It looks like Alma Mater, not content with its current ignominy, is on the verge of dropping out of NCAA Division I and going to non-scholarship sports.
This is a bad idea on a lot of levels, but here are just a few of the problems:
1) Not to put too fine a point on it, but if it weren’t for scholarship athletics, the campus would be a lot less diverse. I mean, a *lot*. I mean, there was ONE non-white guy in my entire graduating class who wasn’t varsity.
2) BSC averages something like 94% graduation for athletes, which is several dozen percentage points above the campus as a whole. Never mind college athletics as a whole. Clearly, you cannot make the case that academics are suffering from too much sport.
3) We have a couple of first-rate coaches in basketball and baseball who won three NAIA national championships between them from 1990 to 2001. They went through the move to Division I, including several years where we were ineligible to compete for postseason honors. (Basketball came within an eyelash of going to the tournament the FIRST YEAR IN…except we weren’t eligible.) Are these guys really going to hang around to coach glorified intramurals?
4) We’ve been down this road before: in 1939, BSC scrapped ALL its varsity sports in favor of “Sports for All,” the intramural program. It took sixty years before we got back to the same number of sports…hell, it took sixty-five years to get to the same number of WOMEN’S SPORTS that we had in the 1930s. You would be hard-pressed to make the case that BSC was a better school from the 40s to the 70s thanks to the absence of every sport but men’s basketball (and a pretty crap team at that). And the much-vaunted “Sports for All” is basically nothing but an organizing framework for fraternity leagues.
5) Speaking of which – if they can find the money for new sorority townhouses AND new fraternity houses, they can goddamn well cough up the money to keep a campus entity running that a) actually unites the student body and b) doesn’t fucking embarrass the alumni on CNN in front of God and the nations.
6) Those blasted Baptists over the mountain at Jesus A&M manage to keep a full slate of sports and a football team too. If they can, and we can’t, I respectfully suggest the Methodists of the United Conference of North Alabama and West Florida aren’t doing their part.
7) So there’s a cash crisis and we have to make the money up somewhere? And enrollment’s down? Maybe they should pay less attention to the drain of the sports teams and more attention to THE FUCKING RICH PRICKS WHO ARE BURNING DOWN CHURCHES FOR FUN. It is possible – just barely slightly possible – that seeing these kids packed off campus in cop cars on every news show in America MIGHT have had a deleterious impact on new applications and alumni giving! I mean, call me crazy, but you don’t miss your enrollment goal by 25% because you had too much money in the conference-champion women’s rifle team…
8) I do not have a lot of happy memories of my time on the Hilltop. It was insufficiently Hobbesian – it was poor, nasty and brutish, but it sure wasn’t short enough. I have very little good to say about my time there that doesn’t involve basketball. But I joined the alumni booster club with two years of school left to go. I wailed on a trombone in the band for three years. I took over as sports editor of the campus paper my senior year just to make sure it acknowleged that we *had* a team, let alone that they were contending for a national championship. I have kicked in God knows how much money to keep the basketball team at the top of whatever level they play in, be it NAIA, transitional, or Big South. After I threw in my Black Tie Club money every single year – including some years when I didn’t have a pot to piss in – I will NOT be happy if the college decides to pull a Brave Sir Robin with the only entity on campus that doesn’t make me want to stick my head in the fucking oven every time I remember I went to school there!
In fact, if they pull the plug, I’m done. I am now taking applications for a new alma mater. If you can whip up a convincing story of how I went to school at your institution for four years, Photoshop up some pictures and arrange for post-hypnotic suggestion, I will gladly throw in my lot with your school and bestow my support on it for the remainder of my days. Provided, of course, it’s not just as embarassing as my own. If you went to Auburn or Tennessee, don’t even bother.
One of these days, I’m going to get around to posting about the utter dysfunction of my college experience, from age 5 to the present, but this will have to do for now. Gah. Also, gah.
-May 18, 2006
The Board of Trustees announced that they intend to pursue a move to Division III, beginning with the 2007-2008 academic year. One lame-duck season in Division I, followed by an end to scholarship athletics.
In addition, they announced plans to start football in Division III, complete with an on-campus facility.
In related news, the Birmingham News reports that the NCAA was approached in February by an institution, requesting anonymity, seeking to explore a move from Division I to Division III.
So the question is twofold:
1) If we don’t have the money to stay in Division I, exactly where in the FUCKING FUCK do we have the money to start up the most expensive sport a college can play, and build it a new stadium to boot?
2) Has this move been in the works for three or four months now, and if so, why has so much effort been made to keep it secret?
I can answer both of those in one: because Birmingham-Southern College is a garbage institution with a garbage administration.
