The pool "was losing between 4,000 and 6,000 gallons of water a day," said Greg Carroll, MSC’s Athletic Director. It would be best to hold off on fixing the pool rather than spending the $12 million the school has received for future renovations in the STUAC building.

Carroll said the STUAC renovations are going to include "the whole building; from the gym to the SGO offices, to the locker rooms, to the fitness center."

The leak is "somewhere between the north end of the pool deck and the filter room," which means the entire deck of the pool would need to be taken up to find out where it was leaking. In addition to that, the pool would need to be retiled, said Carroll.

The school now has millions of dollars to spend and no pool to fix. "Everything is on the table. They have not hired an architect, there’s been no design, there’s been no plan, there’s been nothing definitely decided about what’s going to be done to anything," Carroll said.

The pool was open to anyone who was willing to pay a fee, and those who did were affected by the cabinet’s decision. But a particular group that was affected was the swim team.

Carroll said the decision was made during the course of the summer. "As soon as we were told that the pool was going to be closing, we sent letters to all the members of the teams, as well as all the recruits or potential swimmers that we’ve identified through the help of the coach."

Having only heard back from three to five members, Carroll made it clear that the school would have fixed the problem had it not been such a huge mechanical one. Carroll justified the school’s reasoning again and made it clear that the school had always supported the pool, saying, "the year before we made a pretty big commitment to the pool when we hired a full time aquatics director."

With the demise of one sport, MSC has decided to bring back another. A sport that was once successful at MSC, cross country. Carroll said the school’s main concern with eliminating the swim team was that, "by eliminating swimming at this point in time we might be sending the wrong message to the NCAA."

Besides the mechanical issues with the pool, there was the fact that for the past two years swimming participation had declined greatly. "The NCAA requires that you have six participants on a swim team.

"Last year we had enough boys to count swimming as a sponsored sport, but we did not have enough girls."

"Right now I’ve got 26 guys and gals on the cross country team," Carroll said.

As the semester moves on and students adjust to the extinction of the pool, the cross country team will compete to prove that MSC belongs in the NCAA.