Decline of junior college athletics

Last week, my mid-week assignment took me to Ridgewater College to photograph the Warriors' women's and men's basketball games.

What I saw as I watched the Lady Warriors lose a six-point game the moment I entered the gym was not a poor performance. I saw the continuing decline of junior college sports in Minnesota.

My thoughts had nothing to do with Ridgewater College and its athletics programs. It's the other schools in Minnesota Community College Conference that worry me.

First, MSCTC-Fergus Falls only had seven players dressed for the game. Regardless of the outcome of that game, seven players doesn't get a team very far. Usually.

But the Spartans' lack of numbers is not an anomaly. Actually, it's more par for the course. I've been to numerous junior college games in the last few years and it's normal for a team -- other than Ridgewater -- to field seven or eight players; especially in the women's games.

And then, after looking at the Fergus Falls stats from the women's game, I noticed one player didn't play. On a team with seven players, one of them didn't play! Maybe I should retype that in capital letters.

I don't know what the situation was, but hypothetically, I would have given up and left the team if I was the only player out of seven in a 40-minute game that didn't get to see any court time.

When I saw the Fergus Falls men's team take the floor for warm-ups, I counted the number players and saw ... eight. Shaking my head at that moment didn't seem to do any justice.

To top it all off, I was told during that game the Lady Warriors would not be playing Minneapolis on the weekend because the Marauders kicked at least one player off of the squad and couldn't field a team!

There's no wonder why junior college athletics don't pull in much of a crowd these days. The small, Spartan Ridgewater gym has bleachers on just one side and is dwarfed by all the other high school gyms in the area. Crowds reaching a couple hundred fans get swallowed up in the emptiness, if there are even a couple of hundred.

More likely, there are about 100 or so people in the bleachers; many are parents or close friends and students. The count shifts between the women's and men's games as the men's players go to the locker room at halftime of the women's game, and the numbers at the men's game increase noticeably after the women's players come out of their locker rooms.

Basketball isn't the only sport suffering in this apathy of action. Wrestling in the junior college ranks continues to go the way of the analog television in a high-definition world. In short, it's becoming obsolete. There are only five teams out 17 conference members that boast a wrestling program.

And even then, the competition is spotty. More than not, a team like the Warriors, who usually have no trouble filling out a line-up card with reserves to spare, will win three or four matches by forfeit. In a dual that consists of just 10 weights, that's a lot of inactivity.

Now, I know I'll regret doing this, but I will poke a little fun at the national tournament structure of the NJCAA. If you compare it to how the Minnesota State High School League has its postseason set up for most sports, the NJCAA makes qualifying for a national tournament a snap.

For example, in basketball if a team has a good season, there is only a piddly four-team regional tournament to get through. The same in volleyball. When there was still tennis at Ridgewater it was almost a foregone conclusion that all six players would get to the national tournament, because there wasn't another team in the region to go up against. And the players were not ones with spectacular resumes at the high school level. More times than not, they were the No. 3 or 4 player at their school.

So why is there still athletics at junior college institutions? They don't make any money, no great numbers of people attend the games and the likelihood that a seven-player basketball team beats an 11-player one happens regularly.

I'm not against it at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if more and more two-year institutions decide that they're not getting the bang for their state-supplied dollar.