Owens Community College shut down their baseball and softball programs on Wednesday, April 13 as they scrambled to save money and get out of fiscal watch. Just last month, Owens also shut down men’s and women’s soccer, as well as men’s golf.
With all these cuts, the only sports programs that remain for Owens are men’s and women’s basketball along with volleyball. With eliminating these sports programs, the school is expecting to save approximately $236,000 with the cuts, according to WTOL.com.
This news surprised Coach Dintaman along with his players, considering Owens was one of the better programs in the region.
“I was pretty shocked. They’ve always been a poster child for how to run a sports program. They invested a lot of money in there as shown by the President’s office. They were always fully funded with scholarships. They were the strong economic athletic program in the conference. As they invested in athletics, their enrollment was down a lot,” said Dintaman.
Enrollment has also been down at Sinclair a little bit, but Sinclair also didn’t invest the kind of money that Owens did into their sports programs. Owens had 24 scholarships for just their baseball team alone, while Sinclair only gives six to their baseball club.
Alas, Dintaman doesn’t have anything to worry about, or any other sports programs for that matter, according to the Dean of Communications, Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
“There is no reason to believe that (sports programs will be cut). We are very conservative in being fiscally managed as a college. We aren’t under any kind of situation from the state like fiscal watch or anything. The situation is not at Sinclair. It’s not the same as Owens,” said Rethman.
Even with enrollment being down at Sinclair, there have been no talks about any changes to any sports programs in the near future. When Sinclair goes through a budget process, it is not cut and dry as one might think.
“When the college looks at how to balance the budget, they look at areas where they don’t have to spend as much as they have previously. But it’s not a direct link. It’s more of a holistic, kind of across the board. It’s strategic,” said Rethman.
Rethman isn’t claiming to know the answer to every single question as there are many people that contribute to the process of balancing the budget. However, she submits what she believes the amount of money they need to operate successfully as a division and the college allocates the money and figures out what to do with it from there.
Hypothetically, if Sinclair was under a fiscal watch, Sinclair would first look at the return on their investment with their programs.
“If we are spending money on this particular program, is it doing what we want it to do. There’s that strategic piece. If someone retires, we take a serious look at whether or not to replace that position or not,” said Rethman.
Another important factor into deciding what to do with a program is how efficient the program is being. For example, the baseball team has been incredibly successful under Coach Dintaman and have made strides in producing quality student athletes who perform, not only on the field, but also succeeding at the high level in the classroom.
“There’s a couple of things that the sports programs do for the college and one of those is a student engagement piece. Student engagement is important to the college. We want our students to feel like they are a part of Sinclair,” said Rethman.
Along with success of both basketball and baseball comes free press. For instance, WDTN produced a video about men’s basketball coach Jeff Price and their incredible season. It is almost like free advertisement as a result of them performing well. With that, the school finds value in the team. WDTN also produced a video on Sinclair’s baseball team as the Pride honored the history of the Negro Leagues. All of these are taken into consideration when evaluating programs in the school.
Another factor that helps is that Owens spends more than double of what Sinclair spends on their baseball and softball teams. Coach Dintaman said their operating budget is about $16,000 for each baseball and softball team.
So as of right now, Sinclair sports is not in any jeopardy of losing any scholarships or risk of being cut altogether. Dintaman praises Sinclair’s CFO for doing a good job of handling the budget and keeping Sinclair afloat. Athletic Director, Price was not available for comment on this story.
Matthew Summers
Sports Editor