Gaining Ground
Husky Athletics Seeks to Win on All Fronts
By Daniel Penrice
To gauge the fitness of Northeastern's athletics program today, take
a look back to 199697. Although posting his first winning record (6-5)
since coming to N.U. in 1991, head football coach Barry Gallup led a team
that remained mired in a tradition of mediocrity. On the basketball court
that year, both the men's and women's entrants took pratfalls: new men's
coach Rudy Keeling-taking over after a disastrous second and final season
on the part of his predecessor, Dave Leitao, BA'83-debuted with a 7-20
mark, while veteran coach Joy Malchodi's women's team fared even worse
at 4-23. The men's hockey team, under the tutelage of another new coach,
Bruce Crowder, wobbled through an 8-25-3 campaign. Among the major, marquee
sports, only women's ice hockey gave Husky fans anything to cheer about,
as coach Heather Linstad's squad (slated for club status only a year before)
skated to a 27-9 record and an ECAC (Eastern College Athletic Conference)
title.
Off the field that year, N.U.'s athletics department was trying to
gain ground after being thrown for a few losses. After finding that some
of Husky basketball legend Reggie Lewis's teammates (although not Lewis
himself) had used drugs while at Northeastern, a commission appointed by
former president John A. Curry had recently recommended significant changes
not only in the supervision of student-athletes but also in the governance
of the department. The need for reform had been reinforced in the spring
of 1996, when the men's crew was compelled to withdraw from the National
Rowing Association meet because a team member was found to be academically
ineligible. And early in 1997, the university was slapped with its second
lawsuit in as many years charging failure to comply with Title IX, the
federal civil rights law mandating equal opportunity for women in college
athletics. This was a lot to handle for a football coach doubling as athletics
director, as Gallup was at the time.
If the end of the 199697 academic year found Northeastern athletics
in a bit of a slump, since then the program has been staging a rally. The
women's ice hockey team has kept winning, the football and men's hockey
teams (although still struggling) have each managed one successful season,
and-as no one who follows N.U. sports will have forgotten-the women's basketball
squad won the America East title last year and made it to its first NCAA
tournament. As the new basketball season rolls around, both the women's
and men's teams look forward to playing in a renovated Cabot Center. Meanwhile,
among the sports with smaller followings, Husky athletics has not only
continued several winning traditions-in field hockey, baseball, and track,
for example-but has also begun raising the level of its game in programs
that have foundered in recent years, such as volleyball and soccer.
Up in the front office, Ian McCaw, hired in 1997 as the full-time athletics
director, has implemented the reforms recommended by the Lewis commission,
including random drug testing of student-athletes. In 1998, the athletics
department adopted a strategic plan aimed not only at increasing the teams'
competitiveness but also at raising standards in every aspect of its program:
the student-athlete experience (including academics); sportsmanship, compliance,
equity, and diversity; departmental management; and finances. Northeastern
athletics today is not only in compliance with Title IX, but has become
a national leader in ensuring gender equity. The thirty-seven-year-old
McCaw, whose combination of youth and professionalism promises a new chapter
in N.U. athletics, summarizes the direction of the university's program
today as a transition "from adolescence to adulthood." for most
people with an interest in college sports, winning is the only thing that
matters. Yet an overview of the competitive strength of Northeastern's
teams today reveals many success stories, some notable laggards, and reminders
that-in athletics as in life-results are often mixed and unpredictable.
There are probably more New England sports fans who associate Bill Buckner
with manual dexterity or Larry Bird with charm than Northeastern University
with its football team. The Huskies' 19-14 record over the three seasons
preceding the current one represents N.U.'s best three-year showing on
the gridiron in thirty years-hardly the kind of performance that kindles
passions. On consecutive weekends last month, the team thoroughly outplayed
and nearly beat Boston College (the first Division I-A opponent that a
Northeastern squad had ever faced, as well as the Goliath of New England
college sports), then collapsed in a 77-0 loss to Atlantic Ten rival UMass.
Winding up his second consecutive losing season since going 8-3 two years
ago, coach Gallup says, "Obviously we're very disappointed with our
record." By next fall, he hopes to have the Huskies back on track
towards his goal of either capturing an Atlantic Ten title or winning enough
games (eight or nine) to secure a I-AA playoff berth.
