Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
VANISHING WOLVES
Budget woes forces Cheyney to drop football
It’s been the subject of speculation and rumor for years, but it’s now official: Cheyney University is dropping football due to worsening financial constraints.
Head coach Chris Roulhac confirmed that during a Wednesday evening on campus meeting with Cheyney President Aaron Walton, the coaching staff and players were notified of the decision.
“We were invited to a meeting with the president on Wednesday and told that due to budgetary restraints, the football program was being discontinued,” said Roulhac, who returned for his second stint as head coach at CU in 2015.
“It’s been a very sad last 24 hours, but there is really nothing we can do about it. You hear rumors, but we always held out hope that the program could be saved.”
The Pennsylvania Athletic Association sent out a release on Thursday about the move. Calls to the Walton’s office and to Cheyney’s interim Athletic Director Sue Kilian on Thursday, however, were not returned. And nothing about the move was mentioned on the school’s athletic website as of Thursday evening.
“(Walton) told us that he has to make budget cuts in order to keep the school open,” Roulhac re-
ported. “And because football is the most expensive sport to fund, he had decided to drop the sport.
“He also said that no other sports would be affected at this time, but he left open the possibility that the situation could be reassessed at a later date.”
Here is the PSAC full release: “The Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference is aware of Cheyney University’s announcement of dropping football from its sports sponsorship menu.
“We have been in contact with Cheyney University President Aaron Walton as he and his staff deliberated potential actions. The communications between the conference and President Walton have been objective and forthright on both sides.
“These are very difficult times financially for many institutions of higher education in the country and the commonwealth. Cheyney’s decision is a result of that.
“The conference office will work with its member institutions to find potential opponents in the 10 now open dates in mandated league schedules.”
One of the oldest historically black universities in the country, Cheyney began playing football in 1914, but winning seasons have been very rare. The football team’s alltime record is 183-601-27.
The Wolves began participating at the NCAA level in 1954, and over the ensuing 63 seasons the overall record was 91-501-5. That’s a winning percentage of .157, which is the worst among all 242 Division II programs nationwide.
“Everything at Cheyney is a struggle,” said Roulhac, who has been a coach at CU for 13 of the last 27 seasons.
The program has experienced just five winning seasons since 1972, and none since 1979, which was the only year the Wolves captured the PSAC East crown. Since 1990, CU has amassed 14 winless seasons.
In the last decade, Cheyney was 5-103, including just one win in its last 73 conference games, which came back in 2010.
“Well, it was a labor of love,” acknowledged Roulhac, who was named the PSAC Coach of the Year in 1993 despite a 3-8 record.
Sharp cuts in state aid and higher costs have contributed to the financial woes, but perhaps even more significantly, the university has been increasingly saddled with an enrollment crisis. The number of full-time students at Cheyney has been steadily dropping for the last nine years. It was 1,471 in 200809, and is now reportedly at 709 undergraduates.
It is believed that the school resisted dropping football previously because it helped with enrollment.
“We have about 150 students in the football program, which includes close to 100 players and the rest were going to class and trying to get academically eligible,” Roulhac pointed out. “That is a big chunk of the student body, but I guess it just wasn’t enough. I mean that’s $20,000 per year per student in tuition.”
Calls to PSAC Commissioner Steve Murray were not returned, but he did address the gloomy financial situation at CU in 2015 in the aftermath of a scathing 54-page report from Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale. It warned that the school’s financial picture is “bleak and projected to worsen” without drastic action, and ominously questioned the school’s ability to continue.
“Would the potential loss of enrollment cause a bigger financial dip than the costs of putting the team on the field?” Murray asked at the time. “There is not a lot of scholarship money there, so that’s 60-80 student-athletes that may not want to attend if they don’t offer the sport. Not to mention the inequities that would create between the number of male and female athletes.
“You would think that taking the resources from football and spreading them out to the others would help, but would the potential loss of 6080 kids be so significant you couldn’t recuperate the income lost from tuition?
“One thing we do know is that sports does drive and help enrollment.”
Roulhac said that he was told by Walton that the university spends about $750,000 per season on the football program.
“But that is everything, including officials, scholarships, coach’s salaries, equipment, travel expenses,” he said. “Now I was surprised to hear it was that much.”
Ironically, Roulhac admitted that the program actually received more financial support in the last few seasons than it did when he first coached at Cheyney in 199294.
“We actually had more support during my second time around that the first,” he said. “We used to have zero scholarship equivalencies, and recently we were at about four (equivalencies).
“But keep in mind we were playing in what I think it’s the toughest Division II league in the nation. This fall we played four teams from the PSAC that made the playoffs this fall.”
Roulhac and his staff will remain on salary until June, and he says the primary goal is to make sure his players continue with their education, and help the ones who intend to transfer in order to continue playing football.
“We started to see how things were going at Cheyney, and it was not just in athletics but overall,” said West Chester head coach Bill Zwaan. “So we knew there was a chance for this to happen.
“It’s not a surprise, but it’s disappointing because I always think first and foremost about the kids.”