Cal Re-instates Men’s Rugby Along with 3 Other Sports

from the NY Times:

The University of California, Berkeley, announced Friday that it was reinstating three of the five varsity teams it cut in September after a group of donors, alumni and fans raised as much as $13 million in private donations to restore the teams.

The Cal gymnastics team, along with their baseball team, were left on the chopping block, while three other sports were reinstated. The university will keep women’s lacrosse, women’s gymnastics and men’s rugby, which Cal had planned to demote to a newly created category called varsity club. Baseball and men’s gymnastics will not return.

“We are all greatly impressed by how our community organized itself in the attempt to help these five sports and the university,” Vice Chancellor Frank Yeary said in a statement. “We are delighted that, together, we have found a path that allows us to retain the two women’s teams and our rugby program without adding costs to the strained budgets
of the university and Cal Athletics.”

Cal had initially eliminated the teams to save an estimated $4 million a year and to quell criticism that the athletic department had been accepting $10 million to $15 million a year in university subsidies while the rest of the campus was struggling with severe budget cuts. The new plan is expected to limit the university’s annual contribution to
athletics to $5 million a year by 2014.

The decision to cut the teams led to an uproar by donors, alumni and supporters of the teams, particularly men’s rugby, which had won 25 national championships since 1980, and baseball, which had been a varsity sport for more than a century. Officials had originally said supporters would have to raise as much as $100 million to reinstate the teams, but they recently lowered the target to $25 million if backers could also demonstrate a long-term plan for supporting the teams financially.

Officials said in a news release Friday that at least $8 million of the $12 million to $13 million in philanthropic pledges would be enough to finance the women’s lacrosse, women’s gymnastics and rugby teams for the next 7 to 10 years. The additional financing would have supported men’s baseball and men’s gymnastics for about two years.
“Both programs would have needed to raise multiples of what they actually did raise to meet our criteria,” Yeary said in the statement. “In the context of both current and forecasted economic and financial conditions, we simply could not agree to short-term, stopgap measures.”

The restoration of the teams most likely solves another problem for the university: it means Cal can scrap plans to make another round of cuts to men’s teams to satisfy Title IX, the federal gender-equity law.

According to numbers the university provided, officials would have had to cut about 80 men from team rosters by next fall — and to add about 50 players to women’s teams — to comply with Title IX. Cal faced this predicament because it had been arguing that it was meeting the “interests and abilities” of its female student body, one of three options, or prongs, that institutions can use to show they are complying with the law. But it could no longer make that claim after it cut women’s lacrosse and gymnastics, and it could not show a continuing history of improving opportunities for women, another option.

The university was not in compliance with the only remaining prong, proving that the percentage of female athletic participants was proportionate to overall female enrollment at the university. Only 40 percent of athletic participants at Cal are women, even though women make up 53 percent of enrollment. So to come into compliance, officials planned to make cuts to their men’s teams, while adding players to their women’s teams.