Unlike its gridiron counterpart, the men's basketball program is no
stranger to the limelight. The great teams of the 1980s-when Northeastern
made six trips to the NCAA tournament, including one every year during
Reggie Lewis's phenomenal career-still cast their shadow over a program
that has fared poorly in the second half of the 1990s. Coach Keeling's
reputation as a turnaround artist is being tested after three seasons in
which he has compiled a record of 31-52 (21-33 in America East). The other
major men's squad, the hockey team, faces a similar challenge, as the years
since the Huskies' 1994 NCAA tournament appearance have been lackluster.
Coach Crowder, with a record of 40-60-9 for his first three seasons (and
a last-place finish in Hockey East last year), has rightly described the
task that he faces as "building" rather than "maintaining"
a program.
The recent history of the women's teams in basketball and ice hockey
offers a brighter, even inspiring, story. The basketball team captured
three Seaboard Conference championships and made one trip to the ECAC Division
I tournament in the 1980s. Since then, the team has had its ups and downs,
but took only two seasons to rebound from an abysmal 199697 campaign
and go all the way to the NCAA tournament-and a near upset of North Carolina-last
year. The ice hockey team, which had gone 14-15-5 in 199596, not only
won the ECAC and Beanpot championships the very next year but goes into
the 19992000 season with a three-year mark of 78-22-8.
Beyond these major sports, N.U.'s overall athletics record today is
a strong one. (For a summary of how the rest of the teams have fared of
late, see the article below.) At the same time, the athletics department's
strategic plan proclaims that one of its major goals is to "achieve
competitive success in every sport program." As one means of accomplishing
this, the department has replaced a tiering system, in which football,
field hockey, men's and women's basketball, and men's ice hockey received
formal priority for staffing and funding, with a new sport-by-sport programming
plan. Still, athletics director McCaw admits that certain sports-football,
men's and women's basketball, and men's and women's ice hockey-generate
more revenue than others, and asserts, "It would be foolish of us
not to emphasize those programs and do everything we can to capitalize
on their value."
Among those teams that bring in few or no dollars, one coach has openly
questioned the athletics department's commitment to his program's success.
Last spring, the department announced that the men's and women's soccer
programs would be combined for budgetary reasons, and subsequently chose
men's coach Ed Matz to lead both squads without making the job a full-time
appointment. In an interview with the N.U. student newspaper in June, Matz
complained about a lack of resources for his sport, saying, "The administration
really has to sit down and ask, 'Do we want to have soccer?' " McCaw
denies that the athletics department is wavering in its commitment to soccer
(although he allows that "on our food chain, soccer is on the bottom"),
and describes the combining of the two programs as temporary.among the
toughest competitions in which college athletes engage is the one between
sports and academics. Although Northeastern's soccer teams are still proving
themselves on the field, their players are clearly winners in the classroom.
With team GPAs of 3.08 and 3.06, respectively, for the fall through spring
quarters of 199899, both the men's and women's soccer squads have
outscored the average N.U. student-athlete.
Not that the typical Husky player does poorly academically. The average
GPA for Northeastern student-athletes for the fall through spring quarters
of 199899 was 2.86-not far behind that for all N.U. undergraduate
day school students over the same period, which was 2.99. These athletics
graduation rates advertise the moral advantages of life outside the charmed
but infernal circle of the "big time." For the class of students
on athletics scholarships who entered college as freshmen in 199293,
N.U. boasts a graduation rate of 67 percent. This number compares quite
favorably with graduation rates over the same period of 58 percent for
scholarship athletes in Division I schools generally, and 45 percent for
all Northeastern students.
Although N.U.'s student-athletes may not face the same pressures as
their counterparts at the Ohio States (or even the Boston Colleges) of
the collegiate sports world, balancing athletics and academics-along with
co-op-remains a contest for Husky players. Volleyballer Elizabeth Waclawik,
a middler who has played a two-season sport while maintaining a 3.64 average
in mechanical engineering during her first two years, speaks of the challenges
involved in keeping up with classes: "You have to be disciplined enough
to bring your work and do it on the bus, or in your hotel room, whenever
you have time." While acknowledging the heavy time demands on student-athletes,
both coaches and players say that the pressure itself can help with the
development of time-management skills. "I think I do better in school
when I'm in season," says men's soccer co-captain Greg Ehrman, a senior
majoring in architecture, "just because I don't have time to waste."
