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BasketBlog: UC-San Diego Also Hunting for Division I Home
11/18/2012 8:33:00 AM | Men's Basketball
UC-San Diego Also Hunting for Division I Home
LA JOLLA, Calif. – The University of California at San Diego has a spectacular library named after Theodor Seuss Geisel, commonly known as Dr. Seuss, but that’s about the only thing even remotely silly about the institution.
UCSD, which occupies a sprawling, 1,200-acre campus only 12 miles north of downtown San Diego, is the Harvard of NCAA Division II. Founded in 1960, it’s widely regarded as one of the top public universities in the country, ranking in the top 10 in programs such as oceanography, bioengineering, behavioral neuroscience and geophysics.
Most of its student-athletes are brainiacs. And although the Tritons lost, 65-52, on Saturday night to GCU in men’s basketball – they started two players majoring in economics, two in political science and one in structural engineering -- their athletic program is an amazing success story, not unlike Stanford University in Division I.
Start with the fact that UCSD has a Division III mentality about athletics. Although it has been a member of Division II since 2000, it didn’t begin awarding athletic scholarships until about five years ago – and then only because it was required to do so by the NCAA.
How’s this for different? If you make the team at UCSD, which sponsors a full complement of 23 sports, including crew, fencing and water polo, you get $500 in aid. That’s it.
“That doesn’t even cover your books,” says Ken Grosse, UCSD’s senior associate athletics director, who has been with the school for nearly 20 years.
Nevertheless, the Tritons are remarkably competitive and have done their share of winning at the D-II level. They won national championships in women’s soccer in 2000 and 2001 and in softball in 2011. They’ve finished second in baseball and men’s swimming, and they have at times dominated their conference, the 12-member California Collegiate Athletic Association.
The CCAA, of which GCU used to be a member, consists of 11 schools from the California State University system and only UCSD from the University of California system. And just as GCU eventually would like to leave behind the Pacific West Conference for Division I, so it is with UCSD and the CCAA.
“Our students want to be aligned with California’s other D-I schools,” Grosse says. “The biggest issue is a conference affiliation, aligning with like institutions.”
With an enrollment of about 30,000, nearly 45 percent of whom are Asian-American, UCSD is about 10 times larger than the average D-II institution and more than twice as large as the average CCAA school. It would seem to be a good fit for the D-I Big West Conference, which includes UC-Davis, UC-Irvine, UC-Riverside and UC-Santa Barbara and does not play football.
The University of Hawai’i joined the Big West this year in all sports except football, and San Diego State University and Boise State University will come on board under those terms in 2013. Hawai’i, formerly of the Western Athletic Conference, is now in the Mountain West Conference for football, and the other two will be joining the Big East Conference in that sport.
The musical-conferences scenario in college sports is the result of schools looking “to make the most out of football and save the most in the other sports,” Grosse says.
Last February, students at UCSD rejected a proposal to reclassify to Division I, objecting to the cost of such a move at a time when California’s public universities have been raising tuition dramatically to compensate for state budget cuts to higher education.
“It was disappointing,” Grosse says of the student vote, which was 60 percent against D-I. “It was more of a vote on the timing than anything. The slogan (of the opposition) was ‘Not Now.’ The vote came on the heels of a campus demonstration over fee hikes.”
UCSD faculty, too, have been leery of such a move, expressing sentiments that D-I will become a slippery slope that compromises the school’s academic integrity. Another student vote probably will come up next year, Grosse says.
Notes From the GCU Win
The Antelopes’ victory completed a sweep of UCSD in a week’s time. The previous weekend, the GCU women defeated the No. 8-ranked Tritons, 64-62, in the Disney Tip-Off Classic in Anaheim, Calif…. GCU’s fan support in an announced crowd of 324 was bolstered by the arrival of about two dozen prospective students who were hosted Saturday in San Diego by the University…. The UCSD campus is so immense (10 times larger than GCU’s) that the Antelopes got lost on their way to practice at the 5,000-seat RIMAC Arena on Friday…. UCSD lost by only 71-67 at Dixie State College, GCU’s PacWest rival, on Nov. 9.
