ROWING • Move will place numbers more in line with enrollment

COVID-19 and knowing what that’s going to be over the next couple years,” Wicker said, “it certainly did not make sense to add a men’s sport.”

The next option: eliminating a program that some years has 70-plus participants and offers 20 scholarships, more than any team at SDSU except football.

Wicker informed head coach Bill Zack of the decision Friday morning, followed by a virtual meeting with the rowers explaining that their scholarships will be honored through graduation even though the team will cease operations as an intercollegiate sport in 202122. The public announcement was an open letter from Wicker to SDSU community.

“I was caught completely by surprise,” Zack said. “(The rowers) had been told in various team meetings that San Diego State University was not contemplating cutting sports. Because I was told that or I heard that in many meetings, I relayed that message to them anytime they asked me.

“They’re devastated, they’re crying, they’re upset. They’re dumbfounded how Title IX, which is known for the Yale women’s rowing team and their protests, is being used against them.”

It is the first sport cut by SDSU since the 2001 elimination of men’s volleyball, which won the school’s only Division I national championship in 1973.

“This is the hardest decision I’ll make as an athletic director,” Wicker told the Union-Tribune. “You’re impacting the young women on this rowing team, the alumni of the rowing team, the coaches, their families. My goal, my job, is to bring in young men and young women, and with the staff of the athletic department help them succeed.

“And I’m obviously not helping anyone succeed, at least from this standpoint. So yeah, it’s really hard. But as we look at what’s best for the overall department, that has to win out at the end of the day. … If we’re going to provide the appropriate opportunities for our studentathletes and support them in the ways that they need to be supported, then this is the best decision for that greater good.”

It comes eight years after SDSU added women’s lacrosse for the opposite reason, to achieve gender equity compliance by increasing participation and scholarship numbers among females. That added 40 athletes and 12 scholarships.

Now they’ll subtract about 65 athletes and 20 scholarships.

Two things changed. One is the California State University system no longer follows the stricter gender equity parameters of Cal NOW, a settlement from a 1993 court case that set specific guidelines for its athletic departments in participation, scholarships and expenses.

The other is SDSU’s percentage of undergraduate male enrollment, which has bucked national trends and increased from 41.3 percent in 2005 to 45 percent now.

There are three prongs for athletic compliance under Title IX, and the most common is offering participation opportunities that are “substantially proportionate” to the full-time undergraduate enrollment of males and females. The idea is that if 45 percent of your enrollment is male, then roughly 45 percent of your intercollegiate athletes should be, too.

Another twist: The NCAA allows schools to count “duplicated” athletes who play multiple sports, considering cross country, indoor track and outdoor track as three separate sports even though some people compete in all three.

Athletic departments are required by federal law to file annual reports on participation and finances, and in 2018-19 — the most recently available — SDSU had 221 men’s athletes across six sports and 383 women’s athletes across 13. That computes to 36.6 percent male, 63.4 percent female.

Fifty-seven of them were rowers. Subtracting them gets SDSU to 40 percent male.

The current roster, Zack said, has 49 rowers, but only about a dozen were in town and available to practice last week when the team was allowed back on the water at Mission Bay. He expects to have 44 for the spring season.

“Discontinuing the rowing program is going to allow us to get much closer to where we need to be,” Wicker said, “and then it will be working through some roster management opportunities — walk-ons and things like that — to get us the rest of the way.”

The opposite could happen in scholarships, though. In 2018-19, according to federal documents, SDSU evenly distributed athletic scholarship dollars between men and women at $4.6 million each. The 20 rowing scholarships amount to about $650,000, which would reduce the women to roughly 46 percent based on 2018-19 figures despite accounting for 55 percent of undergraduate enrollment.

The NCAA’s interpretation of Title IX allows some wiggle room with scholarships.

“Disparities in awarding financial assistance may be justified by legitimate, nondiscriminatory (sex-neutral) factors,” the Title IX page on the U.S. Department of Education’s website states. “For example, at some institutions the higher costs of tuition for out-ofstate residents may cause an uneven distribution between scholarship aid to men’s and women’s programs.”

Wicker said women’s rowing currently has a $1.25 million budget, but the department ultimately will realize only an $800,000 annual savings once the remaining athletes under scholarship transfer or graduate.

One reason is the NCAA payout to Div. I schools each spring is based on the number of sports sponsored and scholarships offered, and Wicker expects about $150,000 less without women’s rowing.

It becomes, according to one count, the 96th Div. I team cut or suspended during the pandemic but only the second in women’s rowing (Connecticut being the other).

That’s because rowing has become “women’s football” in Title IX compliance circles, a way for Div. I athletic departments with football teams (and their 85 scholarships) to balance the ledger. It’s relatively inexpensive and can accommodate large rosters, and there is no men’s equivalent since men’s rowing is not a sanctioned NCAA sport.

Some schools took it to the extreme, abusing an NCAA loophole that counts roster size on the first date of competition. They hold fall regattas and enter multiple boats filled with walk-ons who have little experience pulling an oar, then pare the roster considerably by the main season in the spring.

In 2014-15, Alabama reported 128 women’s rowers. In 2011-12, Washington had 181. In 2012-13, Wisconsin had 208.

But women’s rowing at SDSU, which practices on Mission Bay in the early mornings, faced its own challenges.

“It’s a sport that has to go off campus and we’re transporting our students to practice on a daily basis,” Wicker said. “It’s a facility that’s off campus, and the ability to improve the rowing facility is challenging because we don’t own the property. There’s a lot of hoops and expense that we would really struggle to get those facilities to a place where we think it appropriately meets the needs of our student-athletes.”

There’s a history behind that.

SDSU leases boathouse space at the Mission Bay Aquatic Club on Santa Clara Point. San Diego’s other two Div. I programs, at USD and UCSD, are part of the Intercollegiate Rowing Consortium based out of the Coggeshall Rowing Center on nearby El Carmel Point.

A.W. Coggeshall came to San Diego in the early 1900s, had a successful plumbing supply company and quietly purchased land across the city. He was an avid rower and a driving force behind the Crew Classic, so invested that he regularly sold programs and parked cars at the annual event at Crown Point Shores.

He died in 1987 and left a substantial portion of his estate to the sport, including individual endowments to the programs at USD and UCSD. SDSU was left out, purportedly because of differences he had with the athletic department and one fateful incident at the Crew Classic in the 1980s.

The story: An SDSU employee was delivering sound equipment for the event and wanted to park his van in a restricted area. Coggeshall told him no, there was an altercation, and the man ignored him.

“State would have been in the endorsement,” Allan Miller, an SDSU rowing alum, told the Union-Tribune in 1992, “but there were a number of things that upset (Coggeshall) about State. He got back at the university by punishing the rowers forever. It’s kind of warped thinking, but it’s his money.”

SDSU elevated its women’s program from club to Div. I status in 1998-99. Its final season will be 2020-21, assuming there is one.

Zack is in his eighth season at SDSU and in 2019 was named Western Intercollegiate Rowing Association coach of the year. The team competes as an associate member of the American Athletic Conference and had 37 athletes named to the AAC’s all-academic team. The team’s spring semester grade-point average of 3.62 was its record high.

Sometimes when sports are eliminated, alums and community members raise money for an endowment to keep the program af loat. Wicker, noting the gender equity considerations, indicated that won’t happen with rowing.

“This is a final decision,” he said.