Sometimes the potential conflict between academics and athletics becomes
real and unresolvable, as recently happened for Doug Tillberg, a former
defensive lineman on the football team who decided this past summer to
leave the team in order to focus on his studies. "In my twenty-five
years of coaching, I have never seen anything like this," coach Gallup
was quoted as saying when Tillberg-a senior political science major with
a GPA he calls "a hair under 3.7" going into the current quarter-announced
his decision. Yet Tillberg, who says that he has long been bothered by
"not being able to immerse myself in subjects," would appear
to be an exceptionally focused student rather than the harbinger of a trend.
Gallup expresses a view endorsed by other coaches when he says, "I
do see them looking to the future more, because they know they have to
go to law school or grad school or business school. But I see them balancing
[athletics and academics] more too." college athletics programs face
more pressure today than in the past to ensure that student-athletes can
compete in the classroom as well as on the playing field. This requires
particular attention to the academic fitness, conditioning, and success
of minority student-athletes, who have too often supplied the cannon fodder
for big-time sports at American universities. At the same time, colleges
and universities today are not allowed to treat their female student-athletes
as second- or third-stringers. In these two critical areas-racial and gender
equity-N.U.'s athletics department is currently putting up more than respectable
numbers.
The strategic plan talks about diversity as well as equity, and by the
athletics department's own reckoning, African-Americans, Latinos, and other
minorities accounted for twenty-one percent of all Husky student athletes
in 199899, when the comparable figure for full-time Northeastern undergraduates
was just over nineteen percent. These numbers meet the plan's objective
of developing a "diversity plan for intercollegiate athletics which
exceeds the representation of minorities in the university community."
Yet because America's legacy of racism has historically made athletics
both the surest path to college for many African-Americans and a way of
denying their aspirations once they get there, the real story here is how
well the university does in providing genuine educational opportunity for
African-American student-athletes.
In 199798-the most recent year for which NCAA-compiled figures
on scholarship students are available-African-Americans accounted for 15.2
percent of N.U. scholarship athletes, as opposed to 5.1 percent of the
undergraduate student body. The real significance of such figures is revealed
by the strong graduation rates of African-American scholarship athletes
at Northeastern in recent years. For the four classes of African-American
students on athletics scholarships that entered the university between
198990 and 199293, the graduation rate is 67 percent (57 percent
for women and 74 percent for men). These figures can be compared with graduation
rates, for the same entering classes over the same period, of 41 percent
for all Northeastern students (43 percent for women and 40 percent for
men), and 26 percent for all African-American students (28 percent for
women and 24 percent for men).
N.U.'s two African-American head coaches speak of other, more qualitative
measures by which the university has become a good place for African-American
student-athletes. While praising academic support programs for minority
students and students generally, men's basketball coach Rudy Keeling also
says, "I think that one of the major components of Northeastern is
the image that our student-athletes can have of the success of the black
athlete [outside of athletics]. You take a [dean of student services] Keith
Motley [Ed'78, GB'81], who played at Northeastern, or you take our provost,
[David Hall], who played at Kansas State-those type of role models, I think,
are genuinely the best for minority kids." Track coach Sherman Hart,
LA'74, who played football for N.U., says that things are "far better"
for African-American student-athletes than they were when he wore a Husky
uniform. "They're treated more as students-not just as athletes-from
what I see in the halls and from talking to other coaches," he observes.
Female student-athletes have also come a long way at Northeastern. When
the National Women's Law Center brought suit against the university and
two dozen other institutions in 1997, charging failure to comply with Title
IX, the complaint was based on the amount of athletics scholarship aid
that N.U. awarded to women relative to their levels of participation in
the school's intercollegiate athletics program. A year earlier, members
of the women's gymnastics team-disbanded at the end of the 199596
academic year-had filed a Title IX complaint against the university on
the grounds that women's participation in intercollegiate sports at N.U.
failed to match their representation within the undergraduate student body.
