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While other mid-majors drop sports, Pacific is adding them. Here's why:

I talked to the school's AD to understand why they're zigging while others are zagging

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Matt Brown
May 23, 2025

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

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I also want to add two quick housekeeping notes.

1) Last week, I announced that we’re looking to hire a PT assignment editor to help clean up typos and improve our freelance writing pipeline. I’m not quite ready to announce our hire, but after reviewing a hundred applications and interviewing a dozen candidates, I’m confident that our editor is currently in our pipeline. I won’t be reviewing any new applications, but I’ve been so excited by the caliber of person who reached out that we’re already talking about how we might be able to create other roles this summer. Thank you to everybody!

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On Thursday, Stephen F. Austin announced the program will discontinue four varsity sports, including bowling, a sport where the school competed for national championships.

In the press release, the school noted

SFA joins a growing number of institutions across the country that have decided to discontinue athletic teams, citing the financial pressures tied to the changing college athletics landscape, including the looming $2.8 billion House vs. NCAA settlement. 

Which is true. Off the top of my head, SFA joins schools like Eastern Illinois (who just dropped men’s and women’s tennis), Grand Canyon (men’s volleyball), Radford (men’s and women’s tennis), Cal Poly (swimming & Diving), UTEP (women’s tennis) and others. Most of these schools cite costs, and the nebulous “changing college sports landscape” as the reason for making the change.

But at one school is taking a different approach. The WCC’s Pacific, a private school in Stockton, California, announced earlier this week that they plan to add more sports.

University of the Pacific is doing the opposite—adding two new sports programs and expanding three programs to its Division I athletics department. Starting in the 2025-26 academic year, Pacific will add men’s cross country and men’s track and field, revive the men’s and women’s diving programs and expand women’s field events.

Pacific is a mid-major, one with an athletic budget closer to $22 million than $222 million, so it isn’t immune to the financial pressures of running an athletic department. It isn’t starting new sports just because. But it’s also looking at the same set of circumstances that the Cal Polys and EIU’s of the world are facing, and made a very different decision.

Why? And why now? I called up Pacific AD Adam Tschuor to find out.

First, it’s important to understand the complicated math behind the proposed House settlement

Tschour told me that he and his team got to work exploring possibilities the day after they learned about the terms of the proposed House settlement.

He knew that if Pacific wanted to remain relevant in men’s and women’s basketball, “we knew we needed to opt-into the settlement.”

But he also realized that because the school has limited financial resources, they wouldn’t be able to completely fund every single sport at the maximum allowed roster size. Not only would that represent a seven figure cost to the university, but it would put the athletic department out of compliance with Title IX. “We would have needed more male athletes.” So that wasn’t an option.

The adjustments to roster limits also changed how schools like Pacific can use athletics for student enrollment and retention. A sport that generates zero dollars in ticket or media rights revenue can still be financially critical for a university if it helps attract tuition-paying students, as most Olympic sports do.

So Pacific needed to figure out how to responsibly manage limited financial resources, comply with the proposed settlement and make sure they weren’t chasing away dozens of tution-paying students.

The solution? Add more sports.

“We must have looked at a thousand different scenarios,” he told me, “and modeled over a dozen different potential sports.” Pacific needed to find solutions that wouldn’t require massive capital investments, would make sure the school would comply with Title IX, would have enough local schools to play against, and would make sense financially.

There was another wrinkle to consider as well. The school wanted to start competition as quickly as possible, so they wanted to find sports with lots of athletes already in the transfer portal. Having to build a roster from scratch with only high school athletes would take too long.

Expanding programming in track, cross-country and swimming checked all of those boxes.

In the press release, Tschour added

“We owe it to our student-athletes, campus and community to come up with a way to navigate these changes not by cutting, but by growing,” Tschuor said. “These sports additions are the first step in a plan of growth that will transform Pacific for the better—in enrollment, campus life, engagement and competitive success.”

He doubled down on that principle during our conversation. “College sports is a business, sure, but it’s also supposed to be co-curricular. Expanding athletic opportunities fits with what we’re trying to do as a university. We’re a growing school.”

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And in a perfect world, Tschour wants to keep growing.

There are practical limitations on fast Pacific can expand athletic offerings, like locker room space. But those limitations won’t last forever, and Tschour told me the school has modeled pathways to add plenty of other sports.

Two potential candidates in the near future? Restoring field hockey and men’s volleyball, two sports that Pacific previously offered. The department also considered potential club sport offerings, like women’s flag football (attractive, given the depth of high school participation, but with concerns over a lack of local opponents), other varsity sports (women’s golf?)…and yes, even the return of football (which uh, doesn’t make sense unless you’re interested in writing Pacific an 80 million dollar check).

How big the department can eventually get will depend on lots of other factors, like facilities, donor support, and what other schools decide to do. The more west coast schools add a program, the easier it is for other schools to do the same.

At the end of the day, Tschour told me he thought it was important to get out in public and talk about why Pacific looked at the same challenges everybody else is facing, and chose differently.

“Every school has different challenges and different situations, but if we can help encourage one school to add rather than subtract, then I’ll be very happy.”

Real quick, here’s everything else we’ve written recently:

We’re taking Monday off, on account of it being a federal holiday. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you on the internet next week.

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