Four More JC Programs Dropped : Basketball Teams Are Eliminated on Three Campuses

Four more athletic programs at Los Angeles Community College District schools were eliminated Tuesday by the Southern California Conference.

Joe Iantorno, president of the conference, announced that the men’s basketball programs at L.A. City College and Southwest L.A. College and the women’s basketball programs at City and East L.A. College would be dropped because the schools could not guarantee that they would be able to field teams during the 1986-87 season.

The 18-school conference had set a Monday deadline for Los Angeles schools to say which programs they would conduct next season. At a meeting at San Bernardino Valley College, conference officials adopted a schedule for fall sports that eliminated 11 Los Angeles programs in football, men’s and women’s cross-country and women’s volleyball.

Los Angeles schools were given an additional 24 hours to decide which men’s and women’s basketball programs would be kept. Valley College in Van Nuys was the only school that used the extra time to guarantee that it would field a program, adding women’s basketball. Trade Tech, East L.A., Harbor, Valley and West L.A. had previously committed to sponsoring basketball teams.

In all, 15 teams in four sports at Los Angeles schools have been officially eliminated by the conference. Another 14 teams in seven spring sports are still in jeopardy.

The conference has set a Sept. 22 deadline for spring programs. The official state deadline of June 1 has already been extended twice for Los Angeles schools, Iantorno said.

“We wish we could have been more accommodating to the L.A. schools, but we are at the point where we can wait no longer,” Iantorno, dean of students at Desert College, said. “Schedules have to be made and officials have to be assigned.”

On a tentative schedule of sports adopted at Monday’s meeting, City and Southwest Colleges will have no intercollegiate athletic programs. Sources at both schools, however, said Tuesday that they hope to add spring sports before the September deadline.

At Southwest, President Thomas Lakin said he hopes that the school will field teams in women’s tennis and men’s and women’s track next year. At the moment, the school has no one to coach those programs, Lakin said. Last year, the school fielded seven teams.

Six coaches at Southwest will either be laid off or fired June 30 as part of district-wide cutbacks in full-time faculty and part-time employees.

“Until the district as a whole specifies which programs will have coaches and which will not, we have no athletic program,” Lakin said. “There are no guarantees, but I fully anticipate a resolution to all of the issue involving athletics within the district, and I expect to have a full program of athletic teams in the 1987-1988 school year.”

The conference has yet to hear from officials at City, which had no representatives at Monday’s meeting, Iantorno said. A spokesman for the school said there is hope that baseball, men’s track and women’s softball can be added to the spring schedule.

The hardest hit program at Los Angeles schools is women’s volleyball. All four of last season’s programs have been eliminated. In addition, six of nine men’s and women’s cross-country programs have been dropped. In football, Harbor and Valley are the only programs left of the six teams that competed in the district last season.