The women's track team has finished higher than 7th on more than one occasion. I would encourage you to talk to some of the female athletes. You just might be impressed.
All I'm saying is that in VB, soccer, & golf we have NEVER been competitive. If we can't at least be competitive in 7 out of 10 years, then we should be able to cut bait, delete that as one of our varsity sports, and put the money into other sports where we can be competitive in the SOCON.
So when we finished in the bottom half of the conference (often last) in basketball for 7+ years, we should have dumped the sport? Or how about the fact that we’ve won the conference in football twice in 73 years and none in the last 17? You want to dump football too? Should I also mention the one tennis championship almost 50 years ago, and even wrestling which has only 6 teams competing where we have only 2 conference championships in over 50 years. Truth be told, the competitiveness argument is really a cloaked gender issue.
I agree with BravoBeach in that the bashing of women’s sports and athletes at The Citadel has gotten old. I know of no other school where I hear alumni wanting to get rid of female sports that struggle with competitiveness (Wofford, for example). Instead, such conversation accomplishes only two things: 1) makes it harder for coaches to recruit good athletes to a place where some of the alumni don’t want them to be there, and 2) demonstrates how ignorant some of our alumni remain to be.
I am talkng about being COMPETITVE in the SOCON, NOT necessarily winning a conference championship. If the women's teams (specifically: VB, soccer & golf) had gotten progressively BETTER during the past 10 years (and had at least 1 or 2 .500 seasons), I would be OK with that. None of these 3 teams have gotten any better than LAST in the conference EVERY year since their inception, w/ 1 exception: Last year was the 1st year that soccer even won a conference game (span of 9 years), & they finally won 2 conference games this year. This is the first year that soccer did not finish last in the SOCON. It should not take 10 years to build a program that does not finish higher than last in the conference! Theses teams are basically as good as they were when we first fielded a team - there has been NO improvement!
Before you make a statement about how teams have not gotten any better than when they first started I would seriously suggest you actually look at the results, they are all on the website. In the first year the Soccer team had a program they had a 3-20 record, 0 wins in the SOCON. If you look at just how much they lost by somewhere between 4-12 points, a ridiculous amount in soccer and against conference teams normally something like 7/8 points. This season it was 5-11-2, conference 2-6-2 and those losses were normally by one point. A one point match in soccer is pretty even, just depends on who actually managed to get in a shot. No, they haven't drastically changed the overall record but the improvement is huge. I'll be willing to bet next year they will have an even better record especially if people actually give them support.
Volleyball, 1st season: 1-24, the team would maybe score a point or two per match, this season: 7-21, Conf: 2-9, matches are much closer, even in 3-0 defeats they are scoring 15-25pts per match. And the team is extremely young, plenty of room to improve and you have to take into account they play better teams now too, guarantee you they will be even better next year
Golf: I won't speak on it because I don't really know much about it
Yes, I know, a loss is still a loss but these teams have improved a great deal and they can continue to get better if they actually have support. You can't honestly think that if the current teams had to compete against the teams from the 1st years of the programs the ones of today wouldn't absolutely crush those old programs? Seriously, its almost idiotic to say there has been no improvement at all.
