A Beautiful Shame

The story of one team's final season in a new era of college sports
A major shift in college athletics began in 2018. That year, the NCAA launched its transfer portal. NIL would soon follow. Title IX directives were sending athletic departments into compliance crises. Conference realignment rumors swirled. A revolution in college sports proceeded at a rapid pace in just a few short years.
In A Beautiful Shame: One Team's Fight for Survival in a New Era of College Sports, Ryan Swanson follows one team's final season to reveal the impact of these reforms in their early days. The University of New Mexico men's soccer team was a nationally prominent program, with a legendary coach, conference titles, top national rankings, NCAA tournament successes, and more Academic All-Americans than any other school in the nation in its sport. Yet, in the summer of 2018, it was announced that the program would be discontinued. Ryan Swanson's behind-the-scenes account reveals how, even with their successes, the Lobos soccer program was not immune to the changes swirling around college sports.
This team, this crisis, is indicative of a much broader story playing out across the country. The recent changes to college athletics have put an even greater focus on high-revenue sports, to the detriment of many smaller programs, and A Beautiful Shame provides a deeply personal, firsthand perspective on its impact.

Ryan Swanson is professor of history in honors at the University of New Mexico. He also directs the Lobo Scholars Program, an initiative that serves high achieving student athletes. