YVCC cuts wrestling teams

YAKIMA, Wash. — What Yakima Valley Community College wrestling officials avoided four years ago with creative planning will apparently not be sustained by creative budgeting.

The college has run out of options, athletic director Ray Funk said, and the men’s and women’s programs have thus run out of time.

Wrestling, a varsity sport at YVCC since 1990, has been discontinued, the college announced Wednesday.

“With the economy the way it’s been for some time now, and with all the cuts that have been made to higher education throughout the state and at YVCC, it’s no longer feasible to avoid having this situation impact our department,” Funk said.

“Intercollegiate athletics here had largely been left alone through this process. But we’ve reached the point where that can’t continue.”

The decision, Funk said, was made by a group of college administrators in which he was included.

Wrestling was nearly eliminated in 2008, when administrators sought its ouster as at least a partial solution to a complaint against YVCC regarding Title IX, a now-40-year-old federal law banning sex discrimination in schools. At the time, women comprised approximately 64 percent of the college’s students — a higher percentage than competed in YVCC’s varsity sports.

A suggestion was made to the board of trustees that wrestling be eliminated and women’s cross country added, but then co-coach Mike Schmitt countered with a proposal to start women’s wrestling.

At a March 2008 board of trustees meeting in the Hopf Student Union Building, a motion was made to discontinue wrestling but did not receive a second.

A women’s squad was formed in June of that year and won three consecutive National Collegiate Women’s Wrestling Championships.

Competition was not considered especially strong at that level, however, and last season the Yaks switched from collegiate to freestyle without matching their prior success.

Part of the reason, Schmitt said, was that postseason travel money (the women’s national tournament was in Tennessee) had been eliminated, a move the coach called “totally inappropriate.”

While five women qualified for nationals, he said, only three participated because of the financial problem. Their travel was funded through donations, Schmitt said, including some out of his own pocket.

Reached by telephone Wednesday night, Schmitt said he saw the program’s closure coming.

“Yeah, they’ve just been making little cutbacks every year and this last year we had a big mess,” he said. “The year before (2011), they actually paid for our postseason travel and I thought, ‘Maybe they’re buying into it, with us having a bunch of success.’

“But after we saved the program in 2008, they cut a little piece off each year. They were doing it internally, and I think it was a long term plan. The board (of trustees) voted to keep the program, but we didn’t have the administration’s support.”

The Herald-Republic was not able to reach Bob Spain, who introduced wrestling as a YVCC club sport in 1989, saw it become a varsity activity in 1990 and coached through 1998.

“You think about the faculty and staff we’ve lost on our campus and the programs that have either been cut or reduced over the last few years, and it’s just been a very difficult time for the college,” Funk said. “So considering budget matters, I guess it’s our (the athletic department’s) turn.”

Funk became the college’s athletic director in June of 2005, at which point he also was named men’s basketball coach — a position he still holds.

Of the 34 schools in the NWAACC — the Northwest Athletic Association of Community Colleges — only Highline, Clackamas and Southwestern Oregon continue to offer wrestling as varsity sports

“Ultimately,” Funk said, “the college has chosen to maintain the programs that are already sanctioned through the NWAACC.”

Remaining YVCC varsity sports are women’s soccer and volleyball, men’s and women’s basketball, fastpitch and baseball.

“The thing is,” Schmitt said, “I understand the budgetary issues. My thing is we bring a lot of students to YVCC through wrestling, and my other issue is that once the money starts coming back — and it will eventually because everything’s cyclical — you can bring back an English class at the drop of a hat or an art class, but you can’t necessarily bring back a wrestling program that’s been cut. That’s very, very hard to do.”

Schmitt said he’d received “dozens” of phone calls and texts thanking him.

“I just got a call from Gustavo Lopez, a kid from Wapato who wrestled here and now is at Menlo College (in Atherton, Calif.),” he said. “He’s going to graduate, and he said if it hadn’t been for us and wrestling he probably wouldn’t even have gone to college.

“Now it’s sad that those opportunities are going away for others.”