Why Does Cookman Not Have Certain Sports?

By Henson White

Sports are an integral component of a majority of colleges. Most every school has some sort of sports program. However, only the bigger state schools will have "all" of the big sports, especially after the onset of Title IX, which was a measure to give better equality to women's athletics. Many schools cut their "worse" sports. This also affected HBCUs as many, including Bethune Cookman, cut some of their smaller sports. However, Bethune Cookman lost many of their sports to the effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Bryce A Hoynoski, who is the Director of Athletic Communications for the school told us this. "B-CU ultimately suspended all programs due to COVID-19. With that, the university dropped Men's Tennis, Men's Golf, and Bowling. We have not re-added any programs yet as the University continues to recover from the off-year".

A great example of the lack of sports diversity in HBCU schools is the lack of folkstyle wrestling programs. I wrestled all my years in high school and thoroughly enjoyed it. And when I went to look for schools that had any sort of wrestling programs and was sad to see that there are barely any south of the Appalachian mountains. Especially when you are looking for HBCUs with any form of program, currently, the only school with a Division I program is Morgan State University. Every other school with any form of a program only has a club, for example, FAMU has a wrestling club, which is what most other schools have. This lack of specific sports means there is a gap in what certain schools can offer students for scholarships. This causes students who wish to go to an HBCU but want to go on a scholarship to be unable to go. Though it is not as easy as just going, "We will have a team this year" as costs are incurred by making the team and funding said team. So until certain schools can secure funding, we will unlikely see a boom in smaller sports being offered at smaller schools.