Cutting men’s football to boost women’s athletics ‘discriminatory,’ says coach

By Jon Filson

One thing is for sure: there will be no women’s football at Carleton University next year.

But right now everything else is still up in the air. University president Richard Van Loon will decide in mid-February on director of athletics Drew Love’s recommendations. Among the changes being considered: axing football entirely and giving more money to women’s athletics than men’s.

Unhappy Ravens head football coach Donn Smith calls the recommendations reverse discrimination.

“Just flip this over: if women’s basketball was going to be cut to further fund men’s football or to establish men’s football at Carleton there would be hell to pay. It’s reverse discrimination to a degree. And you know it’s just not acceptable.”

But Gail Blake, assistant director of athletics, dismisses Smith’s protests.

“Mr. Smith can say what he likes because he’s working on trying to come up with reasons why football should not be cut. I don’t agree with him.”

Any sabre-rattling is now moot, however: the athletic department stopped taking feedback on the recommendations Jan. 29. Van Loon has received an earful of advice from both sides.

“A lot of people have said to me, ‘Times change’ and it’s good to see you’re re-thinking that sort of thing,” Van Loon says. “Some of them are men, but more of them are women. You can’t help but note that there aren’t many women playing football. And it takes a lot of support for that team.”

“At the end we’ll have a balanced program. It’ll be balanced with football or it will be balanced without football.”

With football costing the university $147,891 in the 1998-99 school year — almost as much as the $159,787 currently spent on all of women’s athletics — it would be extremely difficult to maintain an athletics program at Carleton that balanced funding for men’s and women’s sports and kept an eye on the bottom line. Smith acknowledges that’s the case.

“There’s a gender-equity thing that is obviously a concern,” Smith says, “And it’s certainly a concern to me. We all want to see both men’s and women’s sports succeed and survive at Carleton.”

But, he adds emphatically, “not at the expense of football.”

While both men’s and women’s sports would be cut under Love’s proposal, $28,461 would come from women’s sports. Meanwhile, $142,194 would be cut from men’s, with the bulk of the savings coming from axing the football team.

Of all the sports that would benefit from the redistribution of funds, women’s basketball is the big winner. Its budget would more than double from $27,126 in 1998-99 to $61,126 next year. That would be enough money for the club to hire a full-time coach.

Love says he tried to ensure the athletic programs funded by Carleton get enough money to be competitive. That approach seems to have pushed the right button for Van Loon, who says: “At Carleton, if we do something we’ll do it well.

“And so my concern is to either come out of this with a good football program or to come out of it with a lot of other good sports programs but maybe not football. This is all consistent with the approach I’ve been trying to take.”

Smith refuses to give up, however. He contends that if football is cut, then no sport is safe and he warns it will be extremely difficult for Carleton to recruit athletes for any sport if football gets run off the field.

“Once you start watering down varsity programs the message gets out across all our varsity programs and people are just going to say ‘Well, Carleton really doesn’t have a vibrant offering’ and they’ll look elsewhere.

“Basketball players will go elsewhere. Soccer players will go elsewhere. In some cases people will say ‘If they can do it to football, guess what, they can do it to basketball and other programs down the road as well.’ ”

Van Loon says he’ll take all views into consideration and won’t make his decision until he gets all the information he can.

“It’s early days,” he says, “although later days will come fairly soon.”