(The women's gymnastics team was reinstated for 199798, then permanently
disbanded.) Today, both lawsuits have been resolved and N.U. is in full
compliance with Title IX in terms of both participation and scholarships.
N.U. reached the required gender balance only after three men's teams-in
swimming, tennis, and golf-were eliminated in the 1990s. Critics of Title
IX sometimes point to such moves to argue that the statute, in the guise
of expanding athletic opportunities for women, actually restricts them
for men. Yet Gallup, who served as athletics director during the period
when the three men's programs were cut, says that Title IX should not be
blamed for those decisions, which were based on a combination of factors
besides gender. In addressing gender equity, he also explains, "We
basically followed the trends." This led to N.U.'s hiring of full-time
coaches in women's ice hockey and crew, a dramatic increase in scholarships
in women's crew, and the addition of varsity women's soccer. More recently,
according to McCaw, the athletics department has used "roster management"
to "essentially cap our men's programs and . . . expand our women's
rosters to come into compliance."
Gender equity, as defined in some of Title IX's more obscure provisions,
was also a factor in recent, significant changes in the track and soccer
programs. In the summer of 1998, the men's and women's track teams were
combined under the direction of a single coach; veteran women's coach (and
former part-timer) Sherman Hart was named full-time head track coach while
former men's coach, Mark Lech, BB'79, became an "associate."
(Lech has since left Northeastern to assume the post of women's cross-country
coach at the University of Maine.) Then, this past spring, the athletics
department decided to combine the men's and women's soccer programs. While
soccer coach Matz now leads two teams as a part-timer (although with the
help of three part-time assistants), former women's coach Julia Claudio
has left the school.
Although the women's soccer team may still take a while to become a
consistent winner, it is noteworthy that every one of N.U.'s other women's
programs is strong, and indeed that the women's teams, on the whole, are
now significantly more successful than the men's. What accounts for this
disparity? Gallup points to the "continuity" that many of the
women's programs have enjoyed, with coaches such as basketball's Malchodi
(who came to Northeastern in 1980) and field hockey's Cheryl Murtaugh,
MBA'91 (who arrived in 1988), having had years to build their programs,
while major men's sports such as basketball and hockey have had significant
turnover at the top in the 1990s.
For her part, one of these long-serving and successful
women's coaches offers measured praise for the university's current support
of women's athletics. When she first came to N.U., Malchodi observes, women's
varsity basketball "was more like an intramural program." Today,
she says, "The university is finally really giving a lot more attention
to the gender-equity situation than ever before, and that's a big plus."
Even so, noting that Title IX was passed back in 1972, Malchodi says, "For
me it's been too darn long. Quite honestly, I've gone through all the fighting,
people fighting Title IX-it has not been, 'Hey, Title IX [is in place],
we're going to give you this and we're going to give you that.' It's been
a struggle." Moreover, Malchodi believes that women's athletics at
Northeastern still has "a long way to go" when it comes, for
example, to budgets. as the attention now given to issues such as racial
and gender equity suggests, there is much more at stake in college sports
today than school pride or a little good, clean fun for students and alumni.
Athletics' strategic plan notes that "As universities compete for
the high-stakes benefits which successful intercollegiate athletics yield,
including substantial revenues, unique institutional marketing and development
opportunities, and national visibility, an environment of scrutiny, unprecedented
pressure, and extraordinary expectations are descending upon athletics
departments." In this new arena, a college athletics program without
professional management will flounder like a football coach without his
headphones.
As far as management is concerned, the hiring of McCaw as athletics
director seems to have been a big step in the right direction. Much of
his prior experience (at the University of Maine and Tulane University)
was in the area that McCaw describes as "really the majority of the
job at this point"-bringing in revenue. The reason that Northeastern,
anachronistically, had its football coach doubling as athletics director
from 1993 until 1997 was the university budget crisis of the early 1990s.
While the annual athletics budget (which includes funds for campus recreation
as well as intercollegiate sports) has held steady at approximately $10
million since McCaw's arrival, the department now has a mandate from President
Richard Freeland to pay more of its own freight. McCaw and his management
team are starting to have to play for real money.
