A college education would have been out of the question for Tim Krizan without the ISU men’s swimming and diving team.

Growing up with four brothers in Cedar Rapids during the 1960s, Krizan knew his family could not afford to send him to a university after high school.

“My dad was a school teacher, and when I was in ninth grade, he told me, `You’ve wanted to go to college all your life, and if you don’t find something you’re good enough at that someone will pay you to go to college, you’re not going to go,'” said Krizan, who now lives with his family in Tyler, Texas.

He knew his academic record was not the ticket to the post-secondary education he wanted. But Krizan also knew he could swim. A swimming scholarship paid his way through four years at Iowa State and played a major role is his 1972 graduation from the forestry department.

“It basically got me a college education,” Krizan said. “There weren’t a lot of choices for me. It wouldn’t have happened if I wouldn’t have come to Iowa State.”

Krizan knew it wasn’t an April Fools Day joke when he heard the rumors – the program that made his education possible is being cut from the university he loves, and there is nothing he can do about it.

ISU Athletics Director Bruce Van de Velde announced Monday that the men’s swimming and diving team and the baseball team will be cut from the Athletic Department beginning with the 2001-2002 school year because of budget shortfalls.

Without cutting any programs, Van de Velde said, the department would face a $1.4 million budget crunch next year. The Athletic Department sponsors 20 teams – second in the Big 12 only to the University of Nebraska – with a $20.2 million budget, one of the lowest in the league.

When Krizan found out some high school graduates will not have the same opportunity he had in swimming, he was shocked.

“I’m stunned by the fact that it really happened,” he said. “We’ve sold out the diversity of our programs available to put it all into a couple of money makers. I just don’t see that of Midwesterners and Iowans.”

While the shock wears off, Krizan said, the pain persists.

“I question what the priorities are now,” he said. “I realize that sports are not an academic pursuit, but [sports] allow a much more diverse group to take advantage of education that could not have otherwise.”

Cutting athletic programs, especially men’s swimming, is a rapidly growing trend among Big 12 Conference schools. Within the last month, the programs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Kansas University in Lawrence were cut for similar reasons.

Doug Dickinson, in his first year as head men’s swimming coach at the University of Kansas, said cutting the programs is a dangerous trend.

“It’s prioritizing people and what they want to do, and that’s a sad state of college athletics,” he said. “It is now clearly 100 percent about money, and that’s the only concern. It’s not whether you’re fulfilling kids’ dreams, it’s not whether you’re giving opportunities to kids, it’s whether you can balance the books.”

When he found out his program was cut on March 4, Dickinson said his emotions were a mixture of guilt and despondency.

“Now we’re just trying to get the kids placed in a program somewhere, someplace,” he said. “Unfortunately, a lot of guys were thinking about Iowa State. The question is, just where do you go? Where is safe?”

KU swimmer Cory Gallagher, sophomore with an open major from Oklahoma, said the day his team was told was “a really bad day.”

“We got up at 4 a.m. that day to come back from conference, and they call us up and tell us we have a meeting at 5,” he said. “Then they tell us we don’t have a team anymore. It was like someone had stabbed us in the back.”

Gallagher said many of his teammates are looking for a new school, but he would rather stay at Kansas.

“I’d still like to swim here, but that’s a little bit of a problem right now,” he said. “If I stay, every day, everywhere I go, every place I look, I’m going to remember what I used to have.”

When Kevin Zakrzewski was considering colleges last year, he used two criteria – he needed a school with a meteorology program and a school where he could swim. The choices were narrowed down to Iowa State and the University of Nebraska, and he opted for Lincoln.

The freshman Cornhusker has resumed his search after he was told March 26 that the university was cutting its men’s swimming program.

“It was like the rug was pulled out from underneath them,” said Sandi Zakrzewski, Kevin’s mother. “Sports have always been his thing. . They were very angry, and they were very hurt. My son has lost a lot of respect for the school. Even if they reinstate, he doesn’t really want to swim for them anymore.”

The problem is, she said, three teams are looking for a place to swim. Only three other Big 12 schools – Missouri, Texas and Texas A&M – still have teams intact.

Bob Groseth, who coached ISU men’s swimming from 1979 to 1989, said universities approach athletics from the wrong angle.

“I think the fact that decisions are being made from an economic, rather than an educational, aspect is worrisome, not only for the Iowa State community, but for the university community in general,” said Groseth, who is the current head men’s swimming coach at Northwestern University. “The education business has to do with people, human beings. You try not to be emotional about it, but after you’ve invested that much time in it yourself, you can’t help but be.”

Krizan said he hopes the lessons he learned at Iowa State will not be kept from other students. He recently founded a youth swim program as part of the YMCA in Texas, in hopes that kids will have the chance to get passionate about swimming – a passion that could translate into the opportunity of a lifetime, the way it did for him.

“I realized how much I learned at Iowa State, so much that I know I wouldn’t have,” he said. “I appreciate what the state of Iowa did by putting me through college for four years, and I would like to thank them because it made me who I am.”