URI athletics cuts field hockey, men's tennis, men's swimming

By: Matt Pavao

Posted: 4/15/08

04/15/08 - The University of Rhode Island athletic department announced its plans yesterday to cut the field hockey and men's tennis and swimming teams due to budget cuts within the department. Additionally, the women's lacrosse team will not become a varsity program as originally planned when the gymnastics program was cut in February.

The elimination of the three programs comes after last week's announcement of an $840,000 budget cut of the athletic department for the 2009 fiscal year. The department's cut was part of $12 million in budget cuts to URI.

Athletic Director Thorr Bjorn made the decision to cut the teams after going through nearly 20 different scenarios. The elimination of the three programs will make up half of the $840,000 budget cut. Bjorn said the remainder will come from early retirements, possible layoffs and increased revenue projections.

"There is no good scenario or best scenario," Bjorn said. "We were trying to find the best of a bad situation. This made the most sense in terms of accomplishing all objectives."

Bjorn would have preferred avoiding the elimination of any programs but found that that ultimately wasn't possible.

"Once we found out that we had to make a dramatic cut I felt that the best way to address that was to not cut horizontally but vertically because it's such a large number," Bjorn said. "As we went through the process I felt that ... if it was a horizontal cut then every one of our programs would struggle to compete."

Along with meeting budget requirements, the planned cuts also needed to meet Title IX gender requirements. Title IX expert Janet Judge reviewed the plan for the university and found that it met all requirements.

"After reviewing the proposals for all programs, I find them to be consistent with national and conference averages and consistent with Title's mandate that participation opportunities be meaningful opportunities," Judge said in a GoRhody press release.

Once the decision was made, Bjorn met with the coaches of the field hockey and men's tennis and swimming teams yesterday to inform them of the department's decision and then met with the student athletes in the afternoon. The decision did not come as a complete surprise after the need to make cuts was announced last week.

"We weren't trying to hide this, it's something that we've been talking about," Bjorn said. "[The coaches and athletes] were obviously disappointed but handled themselves with tremendous professionalism and class."

Despite the university's budget deficit it was still difficult for the athletes whose teams had just been cut.

Junior Jared Dorfman of the men's tennis team was very disappointed and believed that there was another direction that the university could have gone in.

"It's an unfortunate situation and a lot of people will be transferring and changing their lives because of it," Dorfman said. "Our whole team stands firmly behind the viewpoint that it wasn't the best decision."

The decision to hold off on moving women's lacrosse to varsity level comes only months after the original announcement to replace gymnastics with lacrosse, but the recent budget deficit eliminated the opportunity to add another varsity program.

When asked if he had known about the need to make additional cuts when he first announced that women's lacrosse would move up to varsity, Bjorn said no.

"Absolutely not," Bjorn said. "I would have never gone down this path. I found out about this four or five weeks ago and we've been working at it since then. I had no idea at the time."

With the cuts, the rest of the varsity programs at URI remain safe.

"I certainly hope that we won't have to do this again," Bjorn said. "We'll have to have a very aggressive fundraising campaign to increase external revenue."

When asked about the possibility of the return of cut programs in the future, Bjorn said that it was possible but not in the near term.

"It depends on the environment in a given year," Bjorn said. "I would never rule it out but that is always really difficult to say."

Sports Reporter Evan Crawley contributed to this report.