Purdue University Calumet athletic director Dr. Bob Bunnell is responsible for the operations of PUC’s athletic department as well as its intercollegiate basketball programs. Now is your chance to submit your questions to the Purdue Calumet’s athletics website and receive an answer directly from the A.D.
Submit your question using the form below. All questions will be screened in order to insure that each one is deemed appropriate with every individual’s personal information kept confidential. Each month the athletic department will vote on the Question-of-the-Month with the individual who submitted that question winning a free Peregrines t-shirt.
Submitted Questions and Answers
Question: I was curious to know why there will not be a male volleyball team. I would be very interested to play competitive volleyball again and would like to know why male volleyball could not be included in the athletic expansion?
Dr. Bunnell’s Response: Thanks for your question regarding why we are not adding men’s volleyball as one of our ten new sports.
It’s really a matter of numbers…In order to be able to join the NCAA, we need 12 sports – 6 for men, and 6 for women. There must be at least one team sport per season (fall, winter, spring) per gender. Volleyball is considered a team sport. Therefore, we needed to add two more men’s team sports (as opposed to individual sports, like cross country, tennis, golf). Of the 1055 active members in the NCAA, only 86 sponsor men’s volleyball…it is the 14th most frequently sponsored sport. Of those 86, only 8 schools are in the Midwest Region, where we are located. We would not have a league in which to compete, and there would be only 8 schools in the Midwest to play, and 6 of the 8 are Division I and II schools, which offer scholarships, which we will not be doing. In the end, soccer and baseball made much more sense for us to add than did men’s volleyball.
I’d like to be able to add lots of other sports as well, but we are limited in resources, and will have to grow incrementally. I think it’s likely that someday far in the future PUC will have men’s volleyball, but not in the near future.
