UC Berkeley announced today that of the five sports it said in September that it intended to cut, three of them would be salvaged and two permanently dropped. From the Bay Area News Group:
UC Berkeley announced Friday morning that its men's baseball and gymastics programs will be eliminated at the end of 2010-11 school year, but that men's rugby and women's gymnastics and lacrosse have been spared.Cal Vice Chancellor Frank Yeary said during a teleconference with reporters that baseball did not come close to generating enough private funding to save the 119-year-old program. Full article
Reaction on the Save Cal Baseball Facebook page is about as you'd expect...really negative.
On the telephone news conference this morning with Cal Athletic Director Sandy Barbour, Vice Chancellor Frank Yeary, and Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, Yeary said baseball supporters would have had to have raised four or five times the amount of money they did to save the program. Yeary also said the university would consider reinstating the dropped sports if supporters raised additional funds, though not for next year.
Barbour said that if the women's programs that came up with the necessary funds to salvage their teams had not done so, the university would have had to add female and cut even more men athletes in order to comply with Title IX, the U.S. law that requires universities to provide athletic opportunities for men and women proportional to enrollment.