If the fan base and this board settle for this and continue to make excuses why we can't put the program back on its feet Smith is exactly what we deserve. We should demand the AD tell what the plan is and if it's more of the same WHY ? I Also think it may be time to call for Her resignation although all sports and participants are important and deserve equal consideration there is NOTHING more important to this institution and the larger community than this D1 Hockey program and for Her not to recognize that is professional malpractice and frankly troubling!!!
Malpractice!!! It did not start recently. It started some time ago and is now only ongoing. Anyone who lives nearby and has been paying any attention can and has clearly seen the decline and flubs multiple times over a period of quite some time. It's not just bigger stuff, it's also the little stuff too and if you can't even get the little stuff right there is no way you will get the bigger stuff right.
Malpractice!!! An athletics website that for years was maintained by now departed staff at a nothing short of a gold standard level as far as D3 athletic websites go. Presently, it has declined into a not up to date, undependable and unreliable operation. For example, the baseball team played a noon game on Sunday in Maryland and as of 9 PM Sunday not even a final score appears (they won according to the opponents website). If that isn't enough, our site has them playing a D2 ballclub on Wednesday (who would possibly eradicate them) in Mississippi instead of the 1 win (out of 8) D3 team they are actually playing!!! There is an old saying that goes that an organization's website is the window to an organization's soul.
Malpractice!!! Charging season ticket holders an additional amount for a parking pass and then leaving the parking lot entrances neither manned or berricated this entire weekend. As should have come as no surprise, earlier arriving non pass holders and visitors' fans (especially Cornell) poured in to the unattended lots and materially filled the lots. When the pass holders arrived a little later (they pay for parking so they can arrive later!!!), they had to drive around looking for anyplace place to park and walk considerably further to the arena in the freezing cold. Needless to say, two older retirees that I sit near used a whole lot of creative verbiage to express their anger. In fact, one even tried to email the AD from her seat only to discover the athletic website does not provide the AD's email!!! My recommendation would be that all these sheepskins, doctors and PhDs' they have running athletics these days conviene a 9 AM Monday damage control meeting to put something together and get it out ASAP to angry people who got stiffed. Especially the ones (and there had to be some) who got disgusted with what they found, turned around and drove their parking pass and season tickets the hell home.
Malpractice!!! Of the longer range variety that is probably the root of it all. Replacing the long time outstanding AD who retired shortly after the beginning of this century first with two drive by guys only here to add lines to a resume on their way to somewhere else and then with a longer term cerimonial, figurehead Athletic Director emeritus. The results, especially the latter, left the then outstanding athletic staff stupidly passed over, rudderless, overwhelmed, overworked and finally the hell out of here. Glad to report that the three I have bumped in to since they left all looked visibly younger than the last time I saw them while working here!!!
Malpractice!!! The biggest one of all. Will skip elaboration as it has already been noted ad nauseum. It was the state of the President's office for a quarter century and the Board of Directors who let it go on that long. That kind of leadership sinks everything around it including what we watch. Expecting all that damage to be fixed rapidly is simply unrealistic.
Malpractice!!! Malpractice!!! Malpractice of little things almost always leads to malpractice of bigger things. While a number of the institute's D3 programs have been able to overcome the malpractice of all those things, the malpractice of all those things on the D1 level almost always leads to very undesirable visible results both on the playing surface (whatever it is at a particular institution) and in the stands. In our case it is both a bevy of 20 loss seasons and an average attendance of 2,181 per game (16 of them). Of the slightly more than 6 dozen COMPLETE seasons of indoor hockey at RPI, only 30 or so have attendance figures that are stated anywhere. Those include a couple from the 1970's and pretty much everything from the mid 1990's to the present. 2,181 is lower than any of them.
