For $500,000 you can buy a tasteful colonial in Barrington, or a nice chunk of diamond at Tiffany, or a pair of Porche Twin Turbo S’s with a little something left over for insurance premiums.
Or you can offer to bankroll Chicago’s own Northeastern Illinois University athletic department.
About a month ago, Northeastern’s board of trustees voted to do away with the school’s 14 intercollegiate programs. Just like that, 160 student-athletes, 10 head coaches, eight assistants, four administrative staff members and two trainers basically were given their walking papers, effective June 30, 1998.
Three of the head coaches and five of the assistant coaches were hired less than five months ago. Same goes for the sports information director and the trainer. Here today, gone in June.
It wasn’t as if the athletic department was splurging on expenses. Rees Johnson, who has put in 10 long years at Northeastern, and another 23 at other schools, is probably the lowest-paid men’s basketball coach in Division I.
“Is this going in the paper?” he said. “Well, $51,000 after 33 years. Tell that to Pat Kennedy, Kevin O’Neill, even Jimmy Collins. See where that compares.”
The point is, Johnson wasn’t coaching at Northeastern to get rich. Instead, he was happy building a program, chasing an NCAA tournament dream. Now this.
“I feel tremendously betrayed, and the athletes feel embittered,” he said. “And how can you possibly blame them? They’ve basically been sold out. I know when I came to Northeastern, it sure wasn’t a household name. I suffered a lot of humiliation and discouragement in building a program. But that’s not the important thing. Me and my assistants use our own money to pay for some of the recruiting costs. We finally get to our pinnacle–having the best team here we’ve ever had by far, thinking we could go to the NCAA tournament–and now it’s jerked away from us.”
And then there is Joyce Wellhoefer, who spent the last six years constructing the Northeastern softball program from scratch. She puts in 65-hour weeks during the season and earns $18,000. That’s mascara money for Dennis Rodman.
On game day in town, Wellhoefer can’t afford to feed her players. On road trips, she crams her team into a van and off they go. Instead of assigning two players to a motel room, Wellhoefer has to squeeze in four to a room to cut costs.
“On Oct. 3, a memo came in the afternoon campus mail,” Wellhoefer said. “It was something like, `Northeastern has decided to drop all sports in 1998.’ That was it. Before I could even tell all my athletes, it’s in the newspaper the next day. That’s how they found out. The president (Salme H. Steinberg) doesn’t answer questions. She won’t return calls to the students, the athletes, the coaches. I guess she said the decision has been made and she doesn’t want to talk to us.”
Steinberg talked Monday, but she wouldn’t say if intercollegiate athletics in any form–Division II, III, NAIA–would return. She did mention the possibility of “enhanced intramurals,” which I’m sure is a lot more fun to watch than, say, Johnson’s team in the NCAA tournament. And she made it crystal clear that the $500,000 Northeastern receives from the state no longer would be used for athletics. Not now. Not ever.
Nor was Steinberg thrilled with criticism of her availability during and after the trustees’ final decision. According to Steinberg, the trustees gave concerned parties the opportunity to speak “in many different places. Certainly, I have spoken to coaches . . . spent an enormous amount of time talking to so many people involved in this. I would say that was not a very reliable source who told you that.”
The sources were Wellhoefer and Johnson, who said they never have been given the chance to meet privately with Steinberg. In fact, Johnson said he was told originally that the school planned a three-year fundraising effort to maintain Division I status.
As for the “many different places” claim, an official decision time line made available by Northeastern cites only one such open forum with the trustees: November 1996.
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Who knows if Steinberg or any of the school’s trustees ever saw Wellhoefer’s team play? Had they made the effort, they would have known that Northeastern went 8-5 during the fall schedule and beat powerful DePaul, which advanced to the NCAA regional finals last season.
Maybe they would have learned that Wellhoefer’s players, each responsible for $300 worth of fundraising, just had a bake sale to raise a few bucks for the program. Or that Johnson’s program had a boffo recruiting year. Or that the women’s basketball team returned its three leading scorers. Or that the baseball team had signed some key recruits.
Doesn’t matter now. Everyone is history, which just happens to be what Steinberg taught for years before being bumped up to Northeastern hatchetwoman.
Since the announcement, two of Johnson’s best players are looking elsewhere. Wellhoefer is worried that after all the redshirting and transferring, she might not have enough players to field a team for the 50-game spring schedule. Sports information director Ian Frink, who moved here from Maryland, is updating his resume.
Of course, in a nice bit of spin control, Northeastern is making a big deal out of picking up the student-athletes’ $2,500 tab for tuition. But what about the other $6,000 for room, board and books the school used to pay? Apply for financial aid, says Northeastern.
Northeastern’s players, many of whom came to the school because it was a Division I program, have anger to spare. They aren’t alone. At Boston University, where the football program will cease to exist at season’s end, players wore generic jerseys in protest last Saturday rather than school-issued uniforms.
Johnson’s team is already thinking about putting black tape over the Northeastern jersey name. Same goes for the volleyball team.
Wellhoefer isn’t sure what her players will decide, though there is talk of doing what Baylor’s softball team did when its program was eliminated several years ago. In its final game, the Baylor women walked off the field with one out remaining in the bottom of the final inning. Just like Belushi’s John Blutarsky in “Animal House.” “Over? It’s not over until we say it’s over!”
Here’s hoping they do it. And just in case the trustees or Steinberg are in the neighborhood, the final regular-season game is Sunday, April 26.