Re: You Just Can't Make This Stuff Up!
The choice of the core sports isn't made in a vacuum. It's determined primarily by which sports are a part of the conference that a school belongs to. In the case of the Big 10, there are 14 sports each for men and women. Schools in the conference have a reasonable expectation that other members will prioritize the sports that are a part of the conference. Only four schools offer more than one women's sport that isn't a part of the conference slate, and Michigan already was a varsity women's water polo team.
This is a fair point. It was also an issue in UND's situation, which most of us weren't aware of until Sicatoka took the time to lay that factor out. Yes, of course, conference obligations need to be taken into account in this conversation.
Men's hockey just barely makes the cut with six teams. Men's lacrosse is the only other sport for men or women with as few participants. So, despite the fact that the Big 10 Network likes to show men's hockey games, it's hard to squint enough to see ice hockey as a core conference sport. As such, there's a pretty strong institutional bias against it being a sport that a school would add, for either gender. $100 million can overcome that bias, but that's what you're looking at.
It's a little to silly to ignore the fact that College Hockey operated outside the usual conference structure for 60+ years, until the B1G exercised the option to start a Men's hockey conference. And obviously a good percentage of hockey schools still compete in hockey-only conferences -- including the Women's WCHA. The arrangement has worked well for many years. To abruptly shift gears and claim that this is now a fatal flaw is pretty arbitrary. But to the extent you're merely pointing out a bureaucratic challenge, OK.
In contrast, the $100 Million claim is nonsense. Penn State used that amount to build a state-of-the-art building from scratch. Remodeling current buildings to accommodate a 2nd Varsity team would cost a tiny fraction of that.
Wrong. I have no idea what the situation is in East Lansing, but as the article in the original post points out, Yost doesn't have the capacity to add a women's varsity team. There's nowhere to put another permanent locker room. There isn't even another building close enough to do what OSU does, as all of the building entrances are surrounded by parking. When Michigan was talking about adding a women's team, the plan was to use The Cube, but this isn't a great alternative, as it's several miles from campus and the facilities are reminiscent of All Seasons in Mankato. There's a reason the men's NTDP abandoned it as soon as it could.
You know a lot more about Ann Arbor than I do. And I've already acknowledged that the rest of us don't have an entitlement to demand competition from another school -- which of course includes Michigan. If Michigan concludes that unique circumstances make it simply impossible to start a WIH Varsity in Ann Arbor, UM is within its rights.
At the same time, please know that I'm not completely out of the loop on this. I've been to Yost on a number of occasions. I played in the 2010 Posters' Game at Yost and our locker room situation was just fine. As for the Cube, I've gone there to see a family member compete in Synchronized Skating. Dozens of teams were present that day. Were the facilities strained? Yes. Did things still work out fine? Yes.
As such, I really don't believe the claim that having a Varsity WIH team in Ann Arbor is physically impossible. Now would it cost real money to create a first class situation? Sure. But I bet the early players would be happy to accept a less than perfect situation in order to get things up and running.
A better question is, why? You're reasoning backwards. You have assumed that schools adding women's hockey is the correct choice, and are trying to construct justifications for that assumption.
This criticism makes no sense. Advocating & strategizing are normal human activities. There's nothing "backwards" about it. Coaches believe in their players, and try to find ways to win games. Attorneys accept cases, and try to figure out ways to get a good result for the client. When a lobbyist accepts employment with an interest group, of course they'll take the position that a good deal for their employer is the "correct choice." As with all of these examples, I simply believe in my cause. The only real difference is that USCHO is an amateur hot stove league, rather than paid employment.
But the universities you're looking at don't start from your conclusion. To them, women's hockey is just one among numerous sports that they could add, with nothing a priori that makes it stand out...
I don't buy your exact phrasing. Still, I agree with the general thrust of this comment. The university in this situation is more like a ref, a judge or a congressional committee -- as opposed to being an advocate. Universities routinely make funding decisions involving competing claimants. Budgetary politics is a necessary process.
The problem, as I see it, is that the hockey community needs to be more united and improve its skill level when it comes to budgetary politics.
What I keep trying to point out is that you define "sisters" too narrowly. The University of Michigan has regularly expanded the number of female athletes that have an opportunity to play varsity sports there. That's something that we ought to be celebrating. Instead, you prefer to condemn them for not choosing the set of female athletes that you prefer. Every single thing you say could be said equally by fans of lacrosse, or water polo, or field hockey, all of which UM has supported. Unless you are already a fan of women's hockey, there's nothing that makes it inherently a better choice. You, and others on these boards, can't seem to grasp the way that you are reasoning from your conclusion rather than towards it. It's lazy thinking, and watching it come up repeatedly is annoying. You compound it by insinuating a moral failure to fulfill an obligation by people who are, in fact, operating in perfectly good faith. They just don't share the same assumptions that you do.
You want annoying? Most of what you're accusing me of saying in this paragraph is either comes from other posters, or is simply fabrication. I get that we're constructing the issue in different ways. But you're dead wrong to be putting words in my mouth.
My Actual Opinion: I definitely join you in celebrating the creation of new opportunities for athletes, both male and female. The Lacrosse teams, or any of the others, are not the enemy. At the same time, they are competing claimants for limited budget dollars. When one of the other claimants does well in the budgetary process, that success should be respected, not resented. And perhaps emulated.
When we've discussed the Michigan case in the past, I've literally gone out of my way to express some sympathy for the plight of the Michigan AD on this issue. I specifically stated that the division within the hockey community tended to push the AD in the direction of the other applications. Far from "condemning" him, I suggested that the decision was rather understandable under the circumstances.
Or, if you're attempting to reference the North Dakota thread, I'll try to re-create my comment here. My participation on that thread was quite brief, at least by my standards. But I did say that I believed UND was making a mistake, and I stand by that. My position was that North Dakota had a greater opportunity to have a national impact in Women's Hockey than in most of the sports it decided to protect. But arguing that an institution is making an unwise or suboptimal choice stops well short of claiming a "moral failure."
As for things I am more critical of:
1. The individual from UND who described Women's Hockey as a "boutique sport" was well over the line. In the context of the program being cut, making such a comment actually is a bit of an ethical fail.
2. The fact that the UND Men's Hockey community "stood by silently" while the Women's program was cut, apparently refusing to offer even moral support, is pretty ugly.
These are the kind of things I'm referencing when I talk about "throwing our sisters under the bus."
All that said, what really frustrates me on this occasion is the inability of some on this board to see the loss of the UND Varsity program as a setback for the hockey community as whole. Same thing with regard to the lost opportunity at UM. To me, it's obvious that both schools could have been genuine leaders in Women's Hockey. Having these schools on the sidelines is a loss. Not in the same league as what the affected players experienced, but a loss just the same. To be indifferent to these setbacks -- or in some cases even gleeful about them -- strikes me as disloyal to our sport.
