The Syracuse University swimming and diving program is being cut from the school, to be replaced by women's hockey. The athletic dept. head Dr. Daryl Gross has put reason behind this decision saying that he feels women's ice hockey will be more competitive in the NCAA. This is not only ending the 90+ years of swimming, but severing the swimming community from Syracuse University.
As you may have heard the program is being cut and replaced with a women's ice-hockey team. The athletic director, Daryl Gross, claims this to be due to a lack of finances, and that it would cost roughly $35-50 million to rebuild an adequate aquatics facility. However, the swim team is content with the pool they currently swim in, and they are competitive with teams training in similar facilities. In addition, this number is largely inflated, as it can cost as little as $6-10 million dollars to build an Olympic sized pool.
Gross claims that these facilities are necessary to allow the swim team to attain national status, and proposes replacing them with women's ice hockey which would be able to better represent Syracuse on the national arena. However, there are only 33 other women's ice hockey teams throughout the nation for them to compete against, making their success easily attainable. In his quest for national titles, Gross is sacrificing two programs with a 90-year tradition and reputation of producing successful student athletes who consistently achieve higher GPAs and graduation rates than almost any other sport.
This decision will be devastating not only to the Syracuse swim team, but to the swimming community in New York, which boasts roughly 7,200 swimmers from around 165 clubs. Because there are roughly only 7,400 female ice hockey players in the entire nation, this is not a decision that will benefit the surrounding community.
Without Syracuse's swim team there will be 19 division one colleges that offer swimming, two of them being Ivy League. Also not all of these colleges offer both men and women's swimming. As prospective collegiate swimmers who would like to have the option open for swimming in your own state, we ask you to take this into consideration and sign this petition asking Syracuse to keep its swim program, as it would be a prospective option for their future swimming careers.
We appreciate your support to keep Syracuse swimming and diving alive!