I’d really appreciate it if you could all forget I ever went there. I know I’m starting right now.
-May 26, 2006
I knew what a four-year scholarship was before I was five years old.
I say this to illustrate the pull exerted on me by the concept of college. As a child, the notion that I would go to college one day was a fact as self-evident as the color of the sky or the wetness of water. As an adolescent, I was fed a steady diet of lies by the likes of Val Kilmer in Real Genius. By the time I reached high school – and especially when things weren’t going well, and ESPECIALLY my senior year – I was told over and over how great things would be in college, how I would thrive once I got to college, how the college experience would be exactly what I needed.
I didn’t do too much to get ready, though. I applied to only three schools: Vanderbilt (main aspiration for any southerner), Alabama (more or less guaranteed and affordable) and, in an odd twist, Birmingham-Southern College. Those who have paid attention know what I think now, but at the time, I knew it only as the place where I took piano lessons for the better part of twelve years and where I first set foot in 1977 for a piano recital.
And they came after me HARD. I got some sort of correspondence just about every day for most of the year. Senior Days, an overnight stay, homecoming basketball tickets (in fairness, Alabama did come across with three different non-conference football games in Tuscaloosa, and far from the worst seats you could ask for). but nobody sweated me harder than BSC. And like an idiot, I stopped at three schools.
Come the spring, and BSC offered me full tuition. Vandy did not. Until they didn’t, I hadn’t realized just how much my heart was set on going there, and I was devestated. It only took a couple of days after that for me to call BSC and accept their offer.
Summer came, and I started to get the invites to the various summer fraternity rush parties. I didn’t think anything of them, couldn’t really envision myself in a fraternity – and then my mother did some calling around. (In my life, my mom has done two things I didn’t really think highly of at the time but which, in retrospect, were sound. One was insisting I go to RLC for high school, and the other was pre-investigating the rush business at BSC.) Come to find out that 85% of the day program students at BSC (i.e. not Adult Studies or masters’ program) were in fraternities and sororities.
Well hell, this changes things.
So I went to all six. I still remember the order: ATO, Sigma Chi, Sigma Nu, Theta Chi, SAE, and KA. I met some of the guys I would share a dorm with that fall. I met a lot of guys, for that matter. Ate a lot of overcooked hamburgers, fell off a sailboat, flipped an inner tube, heard some of the worst garage bands in Birmingham. And while I didn’t really feel it from these people, I figured, well, what the hell, might as well give it a shot, this is a big part of things, right? And I was assured that yes, it was a VERY big part of things. Right up until the beginning of school, the first week of classes, and the formal rush week. So I stooged around between the houses for a couple of nights, went to my dorm, and waited for the invite for the next stage of the process…which never came. And just like that, the end of the fraternity experience.
A few of the usual counselor and administrator-type people immediately began a big song-and-dance about how the Greek experience wasn’t really all that critical a part of life at BSC, and I nodded in all the right places, but this was my formal introduction to the only real tradition BSC has: the blowing of smoke up the ass. Students, faculty, teams, clubs, buildings – they all come and go from the Hilltop, but the blowing of smoke up the ass of everyone from students to parents to alumni to media – that is forever. I probably know more about the history of BSC than anyone who hasn’t written a book on it, and I can tell you that it lacks for any kind of tradition. There’s no statue that crumbles if a virgin graduates, there’s no brass panther with its nose rubbed bright for luck, there’s no bicycle race in your underwear every March, and the fight song doesn’t even have words. The one tradition at BSC is that things will be handled in the dark, without your input, and you will be deceived about it for as long as they can get away with it.
It became apparent rather quickly that if you weren’t in one of the Greek organizations, your social life was going to be a bit limited. There was a band party in the fall and another one in the spring, and occasionally a movie on a screen up on the dorm quad. That was it. That was the full extent of college-supported social life. There was a gameroom in the basement of the dorm-quad eatery…that stayed locked up all the time. There was a ten-foot fence around the campus and dire warnings about leaving it after dark. And there was a city that I already knew better than the back of my hand from my high-school days…one whose under-21 entertainment options had long since been tapped to dry. As for the other students – well, they retreated into their pledge groups and pulled the ladders up behind, and in a perverse parody, so did the theater students, the fine-arts majors, the soccer team, the baseball team, the basketball team, the international students, and just like that, the music stopped and I was looking for a chair. That was early September, 1990. A mere three years and eight months until graduation. No problem.
