Senior tight end Zach Hekker remembers last January in Bellingham, Wash. for all the wrong reasons. The City of Subdued Excitement became anything but "subdued" when Western Washington University cut its 104-year-old football program.
"You walk into the grocery store and you get stopped by 10 or 15 people who just wanted to tell you that they are really sorry this happened and that they don't agree with the decision," Hekker said.
Robin Ross felt like the WWU football program was headed in the right direction. The Vikings' head coach had just led his team to a 6-5 season with a 25-10 win over Colorado College of the Mines in the Dixie Rotary Bowl. Ross felt that tremendous progress had been made during his 3-year tenure at WWU and the program's future was brightening.
"It felt like we had a lot of key components that would allow us to win next season," Ross said. "Our players felt very strongly that they had a chance to compete for a national championship, which was probably the first time in quite a few years at Western Washington."
Although athletic departments across the country have been making cuts, WWU became the first NCAA program in this decade to cut football. The decision has left the West Coast with only four Division II football teams and a bitter controversy at the third largest university in the state of Washington.
No Warning
At 9 a.m. last Jan. 8, Hekker sat down in his Environmental Studies class at about the same time Ross sat down in a meeting with WWU President Bruce Shepard.
"We were going to talk about recruiting," Ross said. "When I walked in the meeting, he informed me that they wanted to discontinue the football program."
The administration had not included any of the football coaching staff in the conversations preceding the decision.
"Supposedly they felt it should be done at a higher administrative level and they said they didn't want to damage the program by having more people be involved in it," Ross said.
The university administration believed that even if enough money could be raised to save the football program, it would face significant ongoing challenges in the upcoming years.
"The amount of money required to not only sustain the program today, but also in the years to come, is not a realistic possibility given the tough economic times we're currently facing," according to an explanation on the Western Washington Athletic Department's website.
The Bellingham Herald predicts the decision to cut football will save the school $450,000 a year and the university's athletic department will no longer finish in the red, as it has done in each of the last five years.
"The administration had said that the shortcomings were not totally football," Ross said. "It was more that they felt like they had to eliminate football to basically allow the athletic department to survive."
Meanwhile, in a lecture on sustainability, Hekker first caught wind of the decision through text message. Initially, he thought it was a joke. He had never heard of any school cutting football, especially a program that had been around for more than 100 years.
"I was dumbfounded," Hekker said. "I was like this can't be. This program's been around forever."
Before Ross could even inform his coaching staff or players of the decision, Sports Information Director Paul Madison had accidentally sent out a press release two hours prematurely. After the letter informed WWU football alumni of the university's decision, news began to spread like wildfire across campus.
The press release marked the first time Jason Stiles realized that there was a debate to cut the sport. Now a commentator for Fox Sports Northwest, Stiles played quarterback for the Vikings in the early 1990s and remained heavily involved in the football program ever since.
"Literally the decision came in the still of the night, with no warning," Stiles said. "None of the big money guys who donate to athletics had any inkling this was going to happen."
Punting it Away
Football has been played at Western Washington since 1903, stopping only for World War II in the 1940s. In 98 seasons, the Vikings have gone 383-380-34.
