University of Maryland President Wallace Loh issued his response to the President’s Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics this morning. Loh’s decision? To eliminate eight athletic teams, as the commission had recommended last week.

I concur with the entirety of this recommendation, including the Commission’s “painful conclusion” to discontinue six athletic programs (eight teams), effective July 1, 2012: men’s cross-country, indoor track, and outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo. All athletic scholarship commitments and affected coaches’ contracts will be honored.

Athletic director Kevin Anderson recommended that a “Save the Programs Campaign” be initiated in order to save the teams in danger of being eliminated, which Loh also accepted. Under this initiative, discontinued teams will have the opportunity to keep their programs alive by raising enough money to run their teams’ operating costs for eight years. The deadline to reach that goal would be June 30, 2012. The M Club (a booster club comprised of former student-athletes) has already donated $1 million to the cause.

Because of Title IX, eliminated teams would be paired up so that a male and female sport would be saved in the process. According to projections in Anderson’s response to the ICA report, men’s and women’s swimming would have to raise $11.6 million to keep the program afloat for the next eight years. The other pairs are men’s track and acrobatics & tumbling ($9.5 million), and women’s water polo and men’s tennis ($8.0 million).

At a press conference this afternoon, Dr. Loh remarked that “this is perhaps one of the most painful and heart wrenching decisions I’ve made.”

“Today is a day, for me, of enormous sadness, because we will be saying goodbye to some members of the Maryland athletics family,” he stated, then noting that he received petitions from over 10,000 people, as well as 500 personal emails in response to the initial report.

The Maryland swimming and diving teams have already established a fundraising website where donations for the program can be made.