’t leave those kids out in the dark with nowhere to go. We’ve got to fight for them.
“As swimmers, as Pirates, that’s what we do. We keep fighting. We figure out our goal, we put our head down, and we work to achieve it. That’s what we did as athletes. That’s what we’re doing as alumni now to try and save it and we’re looking for a hero to come along and say, you know, let me help you with this.”
You can follow the Save ECU Swim & Dive Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or find them at saveecuswimdive.org.
This story was originally published June 26, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "East Carolina cut its swim and dive program. Alumni are fighting back against the decision."