Last week’s announcement by Dartmouth College that they would be cutting their men’s and women’s swimming & diving programs, along with their golf teams and men’s lightweight rowing team, isn’t the first time that the school has tried to drop its aquatics team.
In 2002, Dartmouth announced the elimination of its swimming & diving teams as well. That was a simpler and smaller time in college athletics, though, where the program’s budget was just $212,000. These days, fundraising thrice that amount in some cases can’t even get a conversation with an athletics director.
One of the first attempts to fundraise to save the program came from sophomore swimmer Jenny Kunkel and her boyfriend at the time Jon Lenihan, who attended Xavier. The pair got the idea to list the item for sale on EBay, when the concept of the online-auction site was still relatively novel and becoming a cultural touchstone.
As was covered by ESPN’s Darren Rovell at the time, the auction did get some traction.
“In the first night, we got 4,000 hits,” said Kunkel.
The cut at the time was made to satisfy about 80% of a mandated ‘trimming’ of the school’s athletics budget.
“They just made this drastic cut,” Kunkel said. “They didn’t even talk about creative ways to possibly finance this.”
The story was later picked up by the New York Times, which reported that a user, Mayday 11111, made a bid for $212,099.99, but later retracted it. That was one of at least 6 bids made for the listing.
The Times interviewed a spokesperson for EBay, who said that while actual sports teams, including 2 minor league baseball teams, had been legitimately sold on the platform, that they ultimately removed it because the swimmers didn’t actually have the authority to sell the team.
But the stunt did bring a lot of attention to the program.
Supporters of the program would eventually launch the John C. Glover fund, which was named after former Dartmouth All-American swimmer John C. Glover, who graduated in 1955. He died while training for the Olympics at Yale in 1956.
In total, $2 million were raised for that fund, which set up an endowment designed to fund the program for the next 10 years. That fund was exhausted in 2013, the school has confirmed to SwimSwam.
While Dartmouth swimmers have begun planning ways to revive their program, and we expect to feature them on the SwimSwam Podcast this week to discuss those efforts, the school seems to have declared that it won’t accept any effort to fundraise for the programs.
The school says that, even if they were funded, that they would decline to continue the sports because they didn’t believe that the sports would have a chance to excel without support from admissions in boosting student-athletes’ spot in line to get into Dartmouth.
Along with announcing the program cuts, the school wrote heavily in their press release about the need to free up spots in incoming classes to recruit non-athletes.
From the school’s FAQs:
Do you expect online petitions demanding reinstatement of the impacted sports?
In today’s world, it would be surprising if there were no online petitions demanding reinstatement of the affected sports. However, while we will fully appreciate the passion and sentiment such efforts would represent, many thousands of signatures, organized email campaigns, and social media posts will not change the reality of the current circumstances, nor will they reveal anything we don’t already know—that we’ve made decisions that were unexpected, and that will impact the affected student-athletes’ Dartmouth experiences. We are already aware of those unfortunate consequences. As difficult as the decisions were, we made them knowing they are in the best interest of Dartmouth and the long term success of athletics.
Can alumni and others raise funds to save the impacted sports?
In a community as passionate and supportive as Dartmouth, we anticipate that some alumni, parents, and others will advocate fundraising campaigns to save these teams. Some may make very generous pledges in support of such efforts. However, even if financial resources were plentiful, these sports would exist without any admissions support opportunities, making the competitive playing field extremely lopsided. This would result in such a frustrating and unsatisfactory experience that it would be implausible to expect Division I caliber athletes to choose Dartmouth over other options, or to attract and retain qualified coaches to lead the programs in such a scenario.
This leaves swimming & diving, again, in the school’s bullseye, rehaunting old nightmares from years past. The school says that it could find no compelling reason to protect the program from double jeopardy.
Again, from the school’s FAQs:
Why choose swimming and diving again after doing it less than 20 years ago?
We expect some will question our decision to eliminate swimming and diving in particular, in light of the fact that this same sport was eliminated in late 2002 and reinstated in early 2003. But when our recent analysis reached the same conclusion as 18 years ago, and we realized that our current swimmers and divers would be no more or less impacted than the student-athletes in any other sport chosen for elimination, it simply didn’t make sense to arbitrarily exempt swimming and diving from consideration.
The fight continues regardless, to save this college program, and others. With much bigger budgets in play, and much more money required to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, the mountain seems like a higher climb, especially as that mountain grows with the mounting financial impacts of the coronavirus.
But, it does happen, programs are saved from extinction, if rarely. Sometimes it just takes a little ingenuity to light a fire.
Why cut swimming? It’s a lifelong sport. I would think field hockey (I played field hockey in high school and swam in college) and lacrosse might be better candidates. Personally I also can’t see how any institution of higher learning can promote football.
