No opponent’s buzzer-beater could rip the heart out of a crowd at Gersten Pavilion like the bombshell Loyola Marymount athletic director Craig Pintens dropped on his own athletes on Jan. 23.
The Lions’ A.D. stood before the more than 80 students who made it to the meeting that Tuesday evening – members of the rowing, women’s swimming, track and field and men’s cross country teams, all summoned by a brief, seemingly innocuous email three hours earlier – and informed them that, after this school year, their sports will be discontinued at LMU.
In all, those teams roster 115 athletes. And they employ six coaches and two assistants – who learned their fate 15 minutes before the affected students did.
Alena Sharp, a sophomore swimmer, described the scene on a Zoom call with me last week: “Our athletic director walks in and he looks kind of somber. But from my perspective, it was more so just, ‘This is going to be really awkward. Let me get this over with.’ And then he stood there and he gave us the information.
“At first, there was just silence. And then it felt like you could hear tears start to fall. Like this sob that just started to echo and echo … and it was like, ‘I’m not dreaming, this is not a nightmare. I’m actually being told that I’m not going to have a place here anymore.’”
A teammate who didn’t make the meeting but who was walking by as it was letting out said what she saw looked like a Greek tragedy.
“People went out of Gersten crying and screaming and kicking things … crumbling to the floor,” said Gracie O’Connell, another teammate. “Teams were huddled up together and hugging, devastated.”
It wasn’t any fun for Pintens, either. But he wanted them all to hear it at the same time, and for them to hear it directly from him, so, yes, he stood there and gave them the information.
“I mean, you’ve just changed their lives dramatically,” Pintens said last week, via Zoom. “There’s a lot of…
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