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While schools are thinking about cutting sports, tennis appears to be vulnerable

 


The promise of college tennis lured Abhimanyu Vannemreddy from his home in India to the United States, where he settled at Winthrop University in South Carolina.

Now he is thinking about his future, thousands of miles away from his family, as the financial reality of his sport collapses.

Winthrop announced last month that both men’s and women’s tennis programs will be discontinued due to budget concerns due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tennis has been hardest hit under college programs, as athletic departments across the country are thinking about cutting sports to save money.

I was absolutely surprised, Vannemreddy said. No prior warning or rumor about closing the program. It was just a random phone call one day and found it ready.

Dozens of tennis players across the country are in similar situations. Men’s and women’s tennis is the only sport that has been dropped by more than four Division I schools since the pandemic began, according to research by AP.

East Carolina, Green Bay, Northern Colorado, Southern Utah, and Wright State have dropped men’s and women’s tennis in the past three months. In Arkansas, UAPB has suspended tennis for men and women for the year. Appalachian State cut human tennis, while Akron eliminated women’s tennis. Connecticut will no longer have a men’s tennis team after 2020-21.

My estimate is that some of these cuts were likely in the works, said Timothy Russell, the CEO of the International Tennis Association, the governing body for college tennis. Usually there is a great hue when there is a cut and crying. There is so much going on with the noise in this environment that it is easier to make these cuts without anyone paying so much attention.

Nearly 89% of Division I schools had women’s tennis programs and 71.5% had men’s teams as of 2019, but these recent cuts have raised concerns and prompted officials to seek solutions.

Tim Cass, former A&M coach from New Mexico and Texas, is now the general manager of the American campus of Tennis Associations in Florida. He believes colleges can help their programs by opening on-campus tennis facilities to their communities, by organizing tournaments for juniors or adults, and offering after-school programs.

If you do, your program most likely has a very good chance of being safe, Cass said.

A lack of quality facilities has contributed to some cutbacks.

Hank Harrawood, Winthrop’s deputy athletic director, said his school’s tennis facility required at least $ 1.3 million in repairs. Southern Utah and Northern Colorado did not have indoor facilities on campus, and Southern Utah teams often had to travel 45-50 minutes to practice.

Northern Colorado and Southern Utah are part of the Big Sky Conference, for which members were previously required to play tennis teams. When the Big Sky eased that requirement last month, both schools dropped out of their program.

Scholarships also play a role.

The NCAA allows schools to offer up to 4 scholarships for people tennis and eight for women tennis. Harrawood said this meant that Winthrops’ tennis programs generated a smaller percentage of the school fees than the other Olympic-style sports.

Once Winthrop realized it needed to save over $ 600,000, Harrawood said eliminating tennis was a history of success financially.

Winthrops women had made 17 games of the NCAA tournament, including three directly from 2017-19. The men had won nine Big South Conference regular season titles since 1997.

From the dollar and cents point of view, strictly a business decision on campus, it became clear that tennis is clear where you can influence the least amount of students and at the same time save the most money, Harrawood said.

An NCAA study found that 63% of Division I men’s tennis players and 62% of Division I women’s tennis players were from outside the United States in 2018. No other sport had the majority of its players from outside the US, although men’s soccer had a slightly larger number of international athletes than human tennis.

Retired Stanford coach Dick Gould, who led the Cardinal to 17 NCAA team titles, believes that tennis programs made up mostly of international players are vulnerable when schools have to cut back.

If you’re a state school that gets government and government funding, and your team is 70% (international players), I think that makes your sport an obvious target, said Gould, who left coaching in 2004 but still Stanford’s 12 tennis player stayed for years.

Winthrop men’s coach John Collins was not so sure. He noted that international Winthrops players who did not receive full scholarships actually generated more college money by paying out-of-state tuition fees.

If we had had more Americans from the mountain area like Nevada, Utah, Arizona over the past five to 10 years, the support might have been better, so maybe we have more donors, fundraising facilities and maybe this wouldn’t have happened , Said Southern Utah women’s coach Michael Mucci. But there are so many programs that have been discontinued even with a lot of Americans, so I believe it really depends on the situation.

Winthrop didn’t have a single American player on the men’s or women’s rosters this year. The international players who have remained in the US, such as Vannemreddy, face a series of decisions.

He was able to give up college tennis and stay in Winthrop, which respects the financial aid packages it offered its tennis players. Or he could try to play elsewhere knowing that there are fewer roster spots available with a surplus of players looking for new homes.

He can’t help but wonder about the risk of choosing a school that could end its own program in a year.

That’s definitely something I’m thinking about, Vannemreddy said. There is so much uncertainty at these times. It’s actually a gamble, if I’m honest.

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Washington’s AP Sports writer Howard Fendrich contributed to this report.

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