Hartwick is dropping to DIII !!!

What a shame. Hartwick may not be in a major conference but they have a pretty good team and nice tradition. They were ranked for quite a while this past season too.

Here's my extremely naive question: soccer always seems to be the sport cut when there's budget problems, but does it really cost that much to fund a program? Compared to a lot of sports, I would think soccer is pretty cheap, you might have travel costs and so forth, but the equipment is cheap, it costs little to throw some bleachers on a field, no need to light them, and while squad sizes are large, they're not football or lacrosse. Oh well, I guess another one bites the dust unless the public and alumni rally once again.

 

Hartwick alumnus ('90) here. I got the news Friday night via an e-mail to alumni from the new school President. I'm still a little surprised and certainly bummed out about it. I don't think anyone saw it coming. First we get snubbed from the NCAAs, now we lose our Div. I standing! Bad to worse!

 

Yes, but Hartwick has only been D-III for men's soccer and women's water polo. All other sports at Hartwick are D-III. So it's not that they dropped soccer to D-III instead of football. If Hartwick was going to cut costs in the athletic department, it was a choice between eliminating some D-III programs like football (which was ruled out depsite it being a high cost sport) or drop the two D-I programs to D-III.

It's not that soccer is expensive compared to other sports, but that a D-I program comes with higher costs compared to a D-III program. At D-I, if you want to be competitive, the coach's salary is probably higher to get quality coaching; the budget for recruiting is probably higher, and you have all those scholarships which you don't/can't have in D-III.

More Links:

Hartwick President's Message to College Community - Soccer America

Hartwick to drop Division I men's soccer to Division III - Soccer America

'Wick teams to go Div. 3 - The Daily Star (Oneonta, NY)

Expectations fall at Hartwick - The Daily Star (Oneonta, NY)

 

This is a shame, for a lot of reasons.

First off, Hartwick has a great soccer tradition.

They won an NCAA title in the mid 70's, Mooch Myernick won the Hermann Award there, the school produced Mike Burns, who made two World Cup teams (though I still shudder about his game against Germany, but this isn't the place for that), and they were a power for most of 80s to the mid 90s.

It's a shame a program with that kind of history won't be in D-I.

It's also a shame because they just hired a new coach before last season, a Hartwick alum who left a D-I gig at Oneonta or Quinipiac or one of those schools in NY I wouldn't know about except for soccer, to come back to coach his alma mater.

Did a pretty good job, too, going 15-2-1 and only losing out on an NCAA bid because of a schedule that was too weak but which he didn't have much of a chance to upgrade because of when he got hired.

I hope he moves on and takes another D-I gig as he seems like an up-and-comer.

Another reason this is sad is the Atlantic Soccer Conference, which is a conference for soccer orphans that don't have a confernece affiliation, will lose its automatic NCAA bid because the conference will only have 5 teams next year. Maybe they can get South Carolina or another independent to join up, but if they don't, there's no bid.

And, finally, I feel for the players, especially the rising seniors who are too close to their degrees to likely transfer but who will lose a seaon of D-I competition. That's not how they should have to go out.

Again, a shame. Hopefully these players end up at other D-I schools so they can still make a difference. Several of them are on Canada's U20 team so I can't imagine them being content with D-III ball.

 

Ooops! First line of my post should read:

Yes, but Hartwick has only been D-I for men's soccer and women's water polo. All other sports at Hartwick are D-III.

 

Outrageous

I'm not an alum, but this is shameful. The Hartwick program has been going for something like 50 years, during which time the game has become hallowed in Oneonta.

Before Crew stadium or the Cosmos or Busch Park, this was where the game was played.

The great achievers of this generation of US soccer stand on the shoulders of a lot of guys who played on Elmore Field, or the next hill over: Oneonta State. It wasn't just Myernick and Mike Burns, Hartwick alumni reads like a who's who of American soccer - stunning when you consider the small size of the school. As far as tradition goes, Hartwick versus Oneonta State is the college soccer equivalent of Cal/Stanford.

Relatively speaking, helmet-and-pad Football is brand spankin' new there and insignificant. Those resources should have been poured into the quality and marketing of their soccer program.