I’ve heard that they don’t have a good handle on the Title IX issue at all, and the monitor appointed under Brown’s binding settlement from the 1990s has issued them a notice of noncompliance, and that the administration cancelled a meeting with the monitor yesterday.
Do you know why they received a notice of noncompliance? Didn’t know they had some type of settlement in the 1990s.
Regarding cancelling the monitor meeting, if true, could just be because things are so uncertain for next year, who knows if sports will go, and if so, which ones.
Not sure the thinking at the NCAA, but personally I can’t see all sports happening next year, and if they don’t, it could be difficult for many schools to make sure they are doing their best to make sure programs for the women (where they are the underrepresented group) are a go.
Perhaps a larger issue is that the original initiative was to reorganize the varsity program to allow Brown to become more competitive in the remaining sports on a budget neutral basis. I assume they were going to do this through a combination of increased roster sizes, recruiting slots and moving more money for resources for targeted sports. Looking at the link @Mwfan1921 supplied above, men participating in “All Track Combined” was 108, a larger number of participants than even football (91). Even assuming a large number of duplicated participants, eliminating men’s track and field and X country would have created a huge amount of flexibility to reallocate roster sizes and be easily Title IX compliant. Reinstating track is going to make the reshuffle more difficult because a huge amount of flexibility is lost.
Exactly @BKSquared
This whole thing seems like a mess and many people seemed to have been blindsided. In reading more about this,the diversity issues/concerns with track and field related to both race and sexual orientation issues. The athletic director did not seem to even know that there was a group on campus of athletes to support each other in this?
Crazy timing with this. And so disruptive to athletes and recruits. I’m sure this kind of stuff is going on at other colleges though. Very sad to give no notice.
Yes, men’s track is an attractive sport to cut for Title IX purposes because of the double and triple counting: distance runners are counted three times for XC, indoor, and outdoor and everyone else twice for indoor and outdoor. So a track roster of 45 or so guys can end up counting as 100+.
I do wonder what changes in the athletic program Brown envisions now that the men’s track program has been reinstated (but multiple women’s programs still cut).
BTW, years and years ago, I “funneled“ myself from football to basketball and soccer. No one needed to prod me. 
The fact that they cut sports, from 38 to 29, isn’t surprising from the lack of success Brown has had for at least the last decade. To me, dropping a sport and then saying “Whoops!, just kidding” and going back and reinstating TNF, would make me think that there’s a lot of Brown’s upper management “asleep at the wheel.”
And Brown’s statement about this decision being about competitiveness is a joke. If the decision were based upon competitiveness, then why would you reinstate a TNF team that hasn’t won anything since the Roman Empire fell and cut one of the most successful Brown teams? From what little I was able to gather, the Equestrian team has been to Nationals 7 times in the last 20 years, top 5 in 5 of those years. But hey, cut the equestrians. ?
^this is one of those cases where it depends how one measures success. Brown has had quite a few very good individual track athletes, just not the team strength of programs like Penn, Cornell, Princeton. So yes, if team strength is the measure they’ve not been great.
But if developing great athletes is the measure they’ve done fairly well. Their throws coach won an NCAA championship when he was at Brown and competed in the Olympics as a pro, after all. And Jordan Mann, a steeplechase alum and current assistant, was fifth at the USA outdoor championships a few years ago.
I’m guessing the issue with equestrian is that only one other conference school participates and the center of gravity for the sport is in the south and west, not the northeast.
The president at least seems to have gotten her own sons out of college before all this went down? And her husband still seems to have a job at Brown. A family member couple are both tenured at their same top university and I do know that happens to keep top people. But, this is all pretty interesting. Best of luck to those dealing personally with this. It must be hard . And to have this blow up in the middle of such a difficult time! Seems like unnecessary drama but hopefully it was more well thought out than it appears to be on the surface (from initial official statements, well crafted as they were).
I have no dog in this hunt. No one in my family is an alum and D18 attends UMich, which BTW, is #2 in the Director’s Cup standings. ?
Brown needs to develop more great talent, because to me, ultimately, you represent Brown.
If only one other Ivy League school participates, then that makes some sense to me.