McCaw reports that the athletics department is currently bringing in
revenues (apart from fund-raising) of approximately $1 million per year,
or about twenty percent of the portion of the athletics budget designated
for purposes other than financial aid. This sum-which comes from ticket
sales and sports passes, merchandising and licensing, corporate sponsorship,
and Marino Recreation Center dues and fees-has doubled in the two years
since McCaw took the reins. He now wants to double revenue generated from
these sources again by 2001. As part of this aggressive agenda, the athletics
department has recently begun a campaign aimed at increasing ticket sales
by twenty percent per year, and is developing new merchandising and licensing
initiatives as well as a corporate sponsorship program (in which Northeastern
University Magazine participates).
Money that the department generates through fund-raising is not counted
in the establishment of annual budgets, and therefore constitutes an important
means for N.U. athletics not only to maintain its current programs but
also to realize its aspirations for the future. Here too the department's
plans are ambitious: a three-year-old annual fund, which raised $217,000
last year, is seeking $300,000 for 19992000. While the actual dollar
figures are still modest, Jim Madigan, BA'86, N.U.'s new director of athletics
development, notes that the university has a "relatively young alumni
base," and sees "a lot of room for growth" in giving to
Husky sports.
The athletics department's overall goal for increases in fund-raising,
annual and capital, is now a hefty twenty percent per year. On the capital
projects side, the current renovation of the Cabot Physical Education Center
will require $4.5 million, $2 million of which the department aims to raise
on its own. Basketball coaches Keeling and Malchodi agree that the formerly
dismal condition of their facility has hampered recruiting in the past,
and describe the Cabot renovation as a major boost for their programs.
Stating that he hopes to schedule one home game per year against a big-name
opponent in the near future, Keeling adds, "And then ultimately what
I want to get to is that Cabot becomes too small-that we get such a crowd,
and going to our games becomes such a happening, that we can't play in
Cabot." no doubt most husky football fans-whose team has had its problems
over the years in persuading potential recruits to spend their college
careers playing in the humble precincts of Parsons Field-would love to
shout "sis-boom-bah" in a shiny new stadium. (McCaw says that
this prospect is high on his wish list, although when and how this aspiration
will become reality it is still too early to tell.) Meanwhile, with last
month's football matchup with Boston College having transported the Huskies,
however briefly, to new competitive heights, some supporters dream of a
heroic new era in Northeastern sports-through a leap into Division I-A
football, for example. Do their fantasies have any hope of becoming reality?
Given that turning N.U. into a big-time sports school on the BC model
would require, first and foremost, a significant financial investment,
no one in the athletics department talks of any major expansion in the
foreseeable future. "I don't think we have the infrastructure to go
I-A now," says McCaw of the football program, also noting that the
NCAA's divisional structure for football will soon be undergoing an overhaul,
in which the nation's fifty or sixty truly big-time football schools will
be separated out from the rest of the current Division I-A. Most coaches
questioned about resources for their sports acknowledge that, like others
around the university, they would like to have more funds, but pronounce
themselves generally satisfied with existing support for their own programs.
Women's ice hockey coach Linstad expresses contentment with her own situation
but goes so far as to say that the athletics department's "hands are
a little tied on the money and the support that athletics actually gets
here at Northeastern." Associate Athletics Director for Communications
Jack Grinold also thinks that N.U. athletics could use some more "administrative
and recruiting dollars."
Yet overall, says Grinold, the athletics program is "on the right
course." "I think [N.U.] has a very nice niche," he observes
of Northeastern's standing among New England's Division I schools. "I
don't think we should chase the bigs, and I don't think the university
is aspiring to chase the real bigs." What N.U. is doing, according
to Boston College athletics director Gene DeFilippo, is building up its
program "the right way": "They're totally compliant with
conference and NCAA rules. They are doing it with student-athletes who
are students as well as athletes. I commend them for a job well done."
The old adage, often forgotten in the fevered world of big-time college
sports, holds that it isn't whether you win or lose that counts, but how
you play the game. With plenty of wins to cheer, Husky fans should also
get a boost from rooting for a school that actually knows where the goal
is.
Return to top of
page