St. Louis area colleges are not safe from the nationwide higher education crisis caused by plummeting enrollment. Within a day of each other, both Fontbonne University in Clayton and Lindenwood University announced massive cuts in staff positions, academic and athletic programs.
On Dec. 1, a day after Fontbonne announced a plan to drop 21 academic programs and cut 22 individual faculty positions, Lindenwood announced it would eliminate nine staff positions and 10 sports programs. Before an email went out to the student body, 284 Lindenwood student-athletes met in an assembly to hear the news from Jason Coomer, vice president for intercollegiate athletics.
“I sat in that room with my best friends, with the people I spend most of my time with, with the girls I grow with, crying together, completely broken,” said Sydney Lopez, a gymnast at Lindenwood.
Lindenwood is cutting its men’s and women’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, men’s lacrosse, men’s indoor and outdoor track and field, men’s wrestling, women’s field hockey and women’s gymnastics teams.
“Imagine living out a lifelong dream just to have it taken away in less than five minutes with no rhyme or reason,” Lopez said. “That truly is despicable.”
The wrestling team was scheduled to leave for a tournament that day. Brandon Eusebio, a first-year wrestler, said most of the team opted out to process the loss.
“We have a ton of talented athletes that have lost what we thought would be our home for four to five years, and I personally think a warning or a heads up on the given situation before they just pulled the plug would’ve been nice,” Eusebio said.
Like Eusebio, Lopez agreed that more communication was necessary for this set of circumstances.
“Why couldn’t we have been told this months ago to fundraise and keep the program?” Lopez said. “Why would the school not allow us to fundraise now to keep our sport alive? If we raise one million dollars, the school still would not allow our program to run … weird, right?”
Lopez will graduate before Lindenwood’s gymnastics program ends. Eusebio is in his first year of wrestling at Lindenwood, and he plans to transfer.
Despite the circumstances, Eusebio said wrestling head coach Dallas Smith is making sure the team finishes their season strong.
“We acknowledge Lindenwood University’s decision to discontinue the Men’s Wrestling team at the conclusion of this season,” wrote the National Wrestling Coaches Administration in a statement, “We plan to engage with their administration to explore avenues for reconsideration and a potential reversal of this choice.”
Lindenwood administration says this decision won’t be reversed, citing, among other reasons, a comparison of the number of sports sponsored by schools in the Ohio Valley Conference. The school joined this conference just one year ago.
Lindenwood says it will honor scholarships for all student-athletes playing for discontinued teams at the time of the announcement, as well as for incoming students who intend to play.
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