On April 24, the University of Arkansas quietly announced it was dropping its men's and women's tennis programs. Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek was quoted in a press release saying it was a difficult decision and that the changing landscape of college athletics has required them to make challenging choices. Zach Arns is the program director and one of the hosts of Ruscin & Zach on ESPN Arkansas. He says a decision like this needs to be viewed from a few different perspectives.
Arns: One, you look through the business aspect of it. I totally understand this. This is a program that wasn't generating huge funds. Arkansas is in a funnel-everything-you-can-to-football-and-basketball mode, and look at it like a business — look at it like a spreadsheet. Tennis is a cost center. Can we eliminate this and save ourselves some money? And that's how any business would look at the way Arkansas runs business. I also think it's unrealistic for a university to run 19 professional sports. I think that's unreasonable. But that's the world that we live in. There are schools that run 24, 26. Arkansas chose to run 19. So I think it's hard to ask one person or a group of people to run 19 professional sports. The Dallas Cowboys run one, and that's enough. The list goes on and on and on. I think from a business standpoint I understand it. Do I agree with it? Absolutely not. Because I think there are ways to go about this that aren't simply cutting scholarships, cutting opportunities for men and women to come to college who might not otherwise have that opportunity.
Moore: As someone who does report on Arkansas athletics, what has been your knowledge of the conversations you've had about the experience from people who were involved in the tennis program here, and how they found out about it, about what it meant to them to be impacted in this way?
Arns: Not good is probably the best way to describe the way Hunter Yurachek handled this. He is a PR disaster, and I don't think there's any way around that. Everything that he seems to touch lately is a flashpoint. It turns out badly, and he doesn't help himself out by going silent, which I think is what people are most concerned with right now. My understanding is that he walked into the assembled tennis teams, said three sentences and walked out. No questions. You just took people's chance away, their opportunity away, and you can't stick around to answer a question. Then went to the Jordyn Wieber press conference, said the exact same thing — three sentences — and walked out. He was approached by the state's largest newspaper at a track meet and had an opportunity there to have a human moment, and he referred them back to their statement. And that's, I think, where a lot of people are. He's off-putting to a lot of people. And then you throw in all of the other public stumbles that have gone along with this, and you've got a guy now that has a track record with fans and with alumni that isn't very good. Now the board seems to be on board with him. I'm not sure why, but they are. And these public missteps have really turned public sentiment. We hear this on our show all the time. Public sentiment for him is probably at an all-time low. I don't know if you can go into negative numbers in a popularity contest, but he's probably there.
Moore: What does that mean for Razorback fans as a whole? If the person who is in charge of an entire athletics department is incredibly unliked by fans — and it sounds to me like donors have a hard time with him as well — what does that mean for the longevity of Razorback sports?
Arns: You have to pull parts of this out because it doesn't fit under one umbrella. So take it from a fan perspective. What have we been clamoring for? The football team to be good. Well, this is an effort — Hunter Yurachek's effort — to get football to a level that we want it to be. Is cutting tennis or cutting other sports the cost of doing business to get football back to where it was? Maybe. Maybe not. Other schools seem to be able to negotiate this. It's putting all of your eggs in one basket. If you're Hunter Yurachek and you say, OK, we're going to cut tennis, maybe we'll have to cut something else, and we're going to funnel this money back into football and basketball — you better be good. You can't go 2-10 or 3-9. Cut men's tennis and women's tennis and say, ta-da, I did a great job this year. This is not a business that's running at a deficit. They reported a surplus last year. I understand why he did it, or what the thinking is. I don't agree with it. I don't necessarily think it's the best business plan. I've always been one of those — when you're doing your budget at home, generally speaking, it's not an intake problem. It's an outgoing problem. You have a spending problem. Arkansas has got a spending problem. There's no question about that, and Hunter Yurachek leads that. He also can't seem to raise money. The stadium naming rights — last time I was in here with you, it was like five months ago, stadium still not named. Like, how does this happen? How do you allow this to go on? I work in a radio business. My sales team could sell that thing in six months and have it done for five years. I don't understand how this is happening. It's not that complicated. His fundraising — it's your entire job now in 2026. That's what an athletic director is there for, is to raise funds. The thing that made Razorback athletics what it was, was that there was a point at which during the summer, especially football, where the coaches would go and they might stop in 25 towns, get on a bus and go through 25 towns, and you were able to kind of reach out and touch the coach. You were able to ask the coach a question. You were able to see and hear and get yourself all revved up for Razorback football. That's been taken away. Hunter disbanded the Razorback clubs. They didn't want them. They were going to bring it all in-house. This was a massive misstep and — I can't emphasize this enough — a massive miscalculation on the part of the athletic department, taking the program that this state loves so very much, pulling it in-house and making it untouchable for the regular fan.
Moore: You said that the board seems to support Yurachek.
