The William & Mary swimming & diving team are taking an all-fronts approach in their effort to save their program after the school announced that it would discontinue the sport earlier this month.
Just 4 days after launching their website and pledge drive, the school has already received $850,507 in pledges from 484 donors.
That already makes them one of the most successful fundraising efforts among cut programs this offseason; so far, none of those efforts have successfully saved a team.
As part of their continued efforts to bring publicity to their efforts, one rising junior on the William & Mary swim team, Missy Cundiff, has produced a music video about the program and its cutting.
The video, which has shades of a ‘diss track,’ doesn’t just talk about the successes of the team. It actually distills the alumni fundraising group’s argument into a rhyming highlight of the case being made to save the program. Cundiff, under the name “Lil’ Mizzy,” directly addresses the school’s athletics director Samantha Huge.
Huge has been the target of criticism for alumni over the amount of money being invested into the school’s football and basketball programs, at the expense of swimming & diving and other programs.
One alumni, not directly affiliated with the fundraising group, told SwimSwam this week that he believes that the school’s culture doesn’t align with Huge’s aspirations, and that her goals might be more aligned with advancing her career than advancing the school’s athletics program holistically.
SwimSwam has made several FOIA requests from William & Mary for more financial information about the program and its endowment. The school has acknowledged the request but has not yet provided any of that information.
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Awesome video. I really hope the program is saved!
Can someone link to a primer on the financials on running a college program. It would seem as though coaches and pool maintenance would be relatively small expenses. Are scholarships the real issue?
Scholarships (which William & Mary don’t have) are an issue. Coaches salaries scale up depending on the size of the program. Travel is a huge expense – swim teams are big.
Pool maintenance likewise scales based on the size and scale of a pool. Some teams pay a lot of money for pool rent. Others, like W&M, don’t.
That’s the crux of their argument: their program was CHEAP to run. It cost the athletics department about $180,000 a year to fund TWO swim teams.
Out-of-state tuition at W&M is about $46,000… so essentially the tuition of 4 students alone could fund the program each year. With over 8,500 students it baffles me that W&M athletics isn’t able to allocate these funds. This is a shame.
If the W&M swimmers’ tuition is funding the swim team, then who is funding the W&M swimmers’ education?
Each William & Mary student (athlete or not) currently contributes $2,000 toward athletics every year. That’s…a lot. I might not be happy about that if I were a student.
But here’s the thing: I don’t know that cutting swimming really solves that problem. The amount of that $2,000 that went toward swimming was about $20. And I think that’s ultimately the alumni group’s point: it just really wasn’t a very expensive program.
Unless you account for the opportunity cost of reallocating the team’s endowment to fund other projects.
This is Samantha Huge just trying to divert funds to the school’s football and basketball program. Just to put an exclamation how bad our football program is right now, two years ago we lost to JMU by 52-0. This is an obvious move to just buff up her resume and move to a bigger school as an AD.
GOOD! Get her out…Fire Huge!! The student athletes hate her, the Coaches hate her and alumni aren’t impressed! The Prez and AD both need to go and let the TRIBE fly!
W & M will survive without an amateur swim program because enough ppl will want the tradition & prestige it offers.
The tradition & prestige will be gone in 2 decades if a small liberal arts school like William & Mary makes an attempt to become a football/basketball powerhouse. A switch like this in athletics will destroy the strong academics at the College… even if the switch does not succeed.
If you get rid of underdog Olympic sports at a school, athletes coming in are no longer coming to college to “play school” anymore. Say goodbye to a high GPA athletic department!
Yeah, but the Board of Visitors loves her and the president — they hired them, and you can bet they approved the forced retirement of the long-time football coach and the basketball coach. You don’t think the BOV brought those two in as change agents? Think again. If you have a gripe, take it up with the BOV. They’re the puppet masters.
This athletics director has to go! She is stealing endowments to fund basketball renovations. I hope the swimmers are able to contact the student government about the student fees that go to athletics. I hope they can contact large donors for the basketball project and voice their concerns. If they are going to be successful, they are going to need to get rid of Samantha Huge as AD. They need work around her.
Incredible! Fight on Tribe Swim