The way I look at this Oregon volleyball team is kind of like the way a child looks at a Van Gogh.
“Mommy, I could paint a better picture than that.”
Mr. Moos, I could coach this Oregon volleyball team better than that.
It’s time for volleyball coach Carl Ferreira to pull a Van Gogh and cut the proverbial ear off his program.
It’s time for Ferreira to quit. Or be fired.
The fact that he hasn’t yet been axed is a small miracle in itself. Five players left or were released from his program for various, undisclosed reasons last week. Four were juniors. One was a sophomore. Ferreira’s team will look like an anorexic teenager next season with all the players he’s lost.
And yet Ferreira, presumably, will still roam the sidelines. He escaped the ugly situation with a slap on the back of the head — a “couple weeks away” from the program, in his words. The athletic department may as well have told him to sit in the corner of Athletic Director Moos’ office and take a 15-minute “time out.”
But that’s partly our fault in the media. It took us here at the Emerald a while to break the story, and The Register-Guard, preoccupied with a felon football recruit, didn’t publish a story on the volleyball walkout until today.
That’s a shame. This is a big story, and it illuminates the local media’s bias toward football and basketball.
But it’s partly the fault of our readers. Five players walk out on the volleyball program, and there are no letters to any editors, no outraged response, no thirst for more information on the part of our readership.
As a student at this university, don’t you have a right to know what’s going on with your athletic department? Don’t you want to know?
Five players have left the Oregon volleyball team, and, personally, I want to know why. For that matter, I also want to know why Shaquala Williams was kicked off the women’s basketball team. And why Roderkus Wright was suspended from the football team in the fall.
I’m not going to pretend that we have professional teams here at Oregon, so I’ll avoid the “he or she chose the life of a superstar athlete, so he or she chose to have their lives examined” routine. If these athletes left their teams for reasons too personal to disclose, that’s fine. Tell us that. Or let the athlete tell us that.
But sometimes, I get the eerie sensation that the athletic department isn’t covering up for the athletes’ sake, it’s covering up for itself. The department guards its reputation like a momma bear protects its cubs.
As a student or supporter of the program, this should outrage you. It outrages me. These aren’t pro teams. They’re your teams. For once in your life, you will be directly connected to the athletes you support. You sit next to the athletes in class.
Don’t you have a right to know what’s going on with a team that, in a sense, you own?
I think you do.
And I think this comes back to the issue at hand, the volleyball team and Carl Ferreira. It’s time for the students to care, to be loud like only the Pit Crew can.
Fire Ferreira.