A Beautiful Shame: One Team's Fight for Survival in a New Era of College Sports

(Paperback)

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The story of one teams final season in a new era of college sports

A major shift in college athletics began in 2018. That year, the NCAA launched its transfer portal. NIL would soon follow. Title IX directives were sending athletic departments into compliance crises. Conference realignment rumors swirled. A revolution in college sports proceeded at a rapid pace in just a few short years.

In A Beautiful Shame: One Team's Fight for Survival in a New Era of College Sports, Ryan Swanson follows one teams final season to reveal the impact of these reforms in their early days. The University of New Mexico mens soccer team was a nationally prominent program, with a legendary coach, conference titles, top national rankings, NCAA tournament successes, and more Academic All-Americans than any other school in the nation in its sport. Yet, in the summer of 2018, it was announced that the program would be discontinued. Ryan Swansons behind-the-scenes account reveals how, even with their successes, the Lobos soccer program was not immune to the changes swirling around college sports.

This team, this crisis, is indicative of a much broader story playing out across the country. The recent changes to college athletics have put an even greater focus on high-revenue sports, to the detriment of many smaller programs, and A Beautiful Shame provides a deeply personal, firsthand perspective on its impact.

Reviews

Friday Night Lights collides with the high desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a university required to balance its budget ends up cutting the hopes and dreams of a generation that is too often told it is not good enough. This isnt about soccer; its about a community and a coach that had to fight for every inch only to have it all taken away with a single stroke of a pen. The final season of UNM Soccer is about perseverance in the face of adversity and controlling the controllable. A story that needs to be told and remembered. -- Peter Trevisani, co-founder, owner, CEO, New Mexico United
A Beautiful Shame is a gripping inside look into one of the darkest moments of men's college soccer this century. A program that stood for excellence and achieved incredible success should have been heralded and rewarded and not dropped. This book reveals the current sad state of a college sports landscape that needs real reform so this never happens again to the players, coaches, and the community that serve a university so well. -- Sasho Cirovksi, head mens soccer coach, University of Maryland, three-time NCAA champion
People often talk lovingly about grass roots soccerRyan Swanson skillfully recounts the struggles involved in nourishing those roots, and how they were torn up at UNM. -- Stefan Szymanski, PhD, professor of sport management, University of Michigan, author of Soccernomics
What is the value of the University of New Mexico mens soccer team Ryan Swanson, in this rich and textured chronicle of the announced final season of Lobos mens soccer, shows thatcontrary to university accountingit is priceless. A Beautiful Shame places the Lobos story in the complicated contexts of Land-of-Enchantment state politics as well as the heightened scrutiny and sweeping business changes transforming American college sports in the twenty-first century. At its heart are the young athletes and their coaches who come together to fight to winon and off the pitch. -- Victoria L. Jackson, PhD, sports historian and associate clinical professor, Arizona State University
Neither overly sympathetic nor overly critical, Swanson delivers a deft mix of detailed accounting of the agonizing final run of one of New Mexicos most successful sports programs ever with very human, relatable anecdotes that could only be known by the players, coaches, and the embedded author, who lived out that impossible season. There were political promises never fulfilled, numbers that never added up, school administrators digging in on decisions meant to solve problems that cutting soccer didnt really fix, a college sports landscape moving at warp speed into an uncontrollable billion dollar behemoth, and a sport itself that didnt always view college soccer as something worth saving, anyway. All that taking place in the complex setting of New Mexicoa proud state always ready for a fight, but rarely prepared to deliver solutionsand theres no more fitting description of the painful last days of UNM Lobo mens soccer than as A Beautiful Shame. -- Geoff Grammer, journalist, Albuquerque Journal

Author Bio

Ryan Swanson is professor of history in honors at the University of New Mexico. He also directs the Lobo Scholars Program, an initiative that serves high achieving student athletes. Swanson is the author of The Strenuous Life: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete (2019) and When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a National Pastime (2014), which won the 2015 Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) research award.