- Claude Scilley in today's Whig-Standard delivers a good take on Queen's athletic review, noting that under the "20 criteria" the report's authors used to rank each program, men's hockey (tied for 14th out of 34 teams) is in the danger zone if the university follows through on having only 10-16 teams.
That segues into what a commenter pointed out in yesterday's post: With the Queen's Centre under construction, how could the school justify building a "cadillac facility and no elite level team to showcase it?"
The other fact to take out of this is Queen's is fourth-last among the 19 OUA schools in "percentage of total student fees going to athletics." They're ahead of only McMaster (a much larger school with fewer teams, not to mention a generous donor in B.C. Lions owner David Braley) and two schools that are nonentities in sports, Ryerson and Trent, and that should change.
It's understandable, though, why a student would feel this ambitious athletics overhaul is being done on their backs. Not many 20-year-olds already trying to worry about paying for school would like finding out that an intramural program had switched to user pay, so 10 years down the road, you shouldn't be OK with it as a 30-year-old.
That sort of begs the question: Why doesn't the university explore adopting the Laval football model for football and/or men's hockey, if both are so expensive and so hard for an academically elite school to run, wouldn't it make more sense to turn to well-heeled alumni instead of the currently cash-poor students? - Congratulations to John Bower, who's handled sports information for University of Ottawa these past two years. John's accepted a post as manager of communications for Commonwealth Games Canada, based in Ottawa, so hopefully he won't be a stranger when the Gee-Gees or Ravens teams are in action. As I've said before, John's willingness to accommodate new media types should be a template for every person who works in such a capacity and the professional courtesy he's shown this amateur writer will long be remembered. The bar's been raised at the U of O for whoever succeeds him.
That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
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9 comments:
It would make sense for a number of oua schools to adopt some variation of the Laval model.
Mark Wacyk over at cishoops, who is in the financial planning business, has CIS coaching experience, and has an MBA from uOttawa, would be a good choice for the first chair of the board of directors of any Laval-like corp set up to run the GeeGees.
Good to see John Bower remain in Ottawa and get a position with a national sports org.
I doubt anyone will replace him as his old job seems to have been eliminated as Ottawa restructures its sport marketing and public relations functions. Whether that rastructuring will be for better or for worse, is a big question mark.
Yeah, the understanding is the position won't be the same... whoever/whatever's in place has a high standard to meet.
It won't happen at Queen's thanks to the pervasive anti-corporate activism. Even the Gaels' current mild sponsorship deal with Russell Athletic stirred up "controversy" because the company may or may not have had some of its products, which may or may not have gotten to Queen's, possibly manufactured in a factory, which the company doesn't actually run or have any decision-making power in, which closed when the workers wanted to form a union.
Just imagine the uproar (which is of course always based in groups of people who've probably never seen a sporting event in their lives) that would come from a more expansive private financing initiative. It's a great idea, though.
Perhaps getting lost in the fact that cutting men's hockey would simply be silly on principle is the historical problem with doing this. The world's first ever hockey game (unless you want to debate that) was between Queen's and RMC. By cutting men's hockey the University would be abolishing one of the first teams ever to play our national sport. Now just how disgusting, from a patriotic perspective, is that?
Happy Canada Day, I suppose.
It's early yet and honestly, it's hard to imagine men's hockey getting the ax... presuming the women's program (ranked 11th out of 34 under the "20 criteria") would stay, wouldn't the university be at risk of a gender discrimination lawsuit from the men's team players?
It's happened in the States when schools tried to cut programs to meet Title IX requirements (without touching the sacred cow, football).
I'm baffled that even women's hockey is rated that low considering they've been a regular season powerhouse for some time with a coach who I think was twice named coach of the year.
Well, that's what being in a 10-team conference which only gets 1 CIS berth comes back to bite a program...
The "20 criteria" also refer to things such as marketability... in my day at least Queen's always had good-sized basketball crowds in Bartlett and hockey was more sporadic unless the men's team was in playoffs.
Marketability doesn't explain the high ranks of cross country, rugby, and rowing, though.
Well, it's 20 criteria... lot of things.
Yes, that's what they want you to think.
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