Skiers hoping for another run
“This has left a bad taste in my mouth,” she said.
There were all of these athletes who came despite it being finals week. The women’s team has a cumulative grade-point average of 3.92 and was cited as the top performing program at the recent UNM athletics banquet. The men are at 3.60.
There were two of the 15 who, when asked if they would return to UNM even if they can’t ski, definitively raised their hands. A third went halfway.
UNM says it has assisted athletes who wish to continue NCAA skiing elsewhere. But Patrick Brachner, a junior from Austria, said that’s not nearly as easy as switching schools in football or basketball. Since there are only some 35 schools that sponsor skiing, most have tight budgets, and the supply of talented athletes — in many cases with Olympian talent — exceeds the demand for roster spots.
Barounos also said the April 13 announcement of the program’s elimination didn’t provide enough notice to beat transfer deadlines at most schools anyway. As a result, “student-athletes who generally have trained for over 15 years are facing the end of their ski careers.”
Tiger Shaw, President and CEO of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association and a former Olympian, wrote to the Journal: “What is ironic about the recent UNM decision is that ski racing in America is currently enjoying a renaissance. We are seeing the greatest integration of college programs into our national team pipelines ever, and the rapidly growing programs showcased by a host of superstars in alpine and cross country ski racing is increasing as well. It is … a time to expand, not retract.”
Deb Armstrong, a 1984 slalom gold medalist and former UNM coach, made a webcast appearance to echo those sentiments and voice her support for the program’s “national championship caliber people.
“And these people are Lobos.” The outstanding way in which the ski program has represented UNM hasn’t been a point of dispute. Krebs said it is populated with “tremendous student-athletes” when he announced the decision to end it to save $600,000 a year in scholarships, travel and operations.
John Garcia, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association and a board member of Ski New Mexico, believes the savings is closer to the $285,000 that the team claims on its mission website, saveunmskiteam. com. Scholarship money paid out of athletics still goes to the university’s main campus, after all.
“It’s two coaches with salaries and benefits, two vans and no overhead,” said Garcia. He said talks are ongoing with UNM administrators — he would not specify whom — to involve some form of public-private partnership that could save the program.
“But we don’t know what that looks like yet,” he said.
When the ski team members met with Krebs on April 13 to hear the bad news, Krebs cited a $15 million needed to serve as an endowment to keep skiing going.
“We’ve been told that if we can come up with our own funds, we can stay,” said Brachner. But he is skeptical about how that could work when the money would necessarily be funneled through UNM athletics anyway.
“It’s kind of like clipping a bird’s wings and saying, ‘fly.’”