Swimmers Look to Strike Deal : Eliminated Sports Are Usually Cut and Dried

NORTHRIDGE — Now that men’s soccer has been granted a one-year reprieve, what are the chances Cal State Northridge will permanently restore the program along with three other men’s sports eliminated because of budget and gender-equity concerns?

Not as far-fetched as you may think, says Athletic Director Paul Bubb, despite NCAA figures and sentiment to the contrary.

While conceding that a revenue shortfall prevents Northridge from entertaining any notion of restoring soccer, baseball, swimming and volleyball in the near future, Bubb doesn’t rule out bringing back those sports when the school is on more solid financial footing.

“When the cuts were made last week, my thoughts were that these sports could be brought back in time as resources would allow it, and as would be allowed in compliance with gender equity and Title IX,” Bubb said. “I do believe that there is a way to do it.

“I don’t see it in the context of the next 12 months, but I do see it as a possibility in the next two or three years.”

Bubb said the school will take a big step toward that goal in the coming weeks when an associate athletic director for external affairs is expected to be hired. The fund-raising position has been vacant since Bubb left it in July 1995 to become athletic director.

Because Northridge will likely need to add a women’s sport for every men’s sport that is restored in order to meet impending gender-equity laws, Bubb said the school is looking at ways to improve fund-raising and attract sponsorships from the corporate and business sectors.

“It requires us to be creative in terms of funding,” he said.

Bubb estimated that it would cost close to $500,000 to restore the baseball program and add a women’s sport. He added that a condition of that happening would be for Northridge to join a conference, preferably the Big West, in baseball to lessen costs.

The Matadors competed as an independent last season.

“My expectation is that we will be able to increase revenue and add a women’s sport and bring back a sport that may have been cut previously,” Bubb said.

However, not everyone shares his optimism.

Janet Justus--director of Education Outreach, which is responsible for educating NCAA membership on Title IX and gender equity--said it will be difficult for schools to restore men’s sports and maintain a court-mandated balance with women’s sports.

Starting in 1998, the proportion of female athletes in the California State University system must be within 5% of the proportion of the general student body, as stipulated in the 1993 settlement of a lawsuit filed by the California chapter of the National Organization for Women.

“When a school decides to drop a sport, it’s hard to come back,” Justus said. “We like to see schools do all they can to maintain men’s programs as they add women’s programs over time.”

Statistics show that once a program is eliminated, rarely does it return. In football--the sport in which the NCAA maintains its most thorough participation figures--of 71 college programs discontinued between 1975-95, only 10 were restored, with two later dropped again.

But there are several celebrated cases of discontinued athletic programs being restored, albeit without gender-equity concerns.

Southern Methodist revived its football program in 1989 after serving a two-year “death penalty” imposed by the NCAA for rules violations. Tulane, another death-penalty victim, restored men’s basketball in 1990 after four years without the sport.

Miami of Florida was without a men’s basketball team for 14 years before restarting the program in 1986.

One of the more notable restoration projects on the West Coast involved the University of San Francisco, which dropped its highly successful men’s basketball program in 1982 following a series of rules violations and brought it back in 1985, on the 30th anniversary of the Dons’ second and last NCAA championship season.

Sandee Hill, senior associate athletic director at USF, said financial hurdles were easily cleared in restoring the men’s basketball program. The difficulty, she said, was convincing the public that USF was committed to rebuilding its program in a first-class manner.

“More than the money, it’s the reestablishing of your reputation,” Hill said. “You have to determine what direction you want the program to go and you have to find student-athletes who are willing to come to a start-up program. Those things were as difficult as the financial issues that came along with it.

“Once you make the decision to bring [a sport] back, it’s not so much a matter of finding the best coach, it’s convincing people you are serious about it. Men’s basketball at USF was a national power. Then we walked away from it.

“People had questions: ‘At what level do you want to compete? Are you coming back to be a top-20 program or just coming back to compete in basketball?’ If you go after a blue-chip athlete and you’re up against Stanford, Cal and UCLA, how are you going to convince that athlete that you want to compete at a high level and convince that athlete to come to your school. That’s very difficult.”

Bubb acknowledges that Northridge would face similar credibility questions if it attempted to restore a sport.

“That’s why I think it has to be done very carefully,” he said. “People have to trust your plan and the plan has to be realistic.”