EDITORIAL: Pride and pain part of esteemed package

It was the best of days for Nick Swayne.

And one of the worst.

Wednesday, Dec. 4, was the day Swayne received the high honor of being named Citizen of the Year by the Coeur d’Alene Area Chamber of Commerce.

It was also the day that the president of North Idaho College regretfully acknowledged the first death blow to one of NIC’s athletic programs in more than two decades.

In the article at the top of the Dec. 5 Press, Swayne’s comment about the golf program’s elimination was the last sentence of the story.

“It’s unfortunate,” he said, “but we have run out of options.”

As the announced Citizen of the Year, Swayne was the first person quoted in the article just beneath the golf story. It spoke volumes about who Nick Swayne is and how he built the broad shoulders that helped him survive untold turmoil as president of the college.

“When you grow up here (in North Idaho, as Swayne did), you don’t have access to a lot of things you have in big cities, so you figure out how to make them yourself and do it yourself,” he said. ‘That builds a certain self-reliance and pride.”

And apparently, guts.

The people who put NIC in peril, trustees whose names you have seen far too many times in the paper for all the wrong reasons, made Swayne’s life a living hell. In the very worst way, they wanted him out as president. They vilified him publicly and privately. They spent a fortune of taxpayer and student money trying to get rid of him. 

Yet Swayne conquered them all and, in the process, provided the kind of guidance that now has NIC poised for a continued long and successful run.

As every good leader will tell you, success comes at a cost. The decision to cut the golf program is a painful example. Yet the decision by the new and vastly improved board of trustees is unquestionably the right one.

Citing NIC’s reckless increase of athletic department expense in a single year from $2.2 million to $6.2 million as a major threat to its survival, the organization evaluating NIC’s will no doubt be pleased to see tangible steps made toward paring the massive expense.

The golf program consists of 24 athletes, only three of whom are from Idaho. Paring it from the budget while honoring all commitments to the athletes currently in the program will save NIC more than $600,000 annually. 

It’s a difficult choice but a necessary step in the right fiscal direction.

It’s the kind of choice that may target a true leader as a villain in a few households but a top citizen in far more.