Budget cuts are a part of life

I hardly keep up with what is going on at my Alma Mater. At this point, outside of a few sisters in my sorority, I don't really care what is going on there. For some reason though, some of my classmates do. And one posted on Facebook about how our school had just cut out men's track and field, and men's cross country. 

In my mind, I feel as those this is a pretty staple sports team to have. It is a sport of disciple and in some cases, requires the least amount of money of many of our athletic programs. It does not require a lot of financial support from the students to participate, just being there and working hard. 

I am not an athlete. I never have been and I don't imagine I'd ever get into it in the future. Which may be part of the reason I can't truly deep down feel bad for this cut.

The other reason is because I've always been a supporter of the arts, which has been seeing a shrinking budget for years. In many cases, it is usually the first area to be cut. 

I was in the marching band at my Alma Mater. And every year was a financial struggle for us*. We had to be wise with what little funding we had. My freshman year, we started out with 5 school buses to go to local competitions and 3 coaches buses to go to one distant competition. When I finished out my junior year [and my last year in marching band], we were down to 3 school buses for fewer local competitions and (maybe) took 4 school buses for our one distant competition. Also in my junior year, our band director at the time [we went through 3 of them in the 4 years I went to my school] had fronted his own money to rent a truck to transport our equipment to our distant competition. 

We got lucky though that this particular band director fought so hard. He managed to get the marching band a truck of it's own, some instruments, and new uniforms. Granted, the truck and the instruments may have been owned before, and the old uniforms were probably somewhere between 15-20 years old, it was still a big leap for the band.

For athletics, there is always the option of creating a club. It is not nearly as competitive but it is something. And for athletics, it is a bit easier to form a club sport as oppose to a club marching band. Unfortunately, it does require them to find money in places other than the school. This is when you hope that the record keeping has been kept up-to-date and alumni are readily available to support where they can. It also requires finding someone to be the leader of the club and work on really getting it started. There can be little to no dependency on a professor to do all the work. This means getting people together for meetings, creating a committee, finding a teacher to sponsor the organization, and again, contacting alumni for financial support. 

So while I do feel sad about this cut in the athletics department, I cannot feel terribly bad. 

* It should also be noted that a part of that financial struggle was because of an occurrence that happened a few years before I entered college. The then band director had stolen money from the marching band fund and had run off with it.