Olympic Bronze Medalist Frustrated By University's Cost-Saving Measures 

By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

When Clayton Murphy learned last week that the men's cross country team had been eliminated at the University of Akron, he was stunned.

The Akron alum, who went from NCAA champion for the Zips to 2016 Olympic bronze medalist in the 800 meters in a matter of months, said he read the announcement and could hardly believe the words.

He immediately thought of his coach, Lee LaBadie, the Akron men's cross country coach and the athletes in the program.

"I was in shock," Murphy said Wednesday. "When I read the article it didn't really register what had happened. Coach LaBadie means so much to me, beyond track and coaching. He was at my wedding. He's like family."

Murphy and his wife, Ariana (Washington) Murphy, are set to move cross-country this week from Portland, Ore., to suburban Cleveland, Ohio, in part, so he can set up a training environment with LaBadie.

But now, he also feels like someone "holding a pitchfork and a torch outside the university," rallying with former teammates and alumni to try and save the Zips cross country program.

"It's become, what can I do as an alum, to save a program that spring-boarded me to where I am today?" Murphy said.

He has been working the phones for much of the past week, gathering information, building support and advocating for the cross country team. On Tuesday, he spoke to athletic director Larry Williams for 45 minutes.

What Murphy has learned over the past week gives him an unsettling feeling.

First, the university announced that it was making $4.4 million in budget cuts and that the elimination of three sports — men's cross country, men's golf and women's tennis — were at the heart of that effort.

"I started doing a lot of research over the weekend and the men's cross country team accounted for $7,900 of operating expenses in the 2019 season," Murphy said. "Roughly 12 athletes would have been on the 2020 teams this fall, with 1.2 scholarships spread among them."

Murphy said he and other alums could have raised far in excess of $8,000 for the upcoming season and endowed the future of the program for years to come.

"We could have covered that within a day," Murphy said.

The men's cross country team has a high graduation rate and nearly every member pays four years of in-state tuition to the university. Financially, Murphy said, it doesn't make sense. Cutting cross country doesn't make a dent in what the school's administrators said they must trim.

But in the phone call with the athletic director, a new reason was offered for cutting the program, or at least not reinstating it through a fund-raising drive: Title IX.

"That was frustrating," Murphy said. "It started off as COVID-19 related budget cuts, and now (the administration) is hiding behind the Title IX issue."

Murphy has future meetings scheduled with former teammates, and a former compliance officer at another university, to weigh the merits of the Title IX claim.

"It's tough to argue against that one without knowing more of the facts," Murphy said. "It's a murky issue."

The most likely reason for the elimination of the cross country program and the two other sports — one of which is women's tennis — is that the optics of cutting three sports that have the least perceived value to the university looks good in a headline. It shows you're cutting something.

That's what Murphy suspects, and it's a bitter pill to swallow for someone who was nurtured in the program and has achieved global success.

"I had known for a long time that the university was going to make cuts, even before the pandemic hit," Murphy said. "In January, I was on the campus and so I knew something was coming. In some ways, it's not a complete surprise."

Akron is a member of the mid-major Mid-American Conference and the Zips football team went 0-12 last fall.

The football team, which is important for courting alumni support and donations, doesn't support itself, let alone pay the bills for other sports on campus.

The AD also pointed out that the distance runners at the school would still have two seasons — indoor and outdoor track — in which to compete. The track and field teams, under head coach Dennis Mitchell, along with soccer, are among the most visible and successful sports on campus.

Mitchell had been in the midst of a campaign to refurbish the school's thread-bare track facility. There are tree roots growing through the surface on the backstretch.

"It's going to be extremely hard to build a new facility now, because the biggest supporters of that idea are frustrated (by the cross country team's elimination)," he said.

Murphy, even as a middle-distance runner, said he wouldn't have gone to Akron without a cross country program there.

"I was extremely into cross country," he said. "I wanted to win a MAC cross country title so bad. I poured everything into it. It was such an integral part of my time there."

That effort, a year-round, three-season effort, is what propelled Murphy to stardom under coach LaBadie.

Murphy spent seven weeks at Akron over the winter, working with LaBadie and volunteering his time mentoring the school's student-athletes.

"I've developed relationships with these guys," he said. "So when this happened, my first thought was for them. What can I do for these guys, besides pray for them?"

Eliminating cross country isn't going to do the track programs any good. Future distance recruits are likely to look elsewhere so they can compete during the fall.

Murphy and other alumni have already made that assessment.

"At the conference level, track programs without cross country are not competitive," he said. "You're just crippling a program for years to come."

Murphy knows it's an uphill battle to get the program reinstated, but when he finishes moving back to Ohio, that will be one of his ongoing missions.

"I'm not going to give up," he said. "I'm going to be fighting to get the program back. There's no reason not to rebuild a cross country program at some point."