PITTSBURGH — In his first public speaking since Robert Morris stunningly eliminated the men’s and women’s hockey programs, school president Chris Howard on Tuesday afternoon confirmed the exclusive reporting of DK Pittsburgh Sports earlier in the day that there was, in fact, no vote conducted by the Board of Trustees.
He claimed, instead, that the Trustees achieved a “consensus” after the decision had already been made, and he declined to define what “consensus” meant in this context. Or how many members were canvassed. Or why, to his knowledge, Kevin Colbert, the Steelers’ general manager, resigned as a result of there being no vote.
“We don’t ask our our trustees to vote on this and they didn’t, but they did arrive at a consensus,” Howard said during his Zoom with select media outlets, including DK Pittsburgh Sports.
As our site reported early Tuesday, the decision was actually reached unilaterally by Howard and Morgan O’Brien, the Board’s chairman. The only two Robert Morris representatives in this session were Howard and Chris King, the athletic director who’s known to have had nothing to do with the decision. All but one of the questions in the session, thus, were directed at Howard.
The only one directed at King came from the school’s student news service. Within that, King tellingly referred to it as “the university’s decision.”
Howard released the following statement about the situation:
“As painful as it is to discontinue the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s ice hockey programs here at RMU, we have little choice. I know this decision came as a painful surprise to the student-athletes and many other members of our community. Over the past several years RMU, like other schools, has had to make some difficult strategic, operational, and financial decisions and each of these choices has had a human toll. The location of the RMU Island Sports Center (located a few miles from campus) poses challenges to providing the upgrades needed to maintain a Division I facility, despite being more than sufficient for club sports and community play. Ice hockey has been our most expensive Division I sport due in part to low ticket sales and limited donations, as well as having no access to guarantee game opportunities, conference revenue, or television contract payouts like some other sports. Hockey’s direct expenses alone are already more than $1 million annually. It is also worth noting that few universities our size offer the variety of Division I sports that RMU has fielded, and we are one of only three out of 108 schools in our Carnegie classification that offers this particular mix of sports. Institutions with comparably sized athletics programs boast endowments that RMU simply cannot match at this point in time. We considered several options for sustaining Division I ice hockey in the long term, and would require approximately $5 million to $30 million in facility upgrades, with no guarantee of attracting the kind of corporate support needed to secure that investment.
“For several years, we have actively explored potential opportunities to fund improvements to our current facilities without success. Like virtually all schools, our largest source of revenue at RMU is tuition, and we are simply unable to pass those costs along to our students as we emerge from a global pandemic. The difficult truth is that RMU has two programs which have been very successful on the ice and helped to graduate student-athletes of both great character and intellect. However, that success has been underwritten by the university at a cost that is no longer sustainable to bear. To keep the teams sustainable would require at least $10 million, and as much as $25 million, both to cover long-term operating costs and facility upgrades. I know that does not make what we announced last week any easier for those directly impacted, but it is the reality that we have to reckon with as a university.”
Not every hockey player receives a 100% tuition scholarship, however, RMU said it will honor all their scholarships at the same percentage as they would have received had the program not been discontinued.
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