NCAA Division III school Buffalo State Univerity in Buffalo, New York has eliminated its varsity men’s and women’s swimming & diving programs, effectively immediately.
The school’s brief announcement on the topic did not give a specific reason for the decision, saying that it came “following a lengthy review of the sustainability of the programs.”
“This difficult decision does not diminish the many significant past contributions of the swimming and diving student-athletes and coaches who have played such an important role in the history of Buffalo State Athletics.”
The school did provide SwimSwam with a list of FAQs, though, that expanded upon the decision.
The school says that the 6-lane, 25-yard on campus Kissinger Pool will remain open through the next academic year, at which point “a complete facilities assessment will be completed to determine the direction of that facility moving forward.”
They expanded on the decision by saying that there were “concerns over impeding maintenance expenses to ensure the viability of the aquatics facility.” Facility deficits and costs have been cited as part of the decision making in a number of recent collegiate program eliminations.
The school also said that “decreasing participation trends at the high school level and the increasing challenge associated with fielding competitive rosters that meet NCAA sport sponsorship minimums.”
According to the NFHS, high school swimming & diving participation rates, like most sports, fell coming out of the pandemic; however, swimming & diving participation rates also fell from the 2017-2018 to 2018-2019 seasons, the last pre-pandemic data available.
USA Swimming membership numbers have also fallen.
Buffalo State has a long history in the sport. For the men’s team, that includes NCAA All-Americans as far back as the 1960s, before the NCAA was split into different divisions.
The men’s team has generally had more success than the women’s team: the men have scored at the NCAA Division III Championships five times, including most recently in 2018, when they placed 28th. The women’s team scored just once, in 1982.
At the 2023 SUNYAC Championships, the women’s team finished 7th out of 9 teams, while the men finished 9th out of 9 teams with 33 points. The next-lowest scoring program was SUNY Fredonia with 170 points.
The men’s team currently lists only four swimmers, all underclassmen, while the women’s team lists 11. There is also only one diver listed on the team, Hailey Hankinson, who also swam for the Bengals.
The team’s rosters never recovered after COVID. The program had 12 men and 13 women in the 2018-2019 season, though the men’s squad began to retract a little even before the pandemic.
Mike Kroll was the head coach of Buffalo State for the last five seasons. He had previous stops as the first-ever head coach at D3 school Manchester University in Indiana for the prior four seasons, two years as an assistant coach and aquatics director at D3 Ohio Wesleyan, and two years as the head coach and aquatics director at Genessee Community College.
The move comes just months after the school officially changed its name from Buffalo State College to Buffalo State University as part of an effort to enhance the school’s brand, especially among international students. The school’s fall 2022 undergraduate enrollment of 5,464 is a 11.1% decrease from fall 2021. That is part of a dramatic downward trend in the school’s enrollment which was over 9,300 in fall of 2014.
The move to cut the program bucks the trend of colleges outside of NCAA Division I adding swimming & diving programs as part of an effort to attract students.
Buffalo State still sponsors 7 men’s and 10 women’s varsity sports, including a football team. Federal data shows that the varsity athletes made up 347 of the school’s undergraduate enrollment, or about 6.5%. Of those 347 student-athletes, only 37.8% were female, as compared to about 57.8% of the student body. The move to eliminate swimming programs seems to put the school further out of compliance with the first two prongs of Title IX – proportionality and history & continuing practice of program expansion, especially with the number of impacted women’s athletes being much higher than the number of men’s athletes.
That leaves only the third prong, accommodating student interests, as a path to Title IX compliance.
