They tell you to be true to your school, but I’m having a little trouble with the old University of Oregon lately.
Normally, we focus pretty much on Sweet Home here in The New Era, but what happens at the big schools down the road in Eugene and Corvallis does affect us, emotionally if not otherwise.
Having attended the University of Oregon (back in the good old days when ticket prices and demand for football games weren’t as prohibitive), I’m a fan of the Ducks, though I’ve always liked the Beavers too. The only time I feel torn is when they play each other.
(If anyone doubts that, know that I cheered as loudly as anyone when the Beavers beat Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl in 2001. I cheered enthusiastically when they won each of their national baseball championships. I used to gloat when the Beavers would come down to UCLA and beat the Bruins when I lived in SoCal – to the great annoyance of my friends who wear powder blue and gold.)
But I’m still a Duck, just not a very happy one.
The U of O has done its share of cutting-edge things over the years in sports (football uniforms, athletes on billboards in media markets, etc.), but its recent decision to cut its wrestling program and bring college baseball back to Eugene really raises my eyebrows.
When the Ducks hired a guy who never finished college to run their athletic program, I got a little bit of a bad feeling. Despite the recent hysteria over athletics at the U of O, fueled in part by the generous donations of alumnus Phil Knight, who has just given $100 million to help build a new basketball arena, the fact remains that the primary purpose of the University of Oregon is not to draw fans to Autzen Stadium or this new arena, but to educate the state’s citizens. So the decision to buy out the former athletic director, Bill Moos, and bring in the school’s second-most-generous booster, Pat Kilkenny, to replace him, made me wonder what was next.
What was next wasn’t the kind of shocker I was hoping for.
Not to rehash what’s been reported over and over by the state’s print media, but I guess it’s no surprise that Kilkenny’s first big move was to announce that he’s bringing baseball back – along with competitive cheer for women.
Baseball was cut in 1981 for financial reasons, though a club team on campus made it to the club baseball World Series the last four years.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate baseball. I had a great time watching OSU roll through the College World Series. But the decision to kill wrestling to bring back a far more costly sport, and add a sport that has little to do with what the university has traditionally been about, simply to maintain the Title 9 balance between men’s and women’s sports, is, in a word, stupid.
Why are we doing this? Clearly Kilkenny loves baseball, so that’s a check in the plus column. Oregon wrestling is not as strong as the Beavers up the road, so there’s an obvious minus.
Wrestling clearly is not going to be a huge money-maker in Eugene. But then, neither is baseball.
Wrestling is a lot cheaper to run, equipment- and facility-wise, than baseball. Oregon is a state where high school wrestling is a very popular sport, though teams in Eugene itself are not particularly strong (note: I said “Eugene,” not “Springfield.) That may be part of the problem.
Another part is OSU.
A lot of people in Eugene have watched enviously as their opponents up the road have rolled to two straight national titles. They’re clearly thinking that if the Beavs can win national titles, why can’t the Ducks?
I have to admit that Oregon has gotten off to a good start by hiring George Horton away from Cal State Fullerton, a team that OSU beat in the early rounds of the College World Series this year, but a perennial presence in the CWS. They also got a couple of top-notch assistants to go with Horton, who has been named College Coach of the Year twice in 11 seasons.
Success almost always starts with coaching.
But it’s still wrong. Eugene has a popular minor league baseball team and a bunch of decent high school programs. The University of Oregon doesn’t need another costly sports program, in a sport where there is a high level of competition already out there, when it costs another that needs to be maintained, if not for any other reason than the fact that our modern society has apparently gotten too sophisticated for it.
Wrestling has been cut by too many schools, which obviously don’t appreciate the value of preserving one of the world’s oldest athletic disciplines.
It’s a shame that the U of O has decided it’s going to be one of them.
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You may have noticed that we’ve taken a little different approach to local community announcements in The New Era. If you haven’t already, check out our “Around Town” column on page 3.
In the last few years we’ve tried to use community “briefs,” as we call them, to fill the spaces left after we’ve placed the larger stories on the pages of the newspaper. Making everything fit is like putting together a puzzle and sometimes it has its challenges, particularly if some items need more emphasis than others. Generally, the most important stuff goes higher on the page, with a larger headline.
The problem with our old system was that sometimes briefs that we wanted to get in didn’t make it. Another problem seemed to be that because we haven’t had a regular vehicle to publish such items, organizers of events would forget to send us the information or would do it too late. Sometimes, too, I have to confess, we’d get something that was really too early to write up, so we’d file it and it would sometimes get lost in the shuffle.
Anyway, we’re moving to this system that I’ve used before and it should cut down on some of those problems and result in a better newspaper for you, which is the whole point here. Instructions for getting information to us are listed at the bottom of the column, so follow through and we should all know more than we did when we started.