Sonoma State Players, Coaches Left Blindsided by Elimination of NCAA Athletics

Olivia Wilson and her roommates all ran into their living room at the same time Wednesday morning. Nobody spoke a word as they stared down at their phones.

“We were all in disbelief,” she said.

The roommates — all members of the Sonoma State University women’s soccer team — had just received a campus-wide email titled “budget deficit update.” It detailed a list of reductions the university would make at the end of the year because of a projected shortfall close to $24 million: cutting more than 20 degree programs, laying off some departments’ faculty members, and eliminating all NCAA Division II sports.

“I was so confused. I honestly thought this was a big joke — I even made a joke,” said Wilson, who grew up in Chico dreaming of playing at a school like Sonoma State. “I was like, ‘It’s not April Fools?’”

She called her parents, half crying and half laughing before she could truly process the news.

“I felt very lost,” she said. “The email gave us no information; we just got told that there’s going to be no athletics, and I probably reread it so many times to see if I was actually hearing it right. It’s really traumatic and heartbreaking. That’s how I describe how I’ve been feeling with it.”

Little transparency

Wilson and her teammates got few additional details Wednesday, even after administrators hosted an informational meeting for student-athletes and another with the coaches of Sonoma State’s 11 NCAA teams.

Athletes had hoped the school’s leaders would answer the questions already circulating among them: What would happen in the semester that still lay ahead? Would they play their spring seasons? How would scholarships be affected?

“Honestly, all the athletes that asked questions, the questions went unanswered,” said Taylor Hodges, a sophomore also on the women’s soccer team.

Coaches who met with Sonoma State’s interim President Emily Cutrer and other administrators were left similarly in the dark.

“I was a little insulted that they would make this decision and yet not really be ready to address us and to help us understand what really happened,” said Emiria Salzmann, who has coached women’s soccer for 14 years.

She found out her team had been cut in a text message from one of her players while she was driving to campus.

“The lack of ability to answer questions and have clarity and transparency, it adds insult to injury, in my opinion,” she continued.

In a message to the campus community, Cutrer said student-athletes who remain at Sonoma State would remain eligible for their scholarships, and added that the school would support those who want to transfer.

Coaches were told in their meeting that they would continue their spring seasons, since games had already been scheduled, and their contracts would be extended through the end of June. After that, they’d all be let go.

‘What am I going to do now?’

That timing poses an additional challenge for finding a new job, Salzmann said, since hiring for many coaching positions in soccer and other fall sports — already few and far between — usually occurs over the winter. If a school is going to let go of a soccer coach, they usually do it after the main season, which ends in the fall, and try to hire a replacement before training for the shorter spring exhibition season starts.

“There aren’t that many schools that are going to go into their spring seasons without already hiring a new coach,” she told KQED.

For Salzmann, her opportunities are even more limited because she’s tied to the Bay Area. She has a 10-year-old son, and she and her ex-husband both live in Santa Rosa.

Marcus Ziemer, who has been part of Sonoma State’s soccer program for 39 years, also doesn’t know where he’ll find work after this.

“I’m 62 years old. I want to coach another three to five years and then retire on my terms,” he said. “Now what am I going to do? Who’s going to hire me?”

He played soccer at the university in the mid-’80s and has been the men’s coach since 1989. His team won the program’s only national championship in 2002.

“They could have given a heads up. One of our coaches bought a house a month ago locally. We had one of our coaches [get] recruited by another university and turned that job down,” Ziemer said.

He believes the university waited to announce the cuts until after the semester started so that the student-athletes who choose to transfer would have already paid for the semester’s housing and tuition.

A spokesperson for the university did not respond to a request for comment Friday. In her message to the campus community, Cutrer said she was “keenly aware of [the] human impact” of the cuts, and added that “no amount of explanation or necessity makes any of us feel better.”

Campus culture

Ziemer believes almost all of the university’s 227 NCAA student-athletes will likely leave before the next academic year, and he said the decision to cut athletics will hurt the school’s already struggling enrollment. Sonoma State’s student body is 38% smaller than its peak in 2015, according to the email detailing the cuts.

“We’re a big part of the school’s marketing,” he said. “We go on the road, we play universities all up and down the California and the Western United States. Our logos, our social media posts, we bring a lot of awareness about the university.”

Athletics programs are also a big part of school spirit.

“Sports bring a certain energy and a certain pride to the university,” Salzmann said. “I always say, ‘I bleed blue.’ That will be missing.”

“Human beings are creatures of community,” she continued. “And that’s what sports is.”

Looking ahead

Wilson and Hodges have both already entered the NCAA transfer portal, the database that helps facilitate athletes’ transfers from one university to another.

“My goal as a college student is I always wanted to be a student-athlete,” Hodges told KQED. “Soccer is pretty much [what] gets me through my day.”

Coaches and players will spend the months ahead reaching out to other teams and finding programs where the athletes fit. Wilson thinks that even before their five-game spring season starts, some on the team will likely have already gone on to their new programs.

“I don’t think we’ll have a full team by the time our spring games come,” Wilson said. “I was telling my teammate that I wish we were in season right now finding this out so we could at least know that this [was] our last time and season together.”

She said that the packed schedule of training, team building, and tournament travel every fall gets tiring and busy, but it’s also fun.

“We’ll be in the team room before the coaches come in and we’re all just getting ready, putting our stuff on and we’re just blasting music and getting into the zone,” she said. “It breaks my heart that this choice of getting to play here got ripped from us.”