Nobody wore a black armband to work, but the tone was funereal in the text exchanges and calls among Washington State track and field alums Tuesday.
When it wasn’t just angry.
“I feel like going over to the alumni center and chopping that tile with my name on it out of the floor,” said former Cougar coach John Chaplin. “I’m just so pissed.”
The reactions – from resignation to indignation – came in the wake of the school’s announcement on Monday that it was dropping the “field” part of the program and reducing, in ways unspecified, its numbers in the sprints and hurdles. The Cougars will carry on a program centered on distance running.
How many scholarships will be awarded, how much in budget savings will result and the status of assistant coaches have not been shared publicly. Athletic director Anne McCoy and head coach Wayne Phipps continued to refuse interview requests on Tuesday.
But one thing seemed clear. National regard for the once-formidable Cougar program will take another hit.
“The program has had such a rich tradition and heritage,” said Drew Ulrick, a Cougar discus thrower 20 years ago and now a real estate professional in Spokane. “It was more competitive in the ‘80s and ‘90s on the national stage, but even in my era you always knew WSU was at a meet – there were always a few stars out there.”
Like many, Ulrick was confused by the two-paragraph school statement that the cuts would give WSU “the best opportunity to remain competitive at the conference and national levels,” though it did specify “in the distance events.”
“I just wish they’d been up front and said, ‘We need to cut,’ and not tried to make it sound like this was a good thing,” said Debra Farwell, who coached throws at WSU for 20 years and was one of the pioneer athletes in the women’s program. “This is just sad and another sign that the college athletics system is broken.”
The school provided no rationale for the cuts. But the combination of existing athletic program debt, the collapse of the pre-2024 Pac-12 and the drying up of television money from that and, finally, the pressure the Cougar athletics will face navigating life after the recent House vs. NCAA settlement opening up direct payments to athletes suggests that it was solely a financial consideration.
The last WSU sport to take such a blow was men’s tennis, which was dropped entirely in 1994 after years of half-funding.
Cougar field events were not the first track-related casualty of the post-House world, either, with Colorado announcing last week that it was throwing more of its resources behind its renowned distance corps and axing two field events coaches.
“Sadly, there are probably many more to come,” said Cougar alum and hammer specialist Brock Eager, who competes on the professional level out of the Iron Wood Throws Club in North Idaho. “The whole scheme and layout of college athletics has changed completely in just the six years I’ve been out of college.”
While the Gerry Lindgrens, Henry Ronos and Bernard Lagats of the Cougars’ “Long Crimson Line” of distance runners put WSU track on the map, the field events were wildly underrated.
“The school record in the high jump is 7-foot-7,” noted Eager. “Ian Waltz threw 212 feet in the discus, Tore Gustafsson 255 in the hammer – I’m at 236 and that’s just third. All the other records are world class.”
Indeed, it’s been difficult in recent years for Cougar field athletes to even crack the school’s top 10s. But 14 of the school’s last 21 Pac-12 champions came on the field side.
“To lose that tradition is sickening,” said Farwell.
But what former athletes and coaches find more disheartening is the loss of opportunity.
“If I didn’t get a scholarship to go to college, I wasn’t going,” said Francesca Green, a two-time then-Pac-10 champion from Kennewick who now coaches at the University of Arizona. “Having (coaches) Rick Sloan and Lissa Olson take a chance on me was the opportunity of a lifetime, because my times in high school didn’t put me at the top of the country. So it was life-changing.”
It was a sentiment echoed by CJ Allen, a 2024 U.S. Olympian in the intermediate hurdles.
“If what’s happening with the program now happens back then, I don’t’ know if my life looks the same,” he said. “I won a conference championship as a freshman and used that momentum for the rest of my career, really. Put me in the SEC that year in a little more competitive field and maybe I don’t make the final.”
Allen would win another Pac-12 title before he left WSU, and made time gains each year post-collegiately through 2023 – until he’d become the 30th fastest 400 hurdler in history and No. 14 American.
“In the new scenario at WSU,” he said, “I don’t exist.”
It also puts into question, in the likelihood of similar cuts elsewhere, the impact to Olympic development if its feeder system shrinks. Green – “I’ve always been an optimistic person,” she said – believes elite athletes will always find their place and that it could be an iron-sharpening-iron outcome. But broad-based development could suffer.
“You’re not going to have the walk-on, the football guy who tries the hammer and takes to it and becomes national caliber in four years,” said Eager. “You’re going to miss out on making the diamonds-in-the-rough into diamonds.”
But that’s a macro problem. Alums are more worried about WSU’s micro problem.
“I think about so many kids that won’t get the opportunity now,” said Farwell. “A kid like Tim Gehring – from Kettle Falls, a walk-on and with our development program became a national championship competitor who threw 63-10. He’s an accountant now in Pullman. We had so many kids like that. Maybe they only got a semester’s tuition or books, but that was incentive for them to keep improving.”
Most of the track and field alums grasp the realities of today’s college landscape, even if they don’t like it or understand. They’re more saddened than disgusted.
That doesn’t make this wholesale gutting of the program easier to swallow. Chaplin, a long-time donor as well as the builder of the program, insisted he’s taking the Rono statue project he’s ramrodded off campus.
“I don’t want my name attached to the university in any way,” he said. “I’m embarrassed to be a graduate of WSU.”
