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Akron cutbacks include baseball program
Shortfall projected at $60 million
Gerrad Rohan finished last season on a 16-game hitting streak for the University of Akron baseball team.
The South Range High School graduate never imagined that would be the way his Zips career would end.
The university announced on Friday that it plans to cut its budget by $40 million over the next three years, eliminating 215 positions and its baseball program to deal with an anticipated $60 million shortfall.
“Everyone’s pretty devastated, because it kinda happened out of nowhere,” Rohan said Friday. “The timing of it — the administrators from the president down — didn’t give us much time for anything.
“For it just to be cut, it’s hard for everyone.”
The university said it plans to further close its funding gap by raising undergraduate fees and graduate tuition, and through expected growth in enrollment. A university spokesman says 180 of the 215 positions are currently filled. Employees who will lose their jobs are to be notified later this month. No faculty positions will be eliminated.
Other planned cost-saving measures include hiring an outside company to run the school’s dining services and renegotiating the cost of health care plans.
Rohan said he first heard rumors about the possibility of the baseball program being eliminated a week ago, but didn’t think much of it. He’s been in Bristol, Conn., for much of the summer playing in the Futures Collegiate Baseball League with the Bristol Blues.
Friday morning, he received an email from Akron head coach Rick Rembielak with more details about the possible cuts. A few minutes later, the president of the university, Scott Scarborough, made it official through an email to the entire Akron student body and faculty.
“The University of Akron’s future is bright, but first we need to fix its finances,” Scarborough said in a prepared statement. “Our review indicates UA has a $60 million financial problem, and we have developed a three-year plan to solve that problem.
“We know that the next few weeks will be tough,” the email said. “After that, we will refocus our efforts on the mission ahead — to become a great public university for all of Northeast Ohio and the world.”
The baseball program hasn’t finished with a record above .500 since 2008, but they reached the Mid-American Conference championship two years ago and have been very competitive in league play under Rembielak.
Rohan felt like the program had turned the corner.
“It seems like the administrators didn’t really care, because how do you drop a program just like that?” Rohan said. “You have a coach and you’re not going to give him a chance to find a new job? You just took his job away.
“And the incoming freshmen are going to have to restart the process all over again.”
The university said they would honor all athletic scholarships through the completion of each individual’s undergraduate studies, if they remain at Akron. The other option is to transfer to another Division I program, where they would not be required to sit out the standard one year since the program was dropped.
Rohan said he plans on exploring all options, including transferring for his final year of eligibility. He will be a redshirt senior in the fall and is only 15 credits shy of earning a degree in marketing, which only complicates matters even more.
“I have to worry about getting out of an apartment lease, apply to a new school,” Rohan said. “It’s going to be tough to get scholarship money this late.
“It’s going to be a hard process. I’m just going to try and stay positive and hope that some good comes out of it.”