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— Page A6
enterprise THE DAVIS
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2022
Showdown looms over funding UCD athletics Referendum would cut sports budget in half
his memoir. The set of principles was nicknamed “The Davis Way.” During its move to Division I, the program got another assist from the student body, who approved an additional fee to support athletic scholarships, and Vanderhoef made it clear The Davis Way was more than a value statement. It was also “a promise to undergraduates who’d approved a Division I-enabling student-fee initiative,” he wrote.
By Caleb Hampton Enterprise staff writer Over the past three decades, UC Davis’ NCAA teams have ascended from possible extinction to butting heads with some of the best teams in the country. Today, the school has a nearly $40 million annual athletics budget, alumni playing in top professional leagues and state-of-the-art sports facilities dotting campus. The Aggies’ success, however, is built on a foundation that may be cracking. The financial burden of UC Davis’ athletics program has largely been borne by the student body through a series of agreements made with past administrations and inadvertently brought into the spotlight by the current one. Now, students are leading an effort to scrap the fees undergraduates contribute to campus sports programs, putting about half of the school’s athletics budget at stake. The consequences could be dramatic. If the effort is successful, each student would save roughly $570 per year. Meanwhile, UC Davis’ NCAA programs “would likely be eliminated or reduced to only a few sports,”
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UC Davis students dug the hole that is now Hickey Pool in 1938. It was utilized by UCD physical education students until the program’s cancellation last year. according to a recent analysis by UC Davis’ budget office.
‘The Davis Way’ At the heart of the student-led effort is a desire to hold the campus administration accountable to promises it made over the past three decades, which both students and former administrators say have been broken. Those promises, made in exchange for students agreeing to fund athletics, included assurances about the way UC Davis would run its Athletics Department as well as the maintenance of programs meant to benefit the wider student body. In the early 1990s, UC Davis faced the possibility of scrapping several sports programs, including the football team, due to state
budget crises. In 1993, the student body approved a temporary fee to shore up funding for athletics and other campus units. The following year, after further cuts to athletics, a razor-thin majority of students approved a landmark referendum that extended the temporary fee indefinitely alongside another permanent fee, the Student Activities and Services Initiative (SASI). In exchange for saving athletics, the student body was promised a broad-based 23-sport athletics program and certain resources and opportunities for students, including a Physical Education program. For years, the PE program served as the centerpiece of an arrangement called “the teachercoach model,” which obligated Aggie coaches to hold a master’s
degree and devote half their work hours to teaching. The model rewarded the student body by offering them PE classes taught by NCAA coaches and it integrated the coaches into the campus community. It also provided a level of protection for studentathletes, as it made coaches accountable to faculty bodies like the Academic Senate. In the early 2000s, as UC Davis administrators navigated a move to Division I, they enshrined the teacher-coach model into a set of Eight Principles that “assured our campus community our athletics program would maintain its integrity and remain studentcentered and academically focused,” Larry Vanderhoef, who served as UC Davis chancellor from 1994 until 2009, wrote in
Broken promises The principles were not a recipe for on-the-field domination. On the contrary, they were meant to insulate student-athletes from performance-related pressures and safeguard against the trappings of “big-time” college sports programs: abusive “must-win” coaches, inflated salaries, commercialization, softened admissions standards and the diversion of resources from academic programs. “There was excitement about being part of a new model for the NCAA,” said Paul Medved, a UC Davis alum and parent of a former student-athlete at UC Davis. It didn’t take long, however, for a new campus administration to see the principles as a constraint. After Linda Katehi replaced Vanderhoef as chancellor in 2009, she
See ATHLETICS, Page A3
Coronavirus cases skyrocket in Davis Long lines at testing sites By Anne Ternus-Bellamy Enterprise staff writer After managing to keep COVID-19 cases at relatively low levels since the pandemic began, the city of Davis is being hit hard by the Omicron variant with all-time-high rates of new cases and test positivity. A few of the statistics: n The 350 cases the county has reported in Davis just since last Thursday represent nearly 9 percent of all
VOL. 124 NO. 2
INDEX
cases recorded in the city since the pandemic began nearly two years ago. n The 697 positive cases reported by Healthy Davis Together between Dec. 28 and Jan. 3 (which includes non-Davis residents) mark, by far, the highest oneweek total yet. n Test positivity is hovering around 10 percent, according to HDT medical director Dr. Sheri Belafsky, but is even higher for symptomatic individuals coming in for rapid tests — one in four are testing positive. For most of the pandemic, the test positivity rate for
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asymptomatic individuals was less than 1 percent and for symptomatic individuals was around 6 percent. What’s happening in Davis is likely happening everywhere in Yolo County, but Davis residents have been testing at very high levels in recent weeks and particularly in recent days,
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those tests, “has never seen volumes like this before,” she added. On Sunday, 1,442 tests were done at the South Davis Research Park site alone, double the 700 tests that would have made for a very busy day for the staff
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resulting in some eye-popping numbers not necessarily showing up in other cities. On Monday alone, nearly 12,000 samples were collected at HDT testing sites on and off campus, Belafsky said. The UC Davis Genome Center, which processes all
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