Lady Rams forfeit basketball season
Gilroy – Due to a dwindling roster, the Gavilan women’s basketball program won’t be finishing out the rest of the 2005-2006 season.
“We had to shut it down,” said Gavilan athletic director Ron Hannon Tuesday. “We didn’t have enough players to finish it out.”
The squad, which started the season in November with just seven healthy players, encountered problems once winter break hit at the end of December. Some players went out of town for the holidays and the Lady Rams didn’t have enough players to compete in back-to-back games against Yuba College and Mendocino college on Dec. 28 and 29.
Although the team forfeited all of its games after Dec. 16, Hannon said the school waited until Jan. 10 to officially cancel the rest of the season. The hope was that the team roster would get back to seven players once the spring semester started. But one player was injured in a car accident and another decided not to return to the team.
“We just couldn’t do it,” Hannon said.
Whether or not the women’s basketball program will be brought back next winter is still undecided.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Hannon said. “I think across the board we’re going to look at all our programs and critique and analyze (the need).”
That could mean switching up the sports that Gavilan currently offers to both female and male athletes, something Hannon said the college and the athletic department will be looking at this spring.
“We have to find out the right combination of programs,” Hannon said. “We’ve got 10 women’s sports sanctioned by the (California Community College Commission on Athletics). We’ll look at all of them and find out where the interest is.”
During the 2003-2004 season, the women’s basketball program encountered a similar problem with its roster size under coach Mike Girardi. Current coach Steve Nemeth took over the program when Girardi left to coach at Modesto College before the 2004-2005 season. Nemeth had little time to recruit a full roster and Gavilan canceled the 2004-2005 season before it started.
“We tried to get it going last year and we only had three names,” Nemeth told the Dispatch in November. “Nobody stuck around so we decided to pull the plug early.”
