Stanford currently has 36 sports and it stated a $12 Million yearly deficit, which could hit $75 Million total after 3 years.

"The 11 sports that will be discontinued are men's and women's fencing, field hockey, lightweight rowing, men's rowing, co-ed and women's sailing, squash, synchronized swimming, men's volleyball and wrestling."

So the Cardinal will still have 25 teams.

So the Ivy League did vote to cancel all fall sports.What is a bit surprising is that it made no commitment to moving any sports to the spring as was anticipated. Also, how this plays out with basketball which is sort of an hybrid fall/winter sport is unclear. I’m not a betting man, but if I was I would bet that the Big Sky and the Big West to follow suit soon. FBS football- anyone’s guess, but I would think the PAC-12 would be the most likely to cancel fall sports out of all the major conferences. SEC probably no way. It would probably play with Covid sick players instead off canceling. I also would not be surprised if Trump threatened to pull federal funding from any FBS school that cancelled.

Separate from the pandemic, I have always wondered why we have field hockey at UCD. For a while there were four schools in California with field hockey; UCD, Cal, Stanford and U.O.P. Now there are, at least until I hit "send," only two - UCD and Cal. And Cal's team was on the edge a couple of season ago. They had no place to play so all of their games were on the road. So do we play each other home and away 6 times for our season? Keep in mind the next closest school with field hockey is Iowa. I bet the Ags and Bears drop the sport now, and then we are back to Title IX issues.

Stanford cutting field hockey could put the nail in the coffin for our program. Without Stanford, CAL and Davis are the only two programs left on the west coast. Makes it even harder to schedule a season in a conference that already doesn’t want us.

Edit: @72Aggie I think this will have a ripple effect across sports. Do we see a men’s sport cut because of it? And if so what sport. I know baseball has seen some close calls in the past.

Agreed. Sadly FH has to go. Quick fix- reinstate woman’s rowing. We were great at this sport. We have the boats (I think still) we definitely have the girls to do the rowing. And a place to row. It’s a bit pricey, but with Title IX there is no real alternative. Except if we cut a men’s program. Most likely: men’s water polo. Golf or tennis. Possibly, baseball, but I think its a required sport in the BW. All bad decisions for college sports in the future. AD Blue in a bad spot. And if he’s home in Canada now, he’ll probably be banned from coming back to Davis For next quarter.

Won't affect Davis now, but Pac-12 wrestling must be on life support. With Stanford dropping the sport the only two true Pac-12 schools with wrestling are Arizona State and Oregon State. Davis used to be an associate member for wrestling. I think the current associates are CSU Bakersfield, Cal Poly and Arkansas-Little Rock.

I would guess small sports will suffer wherever they are. At Davis for men that could be golf, cross country, track & field, water polo, tennis....


I wonder if the NCAA will relax rules during the pandemic. Conferences may not need X number of teams in some sport for automatic qualifiers...Conferences may cut some slack for a season....

Then again, this may all be for naught if organized sports are just put on the shelf for another year.

(Then again, we might just wake up one morning and it will be gone.....)

Gender equity?

And what if the Montanas & Dakotas decide to play football. Do we forfeit?

I'm sure we had field hockey for gender equity/TItle IX and because someone on the west coast really pushed the sport. It is a big girls' HS sport in the south bay and Monterey area.

My question was not so much the gender issue as why field hockey. It simply is not a college sport west of the Mississippi River. (Other than Iowa and I think one school in Missouri.)

One of the reasons given at UCD for dropping wrestling was that it was not a west coast sport....yet we picked up field hockey. Why not rowing? The expense for boats compared to transporting a field hockey team to the Midwest and Atlantic Coast for matches two or three times a season?

72. I never figured out the metrics on dropping woman’s rowing other than it was a bit pricey. But now its one of the few very popular west coast woman’s sports that can be played without getting on an airplane. And I will add: WE WERE VERY GOOD AT IT! It would be now just getting on a bus to sac or to the bay. No brainer. Maybe Blue’s worst mistake coming on board?

Cut football, basketball, and baseball. Aggie Stadium can be used for the new ultimate frisbee team. Or better yet cancel all the sports + let the homeless camp on the fields. Give them free hooch, drugs, and clean needles, but close all the restrooms. UCD can become an overflow lot for San Francisco. Ok, worst case scenario out of the way...