I knew this one girl from Governor’s School the previous summer. We had a bit of a fling, that sort of adolescent fling where you don’t actually make any physical contact or even speak to each other for a week and a half out of the two you’re in school. But hell, I was grasping at straws, and she had a roommate, and she said her roommate had a crush on me. And I looked around me, and thought that this might well be the only shot I got at having a girlfriend for the next four years, and I gladly bought the line she was selling…We were together for three years, and I was miserable for two and eleven-twelfths of them. But I stayed with her, because just about everyone I knew, I knew through her. I built a little rapport with some of the guys on my floor, but at the end of the semester, everyone moved around to bunk with one of their pledgemates. (I ultimately wound up with 6 different roommates in 4 years.) I got to know some other people, but she got increasingly clingy and took up more and more of my time.
If I could travel back in time and speak to my freshman self, I would open my remarks by smacking him HARD across the face and explain to him that poor self-esteem and defective social skills were NO excuse for staying in a dysfunctional relationship, and that if he was miserable, he should either get out of the relationship and make his life his own and make a fucking EFFORT, or else transfer. Obviously that didn’t happen.
What I eventually had was basketball. Somehow, somewhere in the midst of my senior year of high school, the “raging sports maniac” gene that had been supressed for eighteen years lit up like a Christmas tree. Everything in the world of sports that wasn’t Alabama football was new to me, and I devoured it voraciously, just like I would the Macintosh in 1994 or New Wave music in 2002. (Let’s overlook how long it took me to arrive and just celebrate that I made it at all, okay?) And BSC was just coming off their first NAIA national championship in basketball. A huge deal, a massive win…and an empty arena, for the most part. One fraternity regularly delivered a full-throated cheering section, and the band wailed like maniacs, but for the most part, you could hear the scoreboard tick. As the season wore on, it got better, and in February, the two rivalry games brought a decent crowd (if mostly from the other school sometimes), but for the bulk of the year, it was band, friends, family, Sigma Nu, and yours truly.
But I loved it. I found out the Pep Band wasn’t all that picky and would train you to play the music, so at the beginning of my sophomore year, I signed up, and next thing you know, I had a bumblebee-striped shirt and a bottle of Gatorade for the breaks. I found out that you didn’t have to be an alum yet to join the alumni booster club, so at the end of my sophomore year, I signed up, and have done so ever since, even when I thought that the check might bounce if it arrived too soon. My junior year, I found myself on a hall with half the team, and started putting up scores and highlight notes on my wipe-off board (I can’t say whether they paid attention, but one player greeted me one night with “SUPA FAN IN THE MUTHA FUCKIN HOUSE!” and I was “SF” for the rest of the year). And my senior year, I approached the editor of the campus paper about covering the team, only to be greeted with “I was meaning to talk to you…our sports editor flaked. Would you be willing to take the entire section?” Which is how I became a sportswriter for one short year. All things I had for myself, things I could call my own, things that didn’t entail standing around awkwardly through another sorority formal with my girlfriend or another rehearsal night with my girlfriend or another hysterical wailing fit with my girlfriend. I got two spring break trips to play at the NAIA national championship tournament. I got hospitality-room food after every game. I got space to myself, something to take pride in, something I could call my own – the program gave me things I didn’t have the nerve or the brains or the skill set to make for myself.
I remember the last week at BSC vividly – my last paper turned in, my last exam skipped in favor of talking NBA with the professor in his office, the realization that those four years were done. It was a dagger. All I could think was “There’s so much I still have to do.” I would do some of it at Vanderbilt, which had made me a University Graduate Fellow in political science with the goal of a PhD, but using grad school to fill the gaps in your undergrad life is a really really bad idea. Trust me on this one.
In 1999, I got a letter: an anonymous donor had poured literally millions of dollars onto the athletic department and they were going to NCAA Division I. Not only were they going to finally offer a full slate of varsity sports, not only were they finally going to offer women’s sports on an equal footing, but they were going up against the big boys. Samford – the ancient Baptist rival! UAB – the crosstown power! Alabama and Auburn – the Death Stars! We were going to compete on equal (well, sort of equal) footing. We would be the next College of Charleston, the next Gonzaga, the next Bucknell or Holy Cross or Hampton – a giant-killer, the team nobody wanted to see on the 15 line in the tournament. I was thrilled. I actually wore my BSC ring the next day. The challenge had been laid down, and we were rising to meet it.
That was seven years ago. The transition took four full years, during which time we were completely ineligible for postseason play. Entire classes came and went without even a chance to compete for postseason glory, knowing they were building a foundation for the future. Students actually started to show up for games. I went to a basketball game the night before Thanksgiving in 2001, when we were still ineligible for the tournament, when classes were out and the dorms were closed. The place was packed, with a full student section and a raging band. The band director looked at me and grinned, “We’ve got more band for this one than we used to have fans.”