Email Doug Carroll at doug.carroll@gcu.edu.
LA JOLLA, Calif. – The University of California at San Diego has a spectacular library named after Theodor Seuss Geisel, commonly known as Dr. Seuss, but that’s about the only thing even remotely silly about the institution.
UCSD, which occupies a sprawling, 1,200-acre campus only 12 miles north of downtown San Diego, is the Harvard of NCAA Division II. Founded in 1960, it’s widely regarded as one of the top public universities in the country, ranking in the top 10 in programs such as oceanography, bioengineering, behavioral neuroscience and geophysics.
Most of its student-athletes are brainiacs. And although the Tritons lost, 65-52, on Saturday night to GCU in men’s basketball – they started two players majoring in economics, two in political science and one in structural engineering -- their athletic program is an amazing success story, not unlike Stanford University in Division I.
Start with the fact that UCSD has a Division III mentality about athletics. Although it has been a member of Division II since 2000, it didn’t begin awarding athletic scholarships until about five years ago – and then only because it was required to do so by the NCAA.
How’s this for different? If you make the team at UCSD, which sponsors a full complement of 23 sports, including crew, fencing and water polo, you get $500 in aid. That’s it.
“That doesn’t even cover your books,” says Ken Grosse, UCSD’s senior associate athletics director, who has been with the school for nearly 20 years.
Nevertheless, the Tritons are remarkably competitive and have done their share of winning at the D-II level. They won national championships in women’s soccer in 2000 and 2001 and in softball in 2011. They’ve finished second in baseball and men’s swimming, and they have at times dominated their conference, the 12-member California Collegiate Athletic Association.
The CCAA, of which GCU used to be a member, consists of 11 schools from the California State University system and only UCSD from the University of California system. And just as GCU eventually would like to leave behind the Pacific West Conference for Division I, so it is with UCSD and the CCAA.
“Our students want to be aligned with California’s other D-I schools,” Grosse says. “The biggest issue is a conference affiliation, aligning with like institutions.”
With an enrollment of about 30,000, nearly 45 percent of whom are Asian-American, UCSD is about 10 times larger than the average D-II institution and more than twice as large as the average CCAA school. It would seem to be a good fit for the D-I Big West Conference, which includes UC-Davis, UC-Irvine, UC-Riverside and UC-Santa Barbara and does not play football.
The University of Hawai’i joined the Big West this year in all sports except football, and San Diego State University and Boise State University will come on board under those terms in 2013. Hawai’i, formerly of the Western Athletic Conference, is now in the Mountain West Conference for football, and the other two will be joining the Big East Conference in that sport.
The musical-conferences scenario in college sports is the result of schools looking “to make the most out of football and save the most in the other sports,” Grosse says.
Last February, students at UCSD rejected a proposal to reclassify to Division I, objecting to the cost of such a move at a time when California’s public universities have been raising tuition dramatically to compensate for state budget cuts to higher education.
“It was disappointing,” Grosse says of the student vote, which was 60 percent against D-I. “It was more of a vote on the timing than anything. The slogan (of the opposition) was ‘Not Now.’ The vote came on the heels of a campus demonstration over fee hikes.”
UCSD faculty, too, have been leery of such a move, expressing sentiments that D-I will become a slippery slope that compromises the school’s academic integrity. Another student vote probably will come up next year, Grosse says.
Notes From the GCU Win
The Antelopes’ victory completed a sweep of UCSD in a week’s time. The previous weekend, the GCU women defeated the No. 8-ranked Tritons, 64-62, in the Disney Tip-Off Classic in Anaheim, Calif…. GCU’s fan support in an announced crowd of 324 was bolstered by the arrival of about two dozen prospective students who were hosted Saturday in San Diego by the University…. The UCSD campus is so immense (10 times larger than GCU’s) that the Antelopes got lost on their way to practice at the 5,000-seat RIMAC Arena on Friday…. UCSD lost by only 71-67 at Dixie State College, GCU’s PacWest rival, on Nov. 9.
Email Doug Carroll at doug.carroll@gcu.edu.
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