Baseball and softball are better sports to field than soccer because if your teams are good you get on ESPN for the College World Series and a lot of people actually watch your school participate. Softball should come before soccer, but I'd like to have both. Also, and this is probably a stupid question because I know absolutely nothing about college swimming, but why have a natatorium and no swim team? How many scholarships would that take? I would think since we are already paying the O&M on the pool, that this would be much more affordable than equestrian.
That's a really stupid reason to field one sport over another, really dumb. The differences in ratings between the softball world series and the soccer final four is measured in the thousands. Neither draw dick for television ratings.
We used to have a swimming and diving team. First of all it would take a pretty significant amount of money to bring the nat from the standard of a recreation pool to a D1 facility. S&W is allowed 14 scholarships spread out over about 30 participants. That is more than volleyball, softball, golf and tennis, the same as soccer, one less than basketball and equestrian, cross country and T&F get 18 (this sport gets absolutely screwed as they get a total of 18 womens scholarships for XC, indoor and outdoor not 18 each sport) and equestrian gets 20 scholarships. The schools that would be our S&D peers spend about $5000 an athlete not counting the cost of maintaining facilities and coaching salaries. Schools are cutting S&D left and right, there are only 5 Big 12 schools with it, even OU has cut that sport. I don't know the cost of travel and operating facilities but since so few schools in our region do it, I'd imagine these things make S&D more expensive than softball or soccer.
