what's that smell? Oh , it's the PSU fencing team Due to an incredibly painful back injury, jazzbalhg is not in the mood to funny this week. Ergo...
As previously documented in jazzblahg Penn State has a great fencing program. In what can only be described as blatant copyright infringement, the article below, recently published in the NYT, further expands...You may be surprised.
One Sunday morning every fall, members of the
Penn State fencing team spend hours scraping nacho cheese, chewing tobacco, peanut shells and cigarette butts off the floor of the university’s 107,000-seat football stadium.
Cleaning after a home game is an annual fund-raising ritual for the team, a coed varsity program that is one of the most successful in national competition. Unfortunately for Division I athletes in sports like fencing, winning championships does not guarantee financial stability.
The cash cow of college athletics returns next week, when multimillion-dollar television programming begins with college football and continues through the end of the
N.C.A.A. men’s college basketball tournament in April. But for many athletes who compete in sports that do not produce revenue — the sports other than football and basketball — the arrival of the college football season means the return to working for the programs they see on television in order to support their own teams.
At N.C.A.A. Division I universities, football and basketball generate most of the revenue that comes from teams, and even some of those programs cannot make ends meet. For other sports, universities often leave it up to players and coaches to find other sources of funding.
For Butler softball players, that has meant working the gates at football games and cleaning the basketball arena. At Utah, that has led to having swimmers serve as hospitality workers in the suites at football games. And in the case of Penn State’s fencing program, that has involved cleaning the trash left behind by the crowds that attend home football games at Beaver Stadium.
“It’s one of the grossest things I’ll ever have to do — hopefully — in my life,” said the Penn State senior Megan Luteran, a captain of the fencing team, which last season won its 10th national title in 18 years.
Joe Paterno, Penn State’s football coach, only underscored the uncomfortable nature of the fencers’ job when he said his team would help clean Beaver Stadium on Sundays this season without compensation. The decision was a punishment for several football players’ suspected connection to an off-campus fight.
Some coaches and administrators insist that it is unreasonable to ask Division I athletes to participate in small moneymaking projects, especially those that involve working for more profitable programs.
Billy Martin, the coach of U.C.L.A.’s men’s tennis team, a perennial national championship contender, acknowledged that his program could not make any money for the athletic department, but he called some of the small projects “high schoolish.”
Bob Reasso, the men’s soccer coach at Rutgers, said: “You’re not going to ask a major Division I football or basketball athlete to do a car wash. We have the same caliber athletes.”
At Butler, a university that recently cut its men’s lacrosse and men’s swimming programs, the softball coach Jeanne Rayman raises about 15 percent of her program’s annual budget through fund-raisers. Her team has sold cookie sheets and held a beanbag-tossing tournament.
“I’m always looking to find something unique, where people don’t just say, Oh, this is just another fund-raiser,” said Rayman, who says she discloses her team’s efforts when recruiting players.
Butler softball teams have also worked the gates at football games, sold concessions at men’s basketball games, cleaned the basketball arena and helped direct cars at
Indiana Pacers and
Indianapolis Colts games.
“The reality of where we are today is that we need to find a way to supplement budgets,” said Barry Collier, Butler’s athletic director. “This is part of it.”
Andrew Brown, a senior on the men’s swimming team at Utah, said that male and female swimmers at his university have had to stock suite refrigerators before football games, then hand out marketing materials at the stadium gates and make sure guests in the suites and the press box have enough food and drinks.
“I’m just happy we still have a swimming team, because a lot of Division I teams are being cut,” said Brown, who has an athletic scholarship that pays for his tuition and books.
Other programs choose to avoid small-scale, time-consuming fund-raising work in favor of relying entirely on other sources of funding, like donations. Doug Smith, the associate athletic director for development at Baylor, said he did not believe in “project-oriented programs,” which he said involve too much work and time and produce an inadequate financial return. Penn State’s fencing team sells university merchandise at football games, and the money they gather from stadium cleaning — several thousand dollars a year — enables them to take an overseas trip once every four years.
Jimmy Moody, a junior on the fencing team, said he found the stadium cleaning experience humbling and understood that Penn State’s football team brought in money that benefited his team. But he was also interested in finding out how the football players would react to the dirty work.
“I’m glad for once that they’ll have to do it,” Moody said. “They’ll get a taste of it. They get to see what we do every year.”
N.C.A.A. bylaws limit the number of hours student-athletes can spend on “athletically related activities.” But those activities do not include fund-raising, said Stacey Osburn, a spokeswoman for the N.C.A.A. Osburn said most rules about fund-raising were left up to individual universities.
At Butler, Rayman said, the continual projects can seem like a burden for some of her players.
“They have so much going on in their college lives, trying to be the best athletes they can be and trying to have somewhat of a social life,” Rayman said. “It just becomes a daily grind. It’s more of a drain on them than a morale booster.”
For many student-athletes, including Brown, the Utah swimmer, the choice between working for high-profile teams and abandoning the sports they love is easy to make.
“It’s unfair that we have to put in extra work because our sport might not be as much fun to watch,” Brown said. “But it is fair that the school is giving us a chance to work to keep the program around.”
Emmanuil Kaidanov, Penn State’s fencing coach, said he thought cleaning the stadium, however unpleasant it might be, was a good team-building effort. He emphasized his 10 national titles and asked how anybody could question him.
“We bond through our misery,” Moody said.