Arns: There's no evidence to the contrary — they keep sending him back out there. At some point, somebody's got to be an adult and step in. And go, this guy's bad for us. He's bad for our public image. All you have to do is look at his work on the College Football Playoff. It was a disaster, and the College Football Playoff committee went, you know what, we don't need the chairman interview anymore. He was that bad. At some point, somebody's got to be an adult, step in and say, we can't do this. We cannot continue to do this because it makes all of us — our state, our program — look bad. And he's at the point right now where he doesn't seem to care.
Moore: If you are another Olympic sport here at the University of Arkansas, how nervous are you that your program is going to go the way of tennis?
Arns: Very, very nervous right now. If the idea is that we're going to trim the edges and funnel this all into football and basketball, I would be very, very nervous. Now, there are a couple of sports that are fully funded, and you've obviously got to stay in line with Title IX. 99% of America doesn't understand what Title IX is. It's not about sports. It's about scholarships, equal opportunity. You have to have an equal number of men's and women's scholarships — not sports. However that's divvied up. People don't understand that. They think it's equal number of sports. No — you can get rid of a men's sport as long as the scholarships line up, you're good to go. I would be incredibly nervous. We went through this in the '90s. Frank Broyles cut men's swimming and I was in school when that happened. I remember there was a gentleman — he's in his 50s now, like I am — but he sat next to me in our journalism class. We used to debate this, and at the time Title IX was something that was off in the distance. It didn't affect us. We didn't have as much information. And men's swimming and diving all came back at some point, and tennis may come back at some point. But boy, what a public relations disaster. You cut it, tell them they need to raise $40 million in order to save the program, and then you bring it back. That makes no sense. Arkansas is not the only school to cut tennis. There are a number of schools — Saint Louis cut tennis, Colorado State cut tennis. There are schools that did it, but not with as much fanfare. This is the first Power Five school to do that. I think Arkansas is taking a good, long, hard look at the economics of college athletics. The question still stands: is cutting this much money from tennis really going to make a difference in football? How much money is the University of Arkansas Athletics going to have to spend to reach a point where they think this is worth the investment? It's not going to make a dent. For the $3 million that you spent on tennis, you can't even get a good left tackle in college football right now. That's where we're heading. I think Hunter Yurachek banked on the fact that there would be rules and regulations brought in on this, that it wouldn't just be the Wild West. That was a miscalculation. He wasn't the only one who thought they would be able to get together — the NCAA plus the athletic directors — and hem this thing in. I think this is a trial balloon. I think they're going to cut other sports. I think they're going to cut deep to make football competitive again. You need $50 million — that's extra income — to make a competitive football roster. The best teams in the country are going to spend $50 to $60 million this year. Where are they getting it? How are they managing it? That's the question. You look at a school like Ohio State — 24 varsity sports, men's and women's. They seem to figure it out. Now, granted, Ohio State's a lot larger than Arkansas. You look at Indiana, won the national title in football last year. Largest alumni base in the country is Indiana University. How are they managing to do this? Arkansas is never going to be able to compete at the top end of this unless something wild happens, and it could. But over 30 years in the SEC, there's a pretty good track record that they're about where they are. I don't know what his plan is because he doesn't speak. He doesn't tell us what he's doing. All he does is make his jokes and then go down to the Little Rock Touchdown Club. That's the only time he speaks, and he doesn't take any questions. He gives you his vision and you can't push back on it at all, and then he goes and hides in his office. I think that's the worst part of this — he owes us an explanation about what he's doing with the program that isn't his. It belongs to the state of Arkansas, and he just simply refuses.
Moore: So let's say Hunter Yurachek picks up the phone. You call him, he picks up. What are you going to ask him?
Arns: My first question is, show me your cards. What's the long term? What's the long game here? I'm a real big person on not reacting in the micro but playing the long game, the macro. What's the end game here? How do you plan to — and it's very easy to say, well, we want to win a national title in football. OK, tell me how. It's real easy to say. How are you going to do it? Our experience on our show is that people don't have a lot of confidence in him. They don't have a lot of confidence in Ryan Silverfield. None of this is Ryan Silverfield's fault. None of it. He walked into this mess. But Yurachek simply refuses to tell you what is going on. You just find out, like we did when tennis got cut. That would be my first question — what's the long game here? And then follow up: how do you plan to get there? Show me how you want to get there, and don't try and dress it up. I want brass tacks. Tell me how you plan to get to the numbers that you're reaching. Because you have to have a plan. It feels to me like he's winging it.
Moore: Anything I missed?
Arns: We've become a very microwave society when it comes to sports. We want results, we want them fast, and we want them immediately. Last time we talked, you talked about Indiana winning the national title. Indiana had a plan. Everybody's got a plan, it seems, except Arkansas. Arkansas seems to just be throwing things against the wall. How many different collectives have they run at us? I can't even remember how many names they have. To me, that's the thing — it just doesn't appear that they have a plan. There's nothing working. You know, you made the fan base feel guilty because they weren't donating enough. I didn't think that was a very good plan. You've gone to all your donors, they've given, you've kind of maxed them out, you're not farming out new business. This is Sales 101, and they just can't seem to figure it out. And I think people are getting very turned off by it.
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