I do differ with Doug on the decision to drop the Men's Soccer program because I'm biased. I was just plain lucky to become a member of Appalachians soccer program and a member of Coach Eric DeGroat's "family" way back in early Sept., 1962. I went to my first practice on crutches, having suffered an ACL-MCL blowout during my senior year in high school. Coach DeGroat took me under his wing knowing that I'd never played the game and wouldn't be able to practice until I was a soph. His advice to me was to watch, ask questions and soak it up like a sponge. I tried to follow his advice and that became my ticket for full admission to the young program. I'm proud to have had an ever-so-small part in the team's colorful, 58 year history and so very sad/angry to see it come unglued so quickly.
I don't blame Doug. He was in a pickle, as the kids say! Besides,the die was really cast years ago when Roachel Laney took a full scholarship away from the team and assigned it elsewhere; and punctuated when Charlie Cobb took 50% of the money set aside for building an on-campus soccer stadium and used it to help pay for cost overruns and hyper-expensive change-orders during construction of the Athletic Center at KBS.
He then gave the other 50% of soccer stadium funding to the The High Country Soccer Association with the understanding that the Appalachian State logo would be placed on an official-sized pitch and that the Mountaineers would be allowed to practice and play there. It became perfectly clear at that point where Men's Soccer's position on the Greater App Totem Pole of Priorities would be going forward. Women's soccer will continue to be held harmless due to the ever-present threat of Tile IX.
Up until today, I've maintained a low-profile on this issue since it was announced. I haven't called or written to Doug because I "get" the pressure he's under (and will continue to be under) until the football/fall sports season either materializes or fades away.
I do feel that the Men's Soccer side of the "story" needs to be known. Those young men gave their all for Appalachian and the story below will show how they were rewarded for their efforts in the classroom (Spring Semester 2020 Team GPA of 3.73) and on the soccer pitch. Not a shining decision for App State admin!
Who killed Appalachian State men’s soccer? The human cost of disbanding a college team...
By Scott Fowler, THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/sport ... 13432.html
Appalachian State players and coaches huddled before taking on North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 2019. The Mountaineers upset the Tar Heels, 1-0. Appalachian State announced it was disbanding the men’s soccer team as a cost-cutting measure on May 26, 2020. TIM COWIE
It started out as a Tuesday just like any other Tuesday. Better, actually, because Appalachian State men’s soccer coach Jason O’Keefe was on vacation in North Myrtle Beach, along with his wife and six-year-old son.
May 26, 2020 — the day after Memorial Day. O’Keefe was at the pool with his son when he got a text around 11:45 a.m. from an App State administrator, telling him to get ready for a hastily scheduled Zoom call with athletic director Doug Gillin at 12:30 p.m.
OK, O’Keefe said. But what was the meeting for?
There was no response. O’Keefe went to his room and, at 12:30 p.m., he saw Gillin pop up on his laptop screen. The AD wasn’t smiling.
“By 12:32, it was over,” O’Keefe said.
Those 120 seconds would change the lives of O’Keefe, his staff and the 29 soccer players they had directed the previous season to App State’s best record since 2002.
Men’s soccer was done at App State, Gillin told O’Keefe.
The team would be disbanded. O’Keefe’s employment would be terminated — not because of unsatisfactory work, but because the team he coached would no longer exist.
And the program — which had existed since 1962 at App State’s picturesque campus in Boone — had done nothing to warrant its sudden disappearance
“Our men’s soccer team was doing all the right things,” Gillin said in one of his emailed responses to a series of questions from The Observer. Gillin also described the men’s coaching staff as “great” and praised the team’s recent progress.
Two other Appalachian State programs were axed that day, too — men’s tennis and men’s indoor track.
The school — which was trying to shave $5 million off its total athletic budget for the fiscal 2021 year — characterized the disbanding of the three sports as a necessary cost-cutting measure due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The decision was not an indictment against any of the sports that were discontinued,” Gillin said.
There wasn’t simply a financial impact, though. There was a large human impact to a day O’Keefe described as “emotionally scarring” and feeling almost like the loss of a loved one.
“And people say, ‘Oh, it’s not life or death,’ ” O’Keefe said. “But I’ll never coach those kids again. ... You’re supposed to go through these phases: Two weeks of anger. Two weeks of denial. ... For three months, I’d go through it every day. And it’s gotten better. (But) there are still things that rip the scab off.”
After hearing he no longer had a job, O’Keefe had to immediately text all of his players to tell them he needed them all on a team Zoom call in an hour, so he could break the bad news before they heard it elsewhere.
The players knew O’Keefe to be methodical, his well-planned schedules were decided far in advance. An out-of-the-blue Zoom call meant something big was up.
“But we had no idea what was coming,” said Parker Cross, a former App State player who was on that team call and has since transferred to N.C. State. “We hadn’t heard anything. Then Jason told us, and I just started crying. A lot of us did.”
THE IMPACT OF COVID-19
The majority of colleges haven’t permanently discontinued any sports due to COVID-19. But App State, which went from fielding 20 teams to 17 on that day in May, is also not the only college to take the “Let’s cut some teams” path.
Winthrop cut men’s and women’s tennis. Furman cut baseball and men’s lacrosse. East Carolina cut men’s and women’s swimming as well as men’s and women’s tennis. Stanford cut 11 sports, although that still left the university fielding 25 teams.
Said Gillin of Appalachian State’s cuts: “Our major budget shortfall due to the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the fact that sustaining 20 (sports) — most in the Sun Belt Conference and top 10 among Group of 5 schools — in a fiscally responsible manner was becoming increasingly difficult. ... (and) led us to discontinue three sports.”
