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Wright State needs a cash cow

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By Marc Katz, Staff Writer Updated 11:23 PM Friday, July 31, 2009

FAIRBORN — For those who have to leave and don’t want to, there never seems to be a decent way to exit.

Every traded athlete who wanted to stay where he was wants to know what happened to loyalty — whether he was told of the trade in a face-to-face meeting or on the telephone.

Every released athlete or fired manager or coach wants to know why he or she suddenly isn’t as useful.

It happens to the good people and the bad people, and it happened to Matt Liddy and Mat Zircher at Wright State just two days ago.

They’re the good people.

Liddy has been at the school 24 years, 16 of them as head swimming coach, winning more championships at the school than practically all of the other coaches combined.

And he did it with an inferior pool.

For the last five years, Liddy has been an assistant athletics director — his choice — and had various duties, including game management at the Nutter Center.

If you think game management is opening the doors and turning on the lights, well, you probably think the basketball team doesn’t practice three hours a day, either.

Zircher has been at the school 16 years on essentially a three-man staff that not only kept the media informed about the school’s teams, but acted as defacto traveling secretaries as well.

When money’s short, though, nice guys do finish last. Tell me one company around here that has not laid off an employee. Has not laid off a revered employee!

Wright State has never been known as a school that overspends on athletics — although I’m certain there have been frivolous expenditures — but it is a young school that has also not been able to lure as many big donations as it would like, and has yet to find a way to entice fans to attend men’s and women’s basketball games.

At Ohio State — where cuts also are being made, by the way — there is a cash cow grazing in Ohio Stadium that allows cuts to be kept at a minimum.

It would be nice if the teams that played in the Nutter Center could become cash cows for WSU.

That’s Athletics Director Bob Grant’s real assignment. Find the money, not cut it.

If that happened, maybe some of the cuts made this week — in equipment, scholarships, travel, people — wouldn’t have been necessary.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2157 or mkatz@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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