I'm very perplexed by a lot of posts on this thread. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is why there are so many conclusions being drawn without any concrete facts.
What bothers me most is that we're all fans of Loyola, and as much as I understand sticking up for someone like Pat Schultz who everyone seemed to like, a lot of us are coming down hard on Loyola brass and the institution, itself, when we don't know all the background (or any of the background, really) behind the situation.
I have been very happy with how Loyola handled our Final Four run -- holding viewing parties across the country, promoting the school and campus, reaching out to alumni, etc. I've also been happy with everything the administration has done in the past few years to boost our profile -- joining the Valley, overhauling Gentile into an actual "college" basketball arena, building a new practice facility, retaining Porter as our coach for foreseeable future, etc. For so long we complained about John Planek being a do-nothing AD who never advanced our athletics department and essentially left us to rot at the bottom half of the Horizon League. Now, we have new, top-notch facilities, high caliber student athletes, a CBI championship, a conference regular season championship, a conference tournament championship, a broken NCAA drought streak, a Sweet 16 appearance, an Elite 8 appearance, a FINAL 4 appearance, an outstanding head coach and ambassador for our school - and for some reason we have decided to make fat jokes and accusations at our own program officials who must have had some positive contribution to achieving all the things we have achieved in the past few years. You don't get all those things accomplished unless you have at least semi-competent people steering the ship.
When Cam Satterwhite and Avery were going through troubles this year, most of us took the side of the program and attributed the problems to the players, themselves. I guess I'm just wondering why, in this situation, we don't give the program the benefit of the doubt? I don't pretend know anything about Loyola basketball from the inside -- the only things I know i gather from watching all the games and what i read on the web (including this message board). That being said, i like to have faith in the institution I cheer for and hope that they continuously make prudent decisions to sustain and advance the program's success. What i do know about the Pat Schultz situation is that, by our school's website's own listing, Schultz has been with the program in some capacity since the late 1980's. That's over thirty years. So that being said, i will admit that it's a bit peculiar that after such a long amount of time, the school moved on from him with absolutely no comment or commendation for his years of service. But I also think that Loyola is not stupid, and i'd hope that they had some legitimate reasons for how they handled the situation. I'm not claiming to know anything it, but, hypothetically, if a long-time employee made a mistake or needed to be let go, I would hope that the university would do him/her the courtesy of allowing them to walk away quietly and not tarnish the many years of service he/she gave to the program. I'm not saying this happened with Pat Schultz -- but do we know definitively that this is not the case? I haven't seen anything in this thread that indicates any wrongdoing by Schultz OR Loyola.
Regardless of what happened, i feel bad of anyone who loses their job... but we've come so far in the past few years and I hate to have our fans unload on our administration and program officials in the midst of such a great time for us all to be Loyola Ramblers.
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