DU is a top athletic program without a football team. DU has fairly equal (size) m/f squads for basketball, lax, golf, swimming, basketball, tennis, soccer, skiing (co-ed). It has women’s volleyball and gymnastics (12 scholarships each). No men’s teams. It has men’s hockey (18 scholarships) but no women’s team.
The facilities make a lot of money with youth sports and community health club memberships, so I’m not sure if the teams are actually charged the true rental value of the facility. There are 2 sheets of ice that are in use probably 18 hours a day. There is a practice gymnastics facility which has youth classes form 9 am to 9 pm almost every day. There are summer youth camps. The lacrosse field has lights and is available to rent out. The basketball arena/hockey ice is rented for everything from rock concerts to high school graduations to Destination Imagination shows to girl scout events.
The finances for the coaches and travel is probably easier to figure out than all the facilities costs.
It is a lot more than just buying 10 more uniforms to add 10 players to a team. There are costs for coaching, trainers, travel, tutors. There is paperwork, there is oversight of the students (both academic and discipline), there is playing time to worry about.
Thinking this must all come down to money, I googled Ivy League endowments, and sure enough, Brown has the smallest endowment. (On a per student basis, Cornell trails but I believe they get some support for its state colleges.) Recent NYT articles have noted the sub-standard living conditions (black mold causing respiratory problems, rodents) that almost shocked me. I mean, I’d have been outraged if I spent the $75000 to have my kid live in such conditions. And I don’t think Brown can say that Providence is a high cost of living city vs Cambridge, New Haven, Philly, and definitely not NYC.
There is an interesting article about Brown and other colleges in yesterday’s Sports Illustrated. Not sure I can link it. Just google Sports Illustrated A Collegiate Model in Crisis. It is long but contains a lot of historical and current info as well as links to info on what sports have been cut at different schools.
@sevmom excellent article, thanks for mentioning it.
One of the points mentioned that is often overlooked in these discussions is sports as revenue generators not in terms of sports revenue but in terms of attracting paying students. There are XC coaches that are pretty vocal about this, who feel they are net drivers of revenue to universities but don’t get the credit. Obviously not the case at selective schools like Brown, but definitely true elsewhere.
^That is true only if those students are incremental and/or their net contribution is greater than the avg student. A track athlete who takes the spot of a student whose net pay is greater actually represents a net revenue loss.
There is a better argument for a football player of a program that runs an operating loss because of the impact that football has on alumni donations. It would be rare for an alum who did not run track to donate to his/her school because of the track team. Football games, especially rivalry games, serve as a major catalyst for general fundraising.
^sure, not true at selective schools where admissions is a zero sum. I’m referring to schools where adding a paying student is a marginal benefit. Akron, for example.
Uconn announced today 4 sports cut , women’s rowing , mens xc, M tennis and M swimming, as a Uconn alum and former runner it hurt to lose XC , but track and field was saved bc we used the Brown model of diversity, and we raised 1.6 million in 3 weeks, unlike Brown Uconn floats the sports programs 40 million and they were looking to cut that to 30 Million in 3 years, hence the cuts. So a big shout out to the Brown track team, thank you for the blueprint. BTW xc was cut only for title 9 reasons and we hope to get it back.
This is such an interesting thread, as I really hadn’t fully understood the implications of Title 9, football, etc. before. My S19 is a track athlete, and I recall being surprised when we were looking at schools that some (Vandy comes to mind) had women’s T&F but not men’s T&F teams. Now, reading this thread, I understand the reason for that probably lies with football. In picking a school, my son kind of naturally gravitated towards D3 schools that had strong athletic programs overall, with football as just one part of that program and maybe not the “star” sport. That leaves the issue of football still being a single-sex sport that will throw off the overall numbers, but it does seem to help promote a healthy balance overall. We didn’t think about the issue consciously, as we weren’t really aware of it until this situation at Brown flared up, but it is something that parents who have kids, especially boys, playing other sports, should have on their radar screen. The situation at Brown seems heartbreaking for kids for whom sports is a key part of the college experience, and the fact the T&F team has been rescued doesn’t help the others.
@NJdad07090 sorry to hear about those cuts but glad to hear that you were able to save Track and Field. It’ll be interesting to see how losing XC affects distance recruiting over the next few years. The 800 guys probably don’t mind so much…