Last month, McGill University announced that it was cutting 25 of its 44 intercollegiate sports teams across 15 different sports, including women’s rugby, women’s field hockey, men’s volleyball and track and field.The Globe and Mail
Alex Hutchinson’s most recent book is The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map.
As soon as I arrived at the University of Cambridge as a grad student in the fall of 1997, I sought out the track coach. I’d just graduated from McGill University, and had gone on that summer to qualify for the World University Games in Sicily. I was serious about running. So I was surprised and a bit nonplussed to discover that the Cambridge coach was, in fact, an undergraduate who had been elected by his teammates as that year’s “training secretary.”
Cambridge’s track team dates back to 1857, and over the decades it has produced dozens of Olympians. It, too, is serious about running. But it’s entirely student-run. Alongside the training secretary, other team members take responsibility for ordering uniforms, making travel arrangements, hosting meets, raising money and so on.
It’s a quirky approach, but one that I’ve come to believe offers some valuable – and possibly existential – lessons for Canadian institutions as they grapple with the rapidly changing landscape of university sports.
Last month, McGill announced that it was cutting 25 of its 44 intercollegiate sports teams across 15 different sports, including women’s rugby, women’s field hockey, men’s volleyball – and my beloved track and field squad. That cutbacks were coming surprised no one: McGill is projecting to lose $185-million in revenue over the next four years as it grapples with radical changes in the Quebec government’s support for English universities in the province. If I had to choose between physics labs and long-jump pits, I’d prioritize the former too.
Olympic champion sprinter Bruny Surin calls McGill’s athletics cuts ‘a nightmare’
But there’s more to these cuts than money. Some of the axed teams, like tennis and squash, are already primarily self-funded. In their very limited public comments explaining the decision, McGill’s representatives have seemed to rule out the possibility of teams like track shifting to a self-funded model.
Instead, McGill hired consultants from KPMG to audit and rank its teams, though it has refused to release the resulting report. One set of criteria, based on guidelines from the governing body for university sport in Quebec, reportedly assesses whether the sport is widely contested at the high school and CEGEP levels in the province, and whether there are official provincial leagues and national championships at the university level. Track and field passes these tests.
McGill officials also cite the growing demand for athletic facilities from the general student population. This is great news for anyone who cares about public health. But it’s hard to take seriously the idea that there’s a massive unmet demand for opportunities to jog on a banked six-lane track built to international competition standards – one of just three such facilities in Canada. Even if there is, the team only uses the track three times a week, sharing its slots with an external track club, so eliminating the team would make only a marginal difference.
The real reason for the cuts, as far as I can tell, has less to do with specific pain points than with a broader cultural shift in how McGill’s athletic department sees its purpose. One vision of collegiate sport is the one I encountered in Cambridge: a model that gives student-athletes opportunities and leaves it up to them to see how far they can take those opportunities. Another is the NCAA system in the United States, where student-athletes are lavished with resources with the implicit expectation that the return – money, institutional prestige, alumni loyalty – will justify the investment. Canadian universities have long inhabited a middle ground between the two extremes, but lately they’ve been drifting south.
McGill hired consultants from KPMG to audit and rank its teams, though it has refused to release the resulting report.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
The reason that McGill can’t let even self-funded teams compete, a senior athletic department official told the Montreal Gazette, is because of all the overhead: human resources, communications, equipment, and so on. “And part of the evaluation was, well, can we finance them to the point where we think they can be successful?” the official said. If we can’t give you the resources to be the best, the thinking seems to be, then it’s better that we don’t let you compete at all. Or to put it another way: we can’t afford to have both bureaucracy and athletes, so we’ll keep the former.
NCAA athletes aren’t immune to cuts, of course. Recent rule changes mean that student-athletes can now be paid by universities and can transfer between institutions without restriction. Given the tens of millions of dollars earned by sports like football and basketball, that raises the fear that richer programs will simply buy up all the talent. To preserve some semblance of competitive balance, the NCAA has imposed draconian roster limits even on so-called “non-revenue” sports like track and field. Those who make the cut will still be treated like royalty, but fewer people will be able to participate. Once again, the needs of the institution trump those of the students.
When I started at McGill in 1993, the team was a self-funded club. It was elevated to funded varsity status the following year after the new track was completed. Still, we took long bus rides to compete in places like Rimouski and Windsor. For a seven-person cross-country team, we would book two hotel rooms, each with two double beds. Whoever raced best one week would get a bed to themselves the next week. It was a powerful incentive. At Cambridge, we slept in a church sanctuary converted to a hostel before the national cross-country championships in Edinburgh one year; before the national track and field championships in Manchester, we bedded down in sleeping bags in someone’s parents’ basement.
After I finished at Cambridge, I moved on to the University of Maryland to do postdoctoral research. Non-students weren’t allowed to train with the Maryland team, but the coach at nearby American University, a small school with one of the best teams in the country, welcomed me to his workouts. It was an impressive set-up. Sometimes, after Saturday morning workouts, the student-athletes would sneak me into their cavernous dining hall for a decadent brunch. The omelette station alone would have funded the Cambridge team for a semester.
What strikes me most, when I think back to my experiences in those three very different collegiate sport systems, is how similar they were. In each place, I trained as hard as I could and bonded with friends who were committed to the same esoteric goals. We absorbed all the lessons that sport is supposed to teach: about patience and commitment, winning and losing, striving and accepting. The trappings were mostly irrelevant. The biggest difference is how many of my Cambridge teammates have kept running in some form as adults. Almost none of my NCAA friends continued after college. My McGill cohort, as usual, is somewhere in the middle.
I don’t envy the funding challenges faced by McGill as a whole or its athletics department in particular. I know they’re doing their best to balance competing priorities while facing shrinking resources. But I hope they’ll rethink the wholesale dismemberment of so many varsity sports programs. At the very least, I hope they’ll engage in serious dialogue with the teams themselves – none of whom were consulted prior to the announcement of the cuts – about sustainable alternatives to the status quo. Most of all, I hope they’ll reflect on whose needs they’re really trying to serve. Otherwise, their efforts to save McGill athletics may turn out like the old medical joke: the operation was a success, but the patient is dead.