Why LMU’s decision to eliminate six teams damages its Jesuit identity

The interior of LMU’s chapel, Sacred Heart

by Gaby Guerrero

“Remember, flipping tables is always an option,” I recall one of my professors telling me during my undergraduate studies as a theology major at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). She was referencing Jesus’s cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem, where he overturns the tables of moneychangers and drives out those who are selling oxen, sheep, and doves inside the temple. In John’s gospel, as he chases them out with a whip, Jesus says to them, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace” (John 2:16).

As an alumna of Loyola Marymount’s Department of Theological Studies, I consider LMU to be my Father’s house. It is the place that sparked my love of studying theology and built my faith in both the gospel and Jesuit spirituality after I converted to Catholicism as a senior in high school. As an alumna of its running programs, I also consider LMU my father’s house, where I was coached for four years by my earthly father. For nearly 25 years, he was the head coach of LMU’s cross country and track programs. 

By nature of my dad’s position, I grew up on LMU’s campus. LMU athletics were my first love, the kind you look back on with an idyllic sense of wonder and fondness. I was my father’s shadow, spending my weekends riding the bus to meets, insisting on carrying my own stopwatch, and having ribbons braided into my hair by the women’s team. As a six-year-old, I learned how to swim and overcame my fear of water under the tutelage of LMU’s swim coach. At baseball games, I scrambled out of the bleachers at Page Stadium alongside my brothers, chasing every foul ball. In 5th grade, I interviewed the women’s basketball coach for my leadership project. 

Breathing in the suffocating scent of sweat it carried, I tried on the Iggy the Lion mascot head when it came home with my dad from work. I screamed my lungs out while watching LMU miraculously upset Gonzaga in 2010, cheering as students vaulted security and guardrails. Growing up, I attended nearly every LMU sports camp and, as a student-athlete, returned in the summers between semesters as a counselor. As a child and eventually, as a member of LMU’s running program, my education came as much through my time in the classroom as it did through athletics.

My dad and I before a cross country race

LMU sponsors Division 1 athletics programs, the highest level of competition in collegiate sports. It distinguishes itself from other D1 schools because of its “institutional commitment to Roman Catholicism,” and its Jesuit religious heritage as outlined by the university’s mission.  In recent years, closures of Catholic colleges have raised existential questions about the mission of Catholic education. Many of these school-wide closures have made headlines and even been such cause for concern as to warrant an American Academy of Religion (AAR) webinar. But we must pay attention to closures that threaten the mission of Catholic and Jesuit education in unlikely spaces, like the recent devastating closures within LMU’s athletics department.

 On January 23rd, 2024, LMU’s Athletic Director Craig Pintens, with the endorsement of LMU’s President, Timothy Law Snyder, announced a decision to unilaterally eliminate six athletic programs. The teams to be eliminated at the end of the 2024 season are women’s and men’s track, men’s cross country, women’s swimming, and men's and women’s rowing. Women’s cross country was spared in order to comply with the NCAA’s requirement to sponsor a minimum of 14 sports. These sports are all what are commonly referred to as “endurance sports,” aerobic in nature and making serious demands on both one’s cardiovascular system and mental toughness. Endurance athletes embody St. Ignatius’s vision for his early Jesuits as “contemplatives in action,” balancing the strategic, cerebral aspects of their sports with the day-to-day physical grit that such difficult activities demand.

In my efforts to make sense of this heartbreaking decision, I found myself returning again and again to LMU’s three-fold mission, which is deeply informed by its Jesuit identity: the encouragement of learning, the education of the whole person, and the service of faith and promotion of justice. By eliminating its endurance sports programs, LMU loses a valuable space of formation where the university’s Jesuit mission is uniquely realized.

Endurance sports live out the encouragement of learning by “[respecting] the integrity of the individual while at the same time pursuing the common good.” Endurance sports like running are often mistaken for individual sports. In addition to the technical answer (the scoring system is team scoring, adding up the performance of each athlete), these sports are far from individual pursuits. It is impossible to forget that you are part of a team in a cross country race, because the only sounds in your ears are the screams of those on the sidelines telling you how close or far your teammates are in front of you. A cross country race is a battle to return to each other, the colors of your shared uniforms a lifeline as you search the sea of runners for the ones you recognize and pull each other forward. I raced alone only in the sense that my own legs physically carried me. While I smoothed my own particular number onto my chest and my hip every time I lined up for a race, that sticker lay beside the LMU emblazoned on my jersey, tying me to a team and a mission far beyond myself. 

Endurance sports promote the education of the whole person in the way that they “develop men and women for others.” This phrase of LMU’s mission comes from a 1973 speech given by the Superior General of the Jesuits at the time, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., where he defined men and women for others as those who “give ourselves to others in love” and “who [do] not live for their own interests.” Such love is forged in the back of buses, where hundreds of hours are spent in conversation, playing card games, doing homework, and using each other as pillows, taking turns trying to sleep. It is given in weight rooms and on tracks, urging each other to endure one more rep. Selflessness that moves us beyond our own interests is learned through hard work alongside those we are unlike, through the giving up of surface-level differences and misaligned temperaments in service to our common desires and underlying love for each other.

Image Credit: The Lion

In the wake of the closure of endurance sports at LMU, the student-athletes affected have above all embraced the service of faith and the promotion of justice, understanding that “the struggle for justice …is a requirement—not simply an option of biblical faith.” The 118 student-athletes impacted by this closure were quick to organize, forming a movement called “Save LMU Sports.” Like Jesus in the temple, these student-athletes are not content to sit idly while their teams, their sacred spaces, are desecrated by this decision and ruthless dismissal. LMU’s student-athletes are emboldened by a Jesuit education that has equipped them to call out injustice and, in the imitation of Jesus, flip the tables of LMU’s administration. I add my voice to theirs, saying that these teams must be reinstated because without endurance sports, we lose a foundational piece of the lived Jesuit mission.