La Salle has a plan to attract more students: Revive baseball, add several women’s sports, start a band

Amid the pandemic in 2020, La Salle University cut seven sports, including baseball, impacting 130 athletes.

Now, it has decided to bring back baseball, noting the strong alumni support for the sport, and add several new women’s sports, including rugby, triathlon and acrobatics and tumbling. That will bring the university’s total number of sports to 23 when the new sports begin competition in the 2025-26 academic year.

The university also plans to start a student band and expand its dance and cheer programs, moving to full-time directors.

» READ MORE: La Salle is cutting seven sports to better align with comparable athletic programs

La Salle anticipates that the moves, along with growth in current rosters, will bring 40 new students to the university in the fall and an additional 185 over the next couple years. The school currently has 339 student athletes and 30 members of dance and cheer.

“There are competitions all over the place that we just don’t get engaged with because we don’t have somebody full time working on building a team,” said Daniel J. Allen, La Salle’s president. “We have a closet full of ... instruments that are being unused and we know we have students who are talented musically, so let’s not only use our current students but recruit new students who want to come to La Salle and play and put together a proper band.”

The moves are part of an effort by La Salle to address falling enrollment and improve student life on campus.

» READ MORE: New La Salle president has made much of his career as a university fundraiser

Allen emphasized the importance of building a vibrant campus life experience, which took a hit during the pandemic and has been slow to return.

“We have to bring that back,” he said.

Allen said the university will pay for the new programs with donor funds and money it borrowed.

In 2020, La Salle cut four men’s programs: swimming and diving, tennis and water polo, in addition to baseball, and three women’s sports: softball, volleyball and tennis.

The university selected the new sports to be added because they “align with access to current athletics facilities, offer the best potential for roster growth, capitalize on the opportunity for regional competition to reduce travel costs, and have the ability to quickly become competitive,” it said in a statement.

Stephen Ross, professor of law at Pennsylvania State University and co-director of the Penn State Center for the Study of Sports in Society, said given that schools provide only a certain number of scholarships, the rest of the students would be paying to attend the school so that they can play a Division 1 sport — and that’s new income for La Salle.

“For a minority, they might be from the area anyway, and might well have chosen to attend La Salle, so literally they are paying for the whole package ...,” he said. “For most, they would not choose to attend La Salle were it not for sports, and so they are literally paying to play. In particular, if these student-athletes would, absent this opportunity, have attended a public university, their parents are literally paying thousands of dollars so they can play sports.”

Brian DeHaven, a former La Salle associate professor who now is chief program director for biomedical sciences at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, said when he taught there, he helped to revive a student band and it was doing well until the pandemic hit. He even filled in as the drummer a few times.

“I’m thrilled to hear it’s coming back,” he said, recounting that his own choice of a college for his undergraduate education — the University of Michigan — was influenced by its band. “I loved being a part of it. I just hope the school supports it long time.”

» READ MORE: La Salle University’s enrollment dropped 28% since 2019. What is the school doing to cope?

The university also plans to change the administrative leadership within its academic structure. Cameron Wesson, interim provost, is in conversation with faculty about those changes, Allen said.

“There’s an infrastructure that is supporting the operations of those schools that we don’t think is as efficient as it needs to be to serve the population of students that we have now,” he said.

The university is planning mergers of some departments and a more disciplinary focus, said Wesson, who came to La Salle from Franklin and Marshall College in June and stepped in as interim provost after the sudden resignation of Shivanthi Anandan in November. But it will not include a reduction in faculty, he said.

La Salle’s School of Arts and Sciences will go from 13 independent departments to seven, he said. Business will be reduced from five to two, and nursing and health sciences will move from four to three. Chairs of the departments that are eliminated will no longer serve as chairs and will lose their stipends, the amount of which La Salle did not disclose.

The mergers are expected to take effect by June 1, he said.

Allen said the university has not made any decision on programs it wants to keep or eliminate. Accounting and nursing, historical strengths of the university, will certainly continue, he said.

“But I would say we are very, very carefully interrogating our portfolio of programs, which is what we would submit is consistent with what any business should be doing on a regular basis,” he said.

The university will look more closely at offering programs that prepare students for the jobs of the future and teach them to be critical thinkers, with the ability to write well and engage in civil discussion about controversial issues, Allen said.

The school also is focused on recruiting more students internationally, including looking at dual programs with Lasallian colleges — other higher education institutions founded by the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools around the world, Allen said.

“There is opportunity here if we make decisions differently,” Allen said, “and focus on what we’re really good at.”