At other colleges, programs have been able to resurrect themselves with successful fundraising campaigns. Bowling Green did that recently with its baseball team, when alumni and donors committed to $1.5 million in donations over a three-year period.
O’Keefe said he asked Gillin in that initial call if a fundraising effort to save the program was an option for men’s soccer, because he thought one could be successful given that the program had nearly 60 years worth of alumni to draw upon.
“That was the only question I asked,” O’Keefe said. “And there was no answer except for ‘This is already done.’ ”
“That option was not presented,” Gillin said, confirming the school couldn’t go the fundraising route. “With the current environment and continued financial challenges, the consequences of this pandemic will be a long-term problem to overcome.”
‘THE SNAP OF A FINGER’
O’Keefe and his assistants have spent much of the past two months trying to help their players explore options. Many will transfer to other schools. Some, however, have decided to stay at App State. Their scholarships — almost all partial, because the team had only about 7.6 scholarships in total to split among 29 players — will still be honored.
Reed Hunnicutt, who went to South Mecklenburg and was honored as one of The Charlotte Observer’s players of the year in 2017, is one of those who will remain in Boone.
A rising senior, Hunnicutt had pointed toward this final season as the one where “we were really going to do something big” as a team.
Instead, he will finish App State without a senior soccer season, but with a construction management degree he should earn by May 2021. Hunnicutt was doing an assignment at an internship at the time of the team Zoom call; he only found out the news when his phone began to boil over with messages in the team’s group chat.
“Angry, you could say,” Hunnicutt said of his reaction to the texts. “It was all taken from our group of boys, with just the snap of a finger.”
‘THE FIRST THING THEY CHOSE TO DO’
O’Keefe, 47, said he wasn’t out to “bash App State” and that he understood college athletics was a business, especially at the Division I level. But one of the things that bothered him about the disbanding of soccer was that he believed cutting sports outright should only be done as a last resort.
“There were a lot of things that we could have done to trim things up,” he said. “Scholarship reduction. Salary pay cuts. ... I think that what made me shocked was that was kind of the first thing that they chose to do.”
App State did institute some other cost reductions, including staff furloughs. Still, hardly any other Division I men’s soccer team in America has been cut in 2020 — Cincinnati is the other prominent school that disbanded its program. Most other schools have found a way to make it work.
O’Keefe had been on the job for four years, turning around a program that had found little success in the 21st century. The Mountaineers had a winning record in the coach’s third year, then beat North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 2019 on its way to an 11-7-1 record. App State scored 26 goals last season, and the players who scored 25 of those goals were returning.
The team also had a high enough cumulative GPA to have won several academic awards during O’Keefe’s tenure. The Mountaineers ranked No. 4 by one measure among all Division I soccer teams in number of community service hours worked.
“Our student-athletes represented App State very well in the classroom and the community,” Gillin said. “They were making strides against high-level competition on the pitch.”
But the team was also expensive to fund. It had a budget of around $600,000 a year, which included coaches’ salaries, travel and the costs of scholarships (the Division I limit for men’s soccer is 9.9; App State made do with about 7.6, O’Keefe said).
The men’s soccer team had an average attendance of 524 last season in Boone. It never played before a crowd larger than the 874 people who watched the Mountaineers upset UNC in Chapel Hill.
THE COST OF FOOTBALL
App State is nearing completion of a massive, $50-million renovation project of its football stadium, called the “North End Zone” project. (That amount of money could have conceivably funded men’s soccer, at current prices, for the next 83 years). It also recently replaced the football stadium’s synthetic artificial turf for approximately $1.5 million in another football-related project.
Gillin resists drawing a connecting line between football’s continuing expansion, however, and the demise of three other App State teams.
“Sports reductions were not related to App State football expenses,” he said. “Sponsoring 20 sports became unsustainable.”
The Sun Belt Conference requires its members to sponsor at least 16 sports. App State is now one sport above that limit, and Gillin left the possibility open that another program could be cut. “We will continue to monitor the environment we are in and make the best fiscally responsible decisions possible,” he said.
Gillin’s aggressive football scheduling and strong football teams — App State’s most recent squad went 13-1 in 2019 and averaged nearly 24,000 fans per home game — have been a hallmark of his five-year tenure as AD. App State moved up to play in the biggest league of college football (FBS) starting in 2014, which resulted in many more expenses but also a higher-profile team. The AD received an enormous raise in January as part of a contract extension; he now makes approximately $500,000 a year.
It was Gillin who originally hired O’Keefe in 2016, and Gillin who signed off on disbanding the program. Now O’Keefe is looking for a job.
“I’m probably in a five-year setback because the chances of me getting a head-coaching job in a program that was up and running like this? I’m probably kidding myself,” O’Keefe said. “So (I’m) probably going back to being an assistant, which is fine.”
He plans to keep coaching, though. “I could do it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” O’Keefe said. “It’s just what I love doing.”
At the moment, he has no one to coach.
Most of his former players are scattered around the country. He and his two assistant coaches — who were also let go — have been busy placing the players elsewhere but need to work on their own next moves. O’Keefe’s wife is in nursing school until May 2021 in Boone, so the family may need to live apart for several months if he finds another job elsewhere.
In the meantime, the former App State men’s soccer players hardly see each other anymore.
“The biggest part I am going to miss,” said Hunnicutt, “is getting to see the team every day. Spending time with them. Because that was really our family.”
