I'm not suggesting you dont know the talent pool, or that your comments and suggestions aren't well placed -- from one perspective. Because they are. More than you know and realize, I agree with you.
What I am saying is either you compete with OU and Arkansas or you dont. And if you do, where is the money coming from? If you get that money -- is it better spent on academics or football or putting back together our basketball team which right now is even more embarrassing than the girls losing 4 - nil to Texas-Brazos River or wherever? We know the answer to that. And at a certain point, from a culture perspective, even with an unlimited budget, TU just isn't the place from a philosophy standpoint that it wants to spend $25 million on infrastructure and $3 million on recurring expenses on a woman's sport that benefits 24 girls, 3 coaches, and about 100 fans. They dont even want to do that for the revenue sport, and there is only one especially at TU, that could otherwise provide the money for women's soccer we are talking about and be a community amenity. We have had major donors step forward and be very very generous with other women's sports. Thank God for them. We would be in a place I dont want to think about without them. But what TU asked of them, and what they agreed to give, had limits. Many of those major donors have given us even more money for non-athletic purposes. And we agree upon those limits because athletics has a prominent place on campus, it is even arguably, a core purpose of the university. But you can't build something you can't sustain. And if you sustain it at one level for one sport, you have to sustain it at that level for all Olympic sports.
So now that we've got that out of the way. We aren't going to have the facilities, the travel, the clothing benefit, mystique, etc of OU or Arkansas. Fine. We are always going to lose those players to elsewhere except in rare instances. And that's been true in every sport since before Waymon Tisdale. It hasn't been true since before World War II. And even then we attracted those players because people were moving to Tulsa because it was in the midst of the largest regional economic expansion in world history up until that time. Either that or we offered a way for the players to escape fighting in a war.
We are talking about your second and third tier local players who have offers comparable to Tulsa. Are we losing them? Are we not offering them? If so, why. Because often that's two different questions and many different answers. And the truth versus what you hear from parents in the bleachers can be quite different.
So let's focus on what we are really talking about. Are we losing players/not offering an option to local players that fit the TU identity and are otherwise academically competitive? The sad part of this story is that you can go to Jenks, Union, Owasso, or Bixby, and be NHS and simply not have the academic horsepower to be a good academic risk for a student-athlete. Those are just facts. TPS is even more risky. TU has admitted local kids who were just a classmate or two short of number one in their class who lacked basic reading skills. Sentence composition was at the junior high level. We didn't know that until they were already admitted because they were test optional. This is a problem for a school that isn't sitting on a pile of tax revenue to pay for remedial classwork/tutoring, as well the administrative costs that go with forgiving loans and other headaches when the student inevitably can't keep up. And that's before we talk about the loss of revenue spent developing a player for two years who isn't there for the pay off junior and senior years on the pitch. You can have a 22 on the ACT, straight As and be a member of NHS, that doesn't mean you are ready for TU. So sitting in the bleachers, without seeing the test report, some of the great students you are talking about, very intelligent no doubt, either aren't good risks, aren't as qualified as you think they are/they are telling people, or there are equal or better academic prospects outside of Tulsa interested in TU that have higher test scores. Those are just facts.
So what you say. We should be giving local girls a chance and we should be trying to win. Well, is that really what TU is trying to accomplish? Is that the goal of women's soccer at TU?
We remember the 1991 probation right? The three of us were around for that right? What happened there and how did we get into trouble? Our budget and oversight was irregular and we were competing in a sport that we otherwise would not have been eligible to participate in if certain facts were disclosed to compliance authorities. Right? What we were really doing was trying to spend as little as possible on sports other than football and basketball to give us extra funds to gain a competitive edge in football and basketball. And of course there were rumors at the time that they couldn't pin other things on us due to lack of evidence so they came up with that. Either way, TU was doing as little as possible in those sports. They needed to compete in them to maintain Division I status, so we did that and nothing more.
Well, thanks to increased Title IX awareness and enforcement, and other factors, the same is basically true at TU but without the mismanagement and wrong doing. What I mean by that is FBS sports at TU has a defined purpose. You either support it if you are a fan or you dont. Its nice to dream otherwise, but by culture, by identity, (and perhaps by practical consequence due to financing), by necessity, TU views major sports competition as a key piece of vocalizing the unique educational experience you can gain at TU. That's it. We aren't trying to win. Its an infomercial for the school. It is a mark of credibility and excellence relied upon by parents and applicants. Its a campus amenity for students and faculty. If we win, people enjoy the amenity more. If we win, we get a greater return on the marketing investment. But we aren't trying to win and in some ways we dont really want to win, because then we would have real problems. You would have pressure to expand a competitive edge and TU doesn't have the donor base or local support to sustain that.
To effectuate that purpose, we have to compete in a bunch of different sports, including women's soccer. So the purpose of women's soccer on campus is really threefold: 1) ensure we can continue to compete in football and basketball on the national stage in a major conference at the highest classification, 2) provide high quality academic opportunities to elite students who wish to compete in sports as part of their studies and not the other way around, and 3) improve the diversity of the student body in terms of geography, life experience, varied academic interests, and other factors, including in some cases, race. TU isn't just looking for the best players who can study. TU is looking for the best students who can play and want to play. So TU in some ways is playing an entirely different sport than OU. And what they are purchasing through fin aid and incentives is totally different. If your goal is for your daughter to get a free education and a try out at the NWSL, then you probably need to go someplace else that wants to train you up to a point that they look good and discards you when your eligibility is done. If your goal is to have your daughter get a nursing degree or MBA and then if she wants to try out for soccer after school and has developed those skills, then the Tulsa name is recognizable enough that she will get those opportunities. Jordan O'Brien ending up in the USWNT pool is a great example of this experience.
If a local player gets a short changed offer by TU, may sense is that they dont fit that identity. Or if they do, and some probably do, they either play a position that isn't a position of need for the roster that year but room could be made for them, or the coach doesn't rate them as high as their parents/peers, or TU has the ability to attract other players that fit the identity better -- specifically bringing players from around the country and around the world to enrich the academic environment of all the students on campus. And in some cases, part of that TU identity is a collective commitment to the idea that parents that can pay, should pay, so players that can't pay can play. If you live in the richest part of Tulsa and you think your son is good enough to play for free or should even be paid to play soccer nobody is watching, you probably need to go up the road. That isn't the purpose of TU sports and TU doesn't have the money or interest in becoming something different or giving you a product that someone else will pay for. I dont personally know if Mac has passed on a local kid because he didn't like the attitude of the parents or the kid, but it wouldn't surprise me and I wouldn't blame him if deep down when deciding whether to offer or pass, he said to himself, the kid wont be happy here, he wont study, he will spend his practice time complaining he isn't playing in MLS and his Uncle Rico Dad will be calling me six times a semester.
TU got into short term financial trouble in part because it discounted its tuition to compete with OU and OSU and kids still wanted to go to a big school, felt they wouldn't fit in at a rich private school, felt they were better than a small school or just wanted to get away from Mom and Dad. So we discounted the price until it was basically free trying to be a good local partner and we were left with kids who couldn't compete and many didn't value the experience. Trying to do the same thing with local soccer talent is a similar analogous mistake.
