Laura HerronStanding room only.
That's the crowd that packed the Raccoon Mountain Room at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's University Center on Tuesday afternoon.
That's the level of concern that UTC's students and track supporters seem to have for the school's recent decision to drop the men's track program. So they packed the amphitheater-style room to hear athletic director David Blackburn and senior associate athletic director Laura Herron attempt to explain the difficult decision.
And for more than an hour they did. Methodically. In painful PowerPoint detail. Lots of specifics. A few generalities. But no questions. At least not until more than an hour had passed and more than a few students and supporters left shaking their heads.
By our own David Uchiyama's account, questions were taken for 13 minutes and 21 seconds. The whole event lasted about an hour and 15 minutes.
"Lame" was former UTC runner Tim Ensign's take on the whole proceeding. "You come to hear explanations and you get a filibuster."
Maybe that's fair. Maybe not. Blackburn has overseen much good work at UTC, nicely building on the necessary overhauls begun by his predecessor, Rick Hart.
UTC's athletic department has been under siege more than once by the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Education regarding its inability to comply with Title IX. As Blackburn pointed out at one point Tuesday, the government "could withhold $1 million to $30 million."
David BlackburnAnd those are promises as much as threats. They are scary and they are real, and only a foolish administration would ignore their potential damage.
But that doesn't mean the men's track team and its supporters are wrong to question this decision, to passionately find some way to alter it. When you've had the best GPA in college athletics two of the last three years -- that's all of college athletics, from the Harvards and Stanfords and Dukes to the Tennessees and Georgia Techs and UCLAs -- you should have built up some body armor.
But there is also this, something that needs to be accepted by all concerned: This is about money as much as proportionality of male athletes to female athletes based on the overall student-body ratio of males to females.
Or as Blackburn noted: "Can we add a sport? We don't have the money. And if we added one for a year, we couldn't continue it for a second year."
And that's the real problem. The same problem UTC has had for decades. It's one reason why Title IX compliance has always been so difficult. When a school has to barter basketball tickets for copy paper -- as the school has in the past -- adding a women's sport to hold onto a men's sport is problematic at best.
"You have to put them in athletic gear, provide medical insurance, tutoring services, stay in a quality hotel on the road," Blackburn explained. "I've been asking for money for two years."
The men's track program is asking for creativity. Take away a couple of football players here. A wrestler or two there. Throw three or four more women on the track. Or the volleyball team. If there's not money to fund a whole new women's team, surely there's some creative math to be done to keep the highest GPA team in the land competing both in the classroom and on the track.
Isn't that what we say we most want from our, um, STUDENT-athletes?
"It doesn't sound like you have your mind made up," Rita Fanning said to Blackburn during the brief Q & A session. "The running community is willing to help. We think if you go back to (UTC coach) Bill Gautier to take on more female runners, the running community will back it with financial efforts."
If she's right, UTC chancellor Dr. Steven Angle and Blackburn should do anything possible to save men's track, if only because these 16 male athletes may be the best example in all of college athletics for doing it the right way.
But there's also a reality check needed here. For instance, while the U.S. Department of Education website lists 97 football players (including walk-ons) on UTC's roster during the 2013-14 school year -- and that seems like a lot for a 63-scholarship FCS program -- that total is pretty much at the bottom of the Southern Conference, the vast majority of schools comfortably north of 100.
And given that, it's time for all those folks who say they care so much for men's track to put their money where their mouths are.
But it's all enough to recall a conversation with former UTC football coach Buddy Nix on the day he was fired in November of 1992.
Walking across the pock-marked playing surface of Chamberlain Field at the close of an early evening practice, Nix said, "You have everything you need to succeed here except money. But without money, it's tough to win."
Twenty-three years later, the more things have changed, the more they've remained the same. How lame is that?
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.