THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Former Post Falls swimmer Mabile fights to save her program at Boise State

Imagine getting some big news out of the blue, and having to sit on it for some 36 hours without telling anybody else?

Now imagine that news being a crushing blow to something near and dear to you.

That’s what coach Christine Mabile went through last week, when she was told her swimming and diving program at Boise State was being eliminated for budget reasons related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was horrifying. It was absolutely horrifying,” Mabile said in a phone interview last weekend. “This was my dream job. As you know, I grew up in Coeur d’Alene. I’m from Post Falls. Both my parents now live in Coeur d’Alene. I went to school at the Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy. And I went to Boise State and I’m an alum. It was my dream to settle in Boise and live my life in Boise, and coach at Boise State. So, all of those emotions, and all the emotions that I was pre-emptively feeling for the girls, for 29 of my athletes, was just crushing. Because we have just the best girls. We have a team GPA of 3.7, and they’re all doing pre-med and engineering and nursing and teaching ... it’s not easy what they’re doing. They’re just the best kinds of people. So, what I was feeling Wednesday was just overwhelming devastation for 29 of these athletes.”

Mabile’s program was one of two programs cut last week by Boise State. The Broncos’ baseball program, revived after a 40-year absence, was axed after just 14 games in its return.

Mabile, who swam for Post Falls High, and competed two years at NAIA College of Idaho in Caldwell before transferring to Boise State, received the bad news Tuesday night from athletic director Curt Apsey.

Via Zoom.

“The protocol was that I was not to tell anybody, not even my assistant coaches, until the announcement at 9 o’clock (on Thursday),” she said. “I could tell my coaches at 8 o’clock, and then (the school) announced it.”

Published figures indicate the BSU swimming and diving program costs more than $900,000 a year to operate, and brings in roughly half that, from student fees and other things.

Mabile disputes that operating number, saying when she runs the numbers, it’s closer to $600,000 to $700,000.

“And that’s just what we cost in the past. That’s not what we could do,” she said. “We could do under $500,000 (in operating costs).”

MABILE — AND the members of the BSU baseball program — have countered by offering to fund raise to keep their programs afloat, but were told “it was a final decision that was not up for discussion,” she said.

That hasn’t stopped the effort.

Through a fundraising page online, along with Mabile — starting on the Fourth of July — calling connections she’s made over the years, the swimming and diving program had racked up $170,000 in pledges as of Sunday afternoon. As of Wednesday night, that number was $220,000 — and, combined with pledges to the baseball program, that total is $500,000.

Mabile said the baseball and swimming and diving programs are pooling their fundraising efforts — her total was just what was pledged to swimming and diving.

“Baseball and I are going in together to try to do $2 million (in pledges), so they can’t refuse,” Mabile said. “They think that we both cost $2 million (combined), but we don’t. We weren’t given the opportunity to say, ‘we can work with this budget instead.’ Both of us can operate under $500,000 each, including coaches salaries, scholarships, operating budget ... If we’re able to raise $2 million, I would hope they would not be able to ignore that. It’s a lot of money, but we have a lot of lives that we’re affecting here, and it’s worth fighting for.”

Mabile said she has since met with Apsey about keeping the programs going this way, but with little success.

FOLLOWING THE cuts at Boise State, there are now just three programs in the Pacific Northwest that offer NCAA Division I swimming and diving — Washington State, Idaho and Seattle Pacific.

College of Idaho is the only other Idaho school to offer those sports. Whitworth and Whitman are among the area NCAA Division III schools to offer them.

In the wake of COVID-19, and other schools around the country trimming sports, did Mabile see this coming to her program?

“I truly had no idea,” she said. “We had been given the go-ahead to plan our season. All spring, as COVID hit, I was planning for a modified season, because I knew we would be hit financially. I was prepared to give up a good chunk of my salary and our budget, to make sure our athletic department was going to be healthy. We were told last month to cut 5 percent, and I offered to cut over 20 percent of our budget.

“And then they came with this, totally out of the blue, a month later. I told the girls that we were given the go-ahead to plan a season, because they were on edge, wondering how many meets we were going to have, and if we were even going to be able to travel. And what our budget was going to be. We were assured that, by the department, that we were going to have a season, and that we could start planning it.”

Apsey and school president Dr. Marlene Tromp made the decision to cut baseball and swimming and diving, Mabile said. BSU’s Senior Woman Administrator — second in command to Apsey — was not part of the discussion, she said.

Her name: Christina Van Tol, wife of BSU baseball coach Gary Van Tol.

Boise State trains in an on-campus pool, but the deck space is too small for meets, Mabile said, so the Broncos compete at the West YMCA, “but it only costs us about $3,000 a year,” she said.

BSU’s swimming and diving program has been around for 14 years.

“Our alumni are engineers working at NASA — 40 percent of our alumni are in the medical field,” Mabile said of her program. “It’s not as publicized, but it is important to society. We’ve been incredibly successful (as a program). We won a conference championship the fourth year the program existed. We’ve won about half the conference championships since we’ve been in existence.”

MABILE ATTENDED Coeur d’Alene Charter, but lived in Post Falls and swam for Post Falls High where her dad, Glenn, was head coach. Glenn Mabile is still the business manager at Charter, which he co-founded in 1999.

At Post Falls, Christine Mabile was a member of the Trojan girls’ state title teams in 2003 and ’04, swimming on three state-winning relays in those two years.

She swam for two years at College of Idaho, then transferred to Boise State, because she knew she wanted to be a college coach, and became a volunteer coach at BSU.

Also, she wanted to train for Ironman triathlons. In 2006, at age 19, she completed Ironman Coeur d’Alene.

Mabile was head coach at College of Idaho for five years then spent two years at Missouri as an assistant for the men’s and women’s program, before taking her “dream job” as head coach at Boise State.

“I really appreciated how the administration and the athletic department and everyone on campus put the students first, and the relationships there are better than anywhere else on other college campuses that I’ve been,” Mabile said of her time as a student in Boise. “I realized that the ‘Boise State Way’ was a really positive student-athlete experience. And I felt like the athletic department put the students first. The athletic department has always been supportive of swimming and diving, and that was a place I wanted to work because I knew I would know the athletic director, and I would know my fellow coaches, and we would have deep relationships, and it wouldn’t be just about putting your head down and winning a championship.”

IF THE bid to keep her (and baseball’s) program alive through fundraising doesn’t work, Mabile, 33, says she’s not sure what she’ll do next. A couple of colleges have reached out to her, to gauge her interest in coaching there.

Meanwhile, the fight to save her program continues.

“If this doesn’t work out I’ll have to decide whether to stay in Boise and find a new career, or move to find a coaching job,” Mabile said. “I’m still stunned enough to not know what to do about this yet.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.