Jesse Schibilia

What a whirlwind of a month:

New apartment in North Brunswick. New HDTV. New Wii. The Burning Crusade. I will have my time filled with plenty of things to do.

I just finished the framework for the RUSportCuts.org advocacy website.  It desperately needs conent from the individual teams.  It includes a discussion forum so that members of each community can come and talk about their efforts.  I really hope that it gets some exposure.  I have called out to the athletes to tell their communities about it so that we have a unified voice.  I feel that a unified voice is really important in a campaign such as this.

I’m sure many of you have heard about the varsity team sports cuts that will be occuring at the end of the 2007 season at Rutgers. If not, read up. They will be cutting the fencing program that I was a part of for the last five years. Obviously, this weighs heavily on my heart.

The cuts were made across the entire University. No part of our school was safe. I can understand that in tough financial times, the fat has to be cut. But I feel as if Rutgers Athletics made the cuts of entire teams to make the cuts visible. I am sure they could have rearranged the team budgets to have the same affect of cutting six entire sports. Instead, they want to avoid public outcry by saying “Look at poor Rutgers Athletics, they lost six entire teams!” The cuts made add up to 3% of the total Athletics budget ($1.2 million of $38 million). I am sure all of 30 teams would be able to maintain with a 3% budget cut straight across the board for each sport.

The cuts that were made are seen as “strategic” because we are considered to be teams that are less productive. Take one look at the t-shirt I made for Rutgers Fencing this year and tell me that we aren’t productive. We have 86 NCAA individual appearances and 32 All-Americans in 20 years. We brought Rutgers a national sabre champion in 2003. To my knowledge, there have been no other teams at Rutgers with any NCAA championships. So the notion that fencing is not productive is ludicrous.

I registered a domain name to create a website for an advocacy website for the cuts. I have been waiting for data from the rest of the teams so that I can put it together, but I have yet to hear from any of them. I am still trying though, and once it is up, I will post the URL here.

I just finished my last few assignments last Friday. I only took three classes this semester, but it was still a ton of work. I have already confirmed one official A, and one unofficial A. That gives me six straight A’s in the last two semesters, which makes my mother very proud!