Chapman Descends a Division : Panthers: Officials opt to go from Division II to III in 1993-94, but football could return.

ORANGE — Chapman University will drop its athletic program from NCAA Division II to Division III and eliminate athletic scholarships beginning in 1993-94, school officials announced Wednesday.

At the same time, university President James L. Doti and Athletic Director Dave Currey said the school is looking into the possibility of adding at least four more sports, including football, which has been absent from the athletic department since 1932.

Chapman will remain in the Division II California Collegiate Athletic Assn. for another year and then will apply to become a member of the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, which includes schools such as Redlands, Whittier and La Verne.

With an undergraduate enrollment of 1,515, Chapman is the only private school in the CCAA, which is largely composed of California State University or University of California schools.

Chapman has only seven athletes on full scholarship, but approximately 50 receive partial aid. Currey said the school allocates about $500,000 annually to athletic scholarships.

Doti and Currey said these scholarships will be honored for the duration of a student’s stay at the school. But after the 1992-93 school year, those who decide to remain on scholarship would not be eligible for athletics under Division III rules. Doti said the school will reallocate athletic scholarship funds to academic and need-based scholarships.

The announcement capped a tumultuous few days for the Chapman athletic department, which announced Monday that men’s basketball Coach Bob Boyd’s contract will not be renewed. It also took Chapman coaches by surprise--they were informed of the move at a 7:30 a.m. meeting Wednesday.

Especially stung was baseball Coach Mike Weathers, whose team moved from Division II to Division I this season and had moved into Collegiate Baseball Magazine’s national poll this week.

“I’m trying to keep under control, think about the players and what’s best for them while at the same time trying to keep this season going the way it’s going,” Weathers said after the Panthers’ 10-3 loss to Cal State Fullerton.

“It was a total shock that it was a done deal, even though there was some talk about it in the past three weeks.”

Even though rumors of a possible move had circulated around campus during the past three weeks, the announcement still hit coaches hard.

“It was rather stunning,” women’s basketball Coach Lindsay Strothers said.

Coaches spent much of the day explaining the situation to players, calling parents of athletes as well as recruits they had been pursuing.

Strothers said his team didn’t take the news well. He has seven freshmen on partial scholarships that help pay the school’s annual $12,974 tuition and $5,000-6,700 in room and board.

“They were very upset,” he said. “I don’t blame them. They were all mad at first but I explained that next year is going to be the same as this year.”

While acknowledging the news was hard for coaches to swallow, Currey and Doti presented the move as a step forward, one that will allow the school to boost student involvement in athletics and its teams to compete on a more level playing field with opponents.

They said they hope to double participation in intercollegiate athletics from the current 170 in the next several years.

“This particular division, we call it III, but it’s probably more practical than Division I or II,” Currey said. “It was really a decision based on where do we fit, where do we belong, why aren’t we competing against schools with similar philosophies, and what can we do to have more programs here?”

Currey, who became athletic director in July, 1990, is the current president of the CCAA. He said during recent conference meetings that he increasingly felt Chapman didn’t have much in common with the CCAA’s public institutions.

“I think this is a dynamic time for Chapman,” he said. “We have a president who is committed to a broad-based program. He’s willing to add sports and broaden the opportunity for competition.

“He’s adding while everybody else is dropping, cutting and going the other way.

“I’m not minimizing the pain that goes with that. There are a lot of growing pains.”

Doti first approached the university’s board of trustees with the idea several months ago and on Feb. 18, the board gave Doti the go-ahead to study the situation and make a final decision.

Doti then went to campus organizations for input and after receiving the final positive recommendation from the student senate Tuesday, he made the decision.

Doti said he had intentionally left the coaches out of the process.

“I really felt it wouldn’t really be fair to them to impose this on them,” Doti said. “If I were in their shoes, I would defend the status quo and the programs that I have. I didn’t want to put them in an awkward position.”

In January of 1989, when Doti was acting president, he was involved in a similar situation. The board considered dropping to Division III before deciding instead to remain in Division II and cut costs by dropping six sports and eliminating scholarships in four others--softball, men’s soccer, men’s tennis and water polo.

Doti said the idea to resurrect football grew out of meetings he had with students at his home last fall. He asked them what would make their experience as Chapman students more complete. To his surprise, many said a football team.

Although Chapman had a club football team in the late 1970s, the last official intercollegiate team was fielded 60 years ago when the school was named California Christian College and the campus was in Los Angeles.

In 1954, Chapman moved to the site of the old Orange High School. There is a lighted stadium on campus that could be used for football. Doti said he hopes to have a completed plan for football and other sports to be added by the end of this school year and have them implemented for the 1993-94 school year.

“I think there would be a lot of interest in a football program at Chapman,” he said. “Of course on Saturdays, there would be crowds and parking and issues like that to contend with, but the pluses would probably outweigh the minuses.”