The admissions boost is baloney when it comes to Dartmouth swimming. I swam for the program in the early 90s and the coach had the ability to maybe influence 2-3 admissions decisions. I personally got in early with no boost and even those who got a boost still had to be pretty close to the mark for admissions. Further undermining this argument is that swimming had one of the highest team GPAs of any sport on campus.
I’m not sure why the athletic department up there is so determined to get rid of a sport whose total budget is coach, bus rides for away meets, and some suits and caps. Maybe it’s all the settlements the school has had to… Read more »
How in the ever loving world can they utter the sentence “even if funds were plentiful”, while sitting on a $5.7 billion dollar endowment???
Many of you don’t get what is going on here by both Stanford and Dartmouth.. With BLM, they are both under pressure to “diversify” without damaging the schools academic standing in guide books regarding SAT/ACT avg. Colleges have “slots” for athletes. Let’s say for Dartmouth if you are a swimmer with 1420 on your SAT and you swim a sub 21 in the 50 free as a high school junior you get in. You take an athletic slot. If you Are an Asian or White NARP ( non athletic regular person) you are not getting in. So what does Dartmouth and Stanford do.. They cut the lilly white country club type sports, dropping one “type” of student, and replace that… Read more »
This is very sad.
Hate to be cynical, but in today’s world, your theory could be true.
Who are you kidding? You love being cynical.
Track and Field got reinstated at Brown within a few weeks of being cut after African American track alums talked to administration about the diversity benefits the team brought to the school.
There could be some merit to this perspective. I agree that diversity is important for a university, and that swimming has a long way to go in terms of racial diversity. At the same time, Dartmouth continues to sponsor varsity Sailing, Lacrosse, Squash, and Equestrian. Unlike these sports, swimming has a broad base of opportunity for participation at the youth and high school level nationwide.
This is pure conjecture. Understand that this is pushing the dangerous narrative that diverse students don’t have the types of grades necessary to get into Dartmouth on their own. I highly doubt that these schools are dropping teams on the sole basis of adding spots to less qualified students. Let me ask…if not for coronavirus do you believe that these teams will have been cut this summer?
There are theories around that they’re only cutting predominantly white sports. While Dartmouth cut their swimming team, they kept their sailing team….a team that isn’t known to be incredibly diverse.
While one can argue that the levels of diversity of the teams are part of what lead the schools to decide… Read more »
As is usual, it’s probably a number of factors.
Are there other sports at Dartmouth without very diverse rosters? For sure. But, sailing, as you bring up, was a rather successful program. The swimming program was struggling competitively, which even in this day, even though it’s going to hurt some programs to read this, matters.
The Harvard student body is 49% white (when Hispanic/Latino are counted as not white), which means the school is far less-white than the US makeup as a whole. The faculty is the least-diverse in the Ivy League, according to one study, including 88.8% white.
The president seemed to indicate that flexibility was the key. Just the ability to admit more students without having to worry… Read more »
The Men’s lacrosse team has a lower gpa less diversity and a losing record. Again we must question the basis of the athletic directors decision. Let’s not confuse the administration with facts.
Dartmouth swim and dive athletes had higher admissions grades than the average Dartmouth student. Swim and dive class of 24 recruits average SAT 1502 and entire class 1501; ACT swim and dive 33.40 and entire class 33. What is President Hanlon taking about? He doesn’t know his own student body or the student athletes.
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Ya can’t squeeze money from potato heads like the AD and President of dis place.
One thing I’ve never quite understood, is: why can’t a school “wind down” a team over 4 years, rather than cutting it effective immediately? Particularly if alumni funded some of the costs of those years.
Sure, it creates big problems for the team’s competitiveness, but it’s not like they’re *more* competitive if the team doesn’t exist. Something like this would relieve the most soul-crushing aspect of program cuts, which is student-athletes whose lives are upended with no warning.
I certainly don’t want programs to be cut, but if it has to happen, it would be much better to let current student-athletes finish out their careers.
I get what you are saying but not replacing graduations would lead to a very small team the last two years.
#Save_dartmouthswimdive
The administration is not interested in money but mentioned the budget cut as a reason for its decision. The athlete director is not a supporter of the program. Perhaps he has a preference for the men’s lacrosse team who also has a track record of losing and a lower gpa than the swim team. Interesting analysis seems to have been conducted by this very “smart” administrator. Guessing boys with sticks is better than women in the pool. Dartmouth will be the only Ivy League school without a swim team and the administration insulted the sport and team in the process of its communication.
Perhaps a swim race solves the dispute. Any women on the team versus the… Read more »