University of Washington has a big- time rowing program. How many schools have their own lake ? Not many.



It's not an indicator of where baseball is headed, but I don't have any leads yet on the 2021 season. Usually there are a few non- conference games displayed on the websites of opponents by now. It would seem that teams might be hesitant to schedule games involving significant travel due to COVID- 19. If they do play I wouldn't be surprised if all the non- conference games are against the likes of Sac State and UOP.

Field Hockey has never made sense from a travel perspective, even less so now. I'm sure the powers that be run analysis on costs and revenue per athlete seat for each sport and would look first to the sports with the worst margins. At least at the high school level, the field hockey clientele skews pretty wealthy so there could be donations happening in other parts of the university that make it worth while. In regard to Title IX, starting this fall NCAA is recognizing a form of cheerleading as an emerging sport. I would imagine schools will jump at the opportunity to claim their already-funded cheer squads as female athletes, which could buy latitude to ax a different money pit sport.

Stanfords cut of 11 sports is sure to prompt cuts by other big ICA programs. I would think that Berkeley's ICA may be next. In short, it is a mess both in terms of a huge deficit and title IX. Just look at two metrics: cal spends 35M on men’s sports with men’s coaches averaging a $533,000 salary versus 14M on woman’s sports with $150,000 average salary for the women’s coaches. I realize alumni support is fairly strong, but not enough to make this program sustainable in the long term.

Lotta work being done on Putah Creek... maybe on anticipation of rowing on Lake Spafford?

Dodn't we just build a new field hockey site?

The dedicated field hockey facility was built in 2014, apparently because the sport requires a “faster” turf than football or lacrosse. I know there has been work on sections of Putah Creek for about 5 years to install small weirs and pumps to make the water less foul along with rebuilding some paths and bridges for ADA and traffic reasons. While it might take me a while to paddle across Lake Spafford, I’d think rowers would want the mileage of the Sac or American rivers.

Are they finally working on Lake Spafford? A few pics would be nice.

They're redoing an automobile bridge near the new math buolding / Crocker Nuclear Lab.

The embankments also appear to be having work done.

I believe a deep-pocketed supporter also stepped forward.

Our own Finn is the engineer behind that job :).

That is a big lake as I recall. Got very funky in the dead of summer. Is this job to try and fix that?

:cheer: :strong:

when I rented Putah Creek Lodge a few years ago they said it was indeed to cut down the funk and to be an educational hydrology demonstration. https://arboretum.ucdavis.edu/waterway

As to the size of Lake Spafford, it is fairly big but not deep. Many years ago I may have been party to a failed attempt to sail it on a sheet of plywood lashed to some inflatables. Key learnings were that OSB doesn’t have the buoyancy of regular wood and the lake is only waist deep.

Boise State just cut 3 sports: baseball, men’s and woman’s swimming and diving saving 2.3M in doing so. Boise AD says that if they cannot fill 36,000 capacity Albertsons Stadium for football This year its ICA program will have a deficit of 10M+.and will be unsustainable.

Really ? Their baseball team didn't even last half a season !!! At least they didn't go ahead and build a ballpark. I feel bad for their coach though. He spent more time building the program than he did coaching it.

Apparently this decision has been reversed by Stanford. Quite a tectonic shift if you ask me.

https://www.flowrestling.org/articles/7049869-stanford-reverses-decision-to-cut-sport-programs

It probably helps that the kid from Stanford won the national tournament, and wore an all black singlet in protest. Good news for those kids.

And probably saved UCD/Cal field hockey as well.

Wonderful news. If Stanford w a massive athletic endowment can't support Olympic sports, everyone's in trouble.

I think he was one of several of the cut programs that had national champions or close to it. I think crew and FH had top finishes nationally as well.

Maybe off subject a bit, but Kenedy Brown, 6’2” All-Freshman/All BWC pitcher 1st Team is probably the best pitcher in the BWC this year and maybe one of the best in all of California. But, is she safe from Oregon? Or anyone else? Is there a way for the public to see who is on the Portal? Is there any limit on poaching players by contacting them and quietly telling them to get on the portal so they can be accessed by the other team?