Jens Deju
Daily Egyptian
The SIU women's swimming and diving team has won five straight Missouri Valley Conference Championships and has earned the right to be called a dynasty.
However, if they are going to remain a dynasty, it won't be in the MVC.
Since this last season's championships in February, both Bradley and Northern Iowa's programs have ceased to exist, leaving just four women's teams in SIU, Evansville, Southwest Missouri State and Illinois State and an even more pitiful three men's teams in SIU, SMS and Evansville.
Both Bradley and Northern Iowa cited budget problems as the reason behind cutting their programs, but they are just the latest in a disturbing trend of college swim teams being axed.
"It's not good for our sport and then coming so close to home, in our conference; it's not a good thing," said Derek Helvey, who will be entering his junior season at SIU. "It might help us in the long run when we can go to a bigger conference and we can get better competition, but still, losing teams is not good for our sport at all."
Helvey said despite MVC teams dropping their programs, he isn't worried about SIU's fate. SIU men's head coach Rick Walker is always up front with the team and promises they'll know of any potential cuts long before they actually occur.
"I'm not really worried until Rick gets worried," Helvey said.
Fellow junior-to-be Edoardo Daelli said Walker's frankness with the team makes it a lot easier. Team members can concentrate on their upcoming meets instead of worrying about whether there will be a team for the upcoming season.
"It's really nice because you know what's going to happen and you can focus on practice," Daelli said. "You don't have to worry about if you have to go somewhere else and thinking about calling other coaches when you know that we're going to be here for sure next year and the year after that."
SIU Associate Athletic Director Kathy Jones said the program is one of the school's strongest and doesn't feel they have any reason to worry that they may be the next to be cut.
"We are very pleased with the caliber of coaches and student-athletes," Jones said. "They do everything that you ask them to do. They're good in the pool. They're good in the classroom. They're good in the community. What else can we ask for? We've got a very competitive program and we have absolutely no intention of doing anything that would jeopardize that."
The loss of Bradley and Northern Iowa means less than half of the conference's schools sponsor teams. MVC rules state that half of the schools must have a team in order to have a conference championship.
As a result, this upcoming season will be the last time the MVC will have a conference championship.
While the atmosphere of the MVC Championships will suffer greatly by the cuts, Walker feels the competition level will be just as high as in years past.
"If you take a look at the two teams that dropped, Bradley and Northern Iowa, you're talking about two of the teams that were not the strongest," Walker said. "Bradley really was not in the finals at all, and Northern Iowa, they were only in the finals in a couple of events. The strongest three teams are still there so it's going to be just as competitive as it ever was."
The loss of the home conference after this next season doesn't mean the Salukis will stop competing.
"We've got a lot of options, and we're keeping them all open," said SIU women's head coach Jeff Goelz. "There are a couple of other conferences that have expressed an interest in having us join, and we've expressed an interest in joining another conference or two. We'll just cross that bridge when we get there."
Walker said two of the more likely options would be joining the Mid-Continent Conference, which includes Western Illinois, Valparaiso and Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. The Salukis could also join the National Independent Conference, which includes Oakland, Northern Arizona, Florida Atlantic, Western Kentucky, Louisiana-Monroe, Cincinnati, SMU and Hawaii.
While the Mid-Continent is an all-sport conference, the NIC is a swimming-only group.
SIU has participated in the NICs before and won the Championships in 1996 and 1997.
"The National Independent Conference we have been to more years than we were affiliated with the Missouri Valley, so this is nothing really new to us," Walker said.
While it wouldn't be anything new, the Salukis would be losing one of their biggest advantages.
Since 1994, the MVC Championships have been held at SIU's home pool, giving the Salukis an unprecedented home field advantage for their biggest meet of the year.
Now that they will be out of the MVC, that advantage will probably be no more.
"It was good to have our own conference," Daelli said. "We used to swim [the championships] here, and if we go to NIC's, we won't swim it here. It's going to be somewhere else, and we're not going to have that advantage of having our pool."
Reporter Jens Deju can be reached at jdeju@dailyegyptian.com
Published on 11/17/05; 12:24:44 PM
