Bernard Fernandez: Olympic Education Center KO'd by budget cuts

Bernard Fernandez: Olympic Education Center KO'd by budget cuts
Philadelphia Daily News

IN THE END, it came down to a matter of dollars and cents. Doesn't it always?
The 20-year-old boxing program at Northern Michigan University's U.S. Olympic Education Center more or less ended on Jan. 14, when budget cuts prevented the continued enrollment of 14 student-boxers whose scholarships no longer would be funded. But the official end of a grand experiment that produced 12 Olympians, 97 U.S. national amateur champions and numerous out-of-the-ring success stories doesn't come until Thursday, when head coach Al Mitchell and assistant coach David Reid, America's only gold medalist in boxing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, go off salary.


"The program is about boxing, of course, but it's about more than that," said Mitchell, the 1996 U.S. Olympic boxing coach and a native of North Philadelphia as is his most famous pupil, Reid, who went on to win the WBA super welterweight championship. "These are inner-city kids we're talking about. Numerous guys got their degrees here. Almost 100 percent at least graduated from high school. Three or four of our athletes became teachers. One is a principal. Several others are coaches. We've had athletes go on to own their own businesses, or learn a trade."

Mitchell, 64, and Reid, 34, intend to remain in Marquette, Mich., training amateur boxers at the new Ringside Gym that is being funded in large part by Ringside, a Lenexa, Kan.-based boxing equipment company. One of Ringside's executives is Dave Lubs, who founded the boxing program at NMU in 1987 and served as its first director.

But Mitchell can't say for sure how many of his amateurs from the recently ended semester can afford to remain in the area without subsidies, or how many more from around the nation will arrive minus the inducement of paid educational benefits.


"I keep hearing that they might bring the program back in September, but I don't know if it'll happen," Mitchell said. "The handwriting had been on the wall for a few years now.

"I've got four kids who borrowed money so they could stay up here. I'm still training them. But I suppose if it came to that, I could go back to training pros."

Lubs is more optimistic that the program can be salvaged.

"I refuse to believe it's gone forever," he said. "I'm optimistic that everything will be back in place by next semester.

"The whole idea when we started this thing was to prepare these kids for life after boxing. We knew we'd have an opportunity to build better boxers, but a lot of these kids graduated from high school and went further with their education.

"What irks me is that local review committees all around the country have made recommendations that there should be more of these programs. So what happens? The first thing they do when there's a financial crunch is to shut down the one they have. It just doesn't make sense."

The Olympic Education Center is the result of a partnership between NMU and the U.S. Olympic Committee. In addition to boxing, Olympic sports whose participant-athletes' costs are picked up in part by the university are men's Greco-Roman wrestling, women's freestyle wrestling, men's and women's short-track speedskating and men's and women's weightlifting.

But NMU annually shells out just $20,000 for coaches in those other sports (everything above that is paid by the respective sport's national governing body), as opposed to $110,000 for boxing. And with appropriations for educational institutions in Michigan shrinking yearly since 2003, it became increasingly evident that funding for some programs would be slashed or eliminated altogether.

"The outlay for boxing was significant - 5 1/2 times what it was for our other sports," said Jeff Kleinschmidt, the director of the Olympic Training Center. "We went to USA Boxing and said that we no longer could continue to pay the coaches' salaries at that level. We asked USA Boxing to pick up the difference so that we could be consistent with our other sports. Their response was that they supported the program and wanted to see it continue, but they were unable to furnish the funds needed within the specified time frame.

"Since the coaches are actually employees of Northern Michigan, and the university has rules regarding layoffs, we had to proceed with notifying the coaches of their layoffs in a timely manner."

No coaches, of course, meant the end of subsidies for boxers and the suspension, if not termination, of the program.

Kleinschmidt, like Mitchell and Lubs, is hopeful boxing at NMU can be revived, for altruistic as well as for practical reasons.

"Four members of the 2000 U.S. Olympic boxing team, fully one-third of the squad, came from here," he noted. "But the program was never just about producing Olympians. The educational aspects are just as important."

You don't have to tell that to Ron Aurit, a Philadelphia boxing coach and referee whose Boxing Scholarship Foundation had hoped to place two promising amateurs at NMU.

"That program was their chance for a better life," Aurit said. *

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