PALO ALTO, Calif. (N.C.C. News)– COVID-19 continues to affect sports across the globe. Several universities such as the Ivy League decided to cancel Fall sports altogether due to the ongoing pandemic. UConn, Brown and various others cut a handful of their varsity sports.
Last week, Stanford officials followed those schools, cutting 11 varsity teams from wrestling to squash out of their athletic program.
The Cardinals are the all-time leader in NCAA titles with 126 and boast a program that breeds Olympians. However, due to the escalating cost of 36 varsity sports, far more than any other university, Stanford decided it needed to cut several teams in order to accommodate for the ongoing financial burden of COVID-19, according to a joint letter from the university’s president, provost and director of athletics.
These teams will have the opportunity to transition into club status following the upcoming year, the letter said.
One of the cut sports, squash, is the only varsity squash team on the West Coast, but rose to the top of the college rankings since its inception as a varsity team at Stanford. Casey Wong, a new alum of the program, is shocked by the decision to demote the team.
Wong was heavily recruited out of high school and rather than stay on the East Coast, chose Stanford as her home. She credits the Squash program for, “how [her team] was able to develop as players but also as people.”
Wong explains that while she’s grateful for everything Stanford Athletics gave her, she didn’t feel that her team was recognized as much as other sports.
For context, Stanford Squash is a largely self-funded team, functioning similar to a club team. Head Coach Mark Talbott raises money from donors to fund the team’s trips as well as his own salary. The team didn’t have their own locker rooms, instead they’d been changing behind a curtain next to their clear all-glass court.
So, the team filed a complaint to Stanford Athletics in order to receive an appropriate new accommodation. Rather than give them locker room access, Stanford “gave us two bathroom stalls in the corner,” Wong said. Wong said the team “felt neglected” and credits that with the cut.
Similar to synchronized swimming and men’s rowing that were cut, squash is not an NCAA sponsored sport. Squash also does not sell tickets to their matches, which are only a few during Winter Quarter.
In Stanford’s letter highlighting their reasons to cut the eleven teams, it cites a $25 million dollar deficit as the catalyst for the move.
Wong explains that it isn’t the decision itself that she’s most upset about, but the lack of transparency from Stanford about the situation.
She points out that “essentially, ten minutes before [Stanford] released the article, they had a zoom conference with all the teams saying that their sports were cut” and that she “didn’t even know that Stanford was considering cutting teams.”
It’s evident that Stanford Squash and the university have a bumpy relationship and the recent news hasn’t sat well with the team or any of the 240 student athletes effected. Men’s Volleyball created a petition to reinstate the team and a group of undergraduate students created a petition to keep all eleven teams at their current varsity status.
Whether these efforts will impact the decision is uncertain, but we’ll continue to monitor the situation.