We played SEC schools and scared the shit out of them. We played Texas A&M and beat them by double-digits on their own court. We saw our name on the front page at ESPN.com as their basketball writers campaigned for us to get a berth in the NIT. We won the Big South title in our first season of eligibility. Not only basketball. In three years, BSC teams have won seven conference championships, and the baseball team has played (and won) in the NCAA tournament.
The first time I saw Avenue Q, off-Broadway, it was hysterically funny and true to life, right up to the song “I Wish I Could Go Back To College.” And it hit way too close to home, right up to the line “I wish I had taken more pictures.” Ain’t no need of lying. It wasn’t dusty, or misty or anything. I was crying. Hard. I was blubbering like a wronged mistress in a Mexican soap opera. Not because I wished I had taken more pictures, but because I wish I’d had more to take pictures of. I was young and stupid and I pissed away what should have been some of the best years of my life with nothing to show for it. But I had one thing: as long as the Panthers were clawing their way forward, I could feel like I was part of something special, like I had been there at the beginning of things. They were saying “Here we are, we’re too small and not good enough and we shouldn’t be here, but to hell with you, we’re staying and we’re going to prove we belong.” They were doing exactly what I couldn’t or wouldn’t or just didn’t.
Now they can’t anymore. The trap door just opened up. This year’s incoming freshmen are not guaranteed scholarships after two years. This year’s rising sophomores will have to find some other way to pay for their senior year. In its infinite wisdom, the NCAA has opened the door for anyone who wants to leave to transfer without penalty to another Division I school…but we still have to play next year in a Division I conference with a Division I schedule and, in all likelihood, with Division III talent.
That’s what makes me absolutely fucking insane about this. If it were really about the money, if our situation were that dire, they would do what they always do and start shaking down the donors like crazy. But my phone never rings, the e-mail isn’t any more frequent than once a month or so, the campaign for Panther Athletics doesn’t exist. So they’re jerking the rug out from under our teams for some other purpose, and trying to do so under cover of darkness without a full airing of facts. Smoke, ass. Same as it ever was.
To paraphrase a line from elsewhere: We don’t blame BSC for obfuscating, deceiving, lying, and doing what they do with no apparent goal or purpose, any more than we blame a dog for humping our leg. It’s just the way they’re programmed and they can’t help themselves. But when the dog doesn’t stop humping our leg, we cut his balls off.
That’s why I’m not a Panther anymore.
-May 28, 2006
Eighteen years later, it’s over.
I was right. I was absolutely right. David Pollick was blowing smoke up the ass of everyone. A bell tower, an on-campus lake, a football team and a stadium, all paid for with money they didn’t have and miscalculated the return on – and which my old computer science professor figured out from publicly available data, just before it was too late.
The irony is, if they’d decided in the mid-90s that they were going Division III, and been honest about it, and gone through some kind of evolution – would I still have been alienated? Would I have burned the bridges and then napalmed the ashes the way I did? Because I surely did. The athletic programs at BSC were the one thing that gave me any sense of belonging the whole time I was there – the one thing it turns out I needed more than oxygen – and without that, there was no point clinging to a bad time.
The last graduates are done and gone. The college will wrap up its affairs on May 31, and that will be the end of the story.
Except.
The baseball team is still going. They won a super-regional in two games despite having multiple players down with food poisoning so severe that two were hospitalized and a reliever had to pull an IV fluid needle out of his arm to go pitch almost three innings of relief with the bandage still on. But they are going to open the D3 College World Series on May 31, the last gasp. There is no school behind or beneath them. There is no money to fund and support them other than what can be cadged from GoFundMe. There is no future but what they make themselves. Just a bunch of Panthers, all that’s left after all this time.
So I paid into the GoFundMe. I dug out the hat and put it on. I dug out the ring and put it back on my finger. Because now, with nothing else left, all that remains of BSC is the bit I was able to belong to. And then, win or lose, I have an undergraduate degree from an institution that no longer exists. Nothing they can do any more to embarrass me or make my life worse. No chance of people burning down churches, of camping in trees for years, of hosting blackface frat parties or putting faculty on TV to advocate for idiocy or constantly smashing themselves into a sports brick wall in a college environment that is anarcho-professional now. The last thing BSC might give me is an off-ramp to gracefully get away from college sports for good.
But if they’d been honest, if they’d been realistic, if they’d stayed the course in D-1 and been in Coastal Carolina’s spot in the mid-2010s, or just gone straight to D-3 and followed a path like the city itself to become the kind of place I wouldn’t be sorry to have attended…
Wouldn’t that have been something.