Should small colleges like St. Francis University in Loretto, which fields teams in 23 sports, end the facade of “Div. I” and focus that money on saving its academics and helping those students and faculty, whose programs and jobs may be cut?

Photo: St. Francis Athletics website

                                      … schools are reconsidering their athletic programs

Earlier this week, St. Francis University of Pa. announced that it would start a phased reopening of its campus and was preparing to hold on-campus classes in the fall. 

The Loretto school will start this on Friday, June 5 as part of Gov. Wolf’s “Green Phase” and will start some person-to-person classes this summer. However, it did announce that it would follow the lead of some major national universities and start earlier than usual and end classes at Thanksgiving. 

Students and faculty are happy with that since like others throughout the country, they have been doing electronic classes since March,

Under the Yellow Phase designation, physician assistant science students were able to return to campus on June 1 for in-person instruction … 

The university also announced it intends to offer face-to-face classes in fall, as long as the state continues to ease restrictions, although there will be measures in place that will allow for smaller classes and the ability to be flexible if virus cases emerge. The plan calls for the fall semester to begin ahead of schedule (August 17) and conclude with the Thanksgiving holiday.

News release, St. Francis University, June 2, 2020

What the release did not address were questions like these: 

• How many faculty positions or academic classes would be eliminated? 
• How many students are expected in the fall and how much of a decrease will that be from previous years? 
• And, how many sports would be cut, if any, in order to save the academic programs?

State of NCAA athletics

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is in big trouble right now, and it knows it. Part of the reason for that is that it has buffaloed so many schools into believing that in order to play Div. I football or basketball, a minimum of 16 sports are essential. While that does provide many opportunities for athletes, it drives athletic programs deep into debt. 

The smaller colleges and universities, often called mid-majors, are now struggling big-time to try and maintain that status. For many, it is the idea of an opportunity to compete in the NCAA men's or women’s basketball tournaments. Those are definitely exciting, but at a time when these schools are in the process of cutting programs and faculty and research projects because they fear a severe drop in enrollment, plus the tremendous amount of money that they have lost during the COVID 19 pandemic, athletics seems to be much less of a priority. 

Which brings me to St. Francis, the Red Flash, which had 23 sports for some reason. Actually, the athletic administrators realized that they could use athletics to attract students. Here is how that worked. If a young person was given a half or quarter-tuition scholarship to participate in a sport he or she then would be one more student in the cap of the admissions office, helping them to reach that goal that they needed to make money or break even. And other athletes who did not earn a scholarship could be attracted to the school to play on one of these teams. 

In essence, athletics became a tool to recruit students, and the department then was able to justify having so many teams. And the reason was that St. Francis wanted to be called a D-I school.

History of the Red Flash and basketball

While St. Francis likes to talk about being Div. I since the time of Maurice Stokes, that is not the case. In the Stokes years, mens basketball became a nationally-known program under legendary Coach Dr. Skip Hughes, a dentist who had played for the Panthers at the University of Pittsburgh. However, St. Francis considered to be a small college basketball team, and it played NAIA teams as well as ones in the NCAA. 

The NCAA did not make the distinction between non-scholarship and scholarship teams until the 1970s, approving the Div. I, II, and III breakdown in 1973. I am not certain exactly what year the Red Flash basketball became Div. I, but it was in the mid-70s. 

However, the greatest basketball teams that it had were in the 1950s and 1960s, featuring players who excelled in the NBA starting with Maurice Stokes in the early to mid-50s to Norm Van Lier and Kevin Porter. Since Porter left in the early 70s, the quality of St. Francis basketball has continued to decline to the time when they entered the Northeast Conference in the 1980s. 

To think that the 1991 team that won the NEC and competed in the NCAA tournament could compete with the teams of the Stokes era or that of Stormin’ Norman Van Lier and Muggsy Lewis is ridiculous. 

Nevertheless, they continue this line of playing 23 sports so that they can field an NCAA contender, yet they have done so only once. 

In fact, the successful basketball program at St. Francis has been the women, who have won at least ten NEC titles and have gone to the NCAA tournament about 12 times. 

That has been nice, but from what I have been told, many people in the academic departments have apparently complained for years about the large amounts of money that are being spent on athletics, which is not part of its academic mission.

Catch-22 situation

The problem for St. Francis is that in order to reach its admissions needs so that it can break even or make some money, the school has relied on athletics. It works like this. 

The coaches give the athletes in the non-revenue producing sports at a school a partial scholarship, let’s say for lacrosse or water polo, two women’s sports at St. Francis. They must pay the rest of the way, including half tuition, room and board, books, fees, and other costly items that help a school survive. 

The coaches must also try to find some marginal players who might want to play but are not scholarship athletes and are willing to attend school anyway for an opportunity to play. The financial aid people search for all kinds of aid for all of these athletes to entice them to do so, including costly student loans. 

According to the St. Francis website, this is the amount of money that a student would need to fork out to attend the Franciscan school, and it is the reason that many parents are opting for a state-run school,

The undergraduate education provided by Saint Francis University is funded primarily from tuition. Annual tuition amounts are approved by the Board of Trustees. The tuition rate for the 2020-21 academic year is $38,078 for a full-time, traditional undergraduate student.  

“Undergraduate Tuition and Fees,” St. Francis website

Numbers like that are why many private schools are worried that with many parents losing jobs and students leery about the coronavirus returning, they may decide to go elsewhere or take a year off and see if they can earn a little money. 

Conclusion

That brings me back to the original point: Should St. Francis and schools like it continue to hide behind this “Div. I” curtain or cut back on sports significantly. 

Will these schools do so?

Should St. Francis not just drop sports but drop to Div. II, which has partial scholarships, or Div. III, which provides no athletic scholarships?

Wait and see. 

The St. Francis athletic director, Susan Robinson Fruchtl, resigned in March, and whoever replaces her with have a major task in front of him or her.

Division I Men's Sports (8)

• Basketball 

• Cross Country 

• Football 

• Golf 

• Soccer 

• Tennis 

• Track & Field 

• Volleyball

Division I Women's Sports (13)

• Basketball  

• Bowling 

• Cross Country 

• Field Hockey 

• Golf 

• Lacrosse 

• Soccer 

• Softball 

• Swimming 

• Tennis 

• Track & Field 

• Volleyball

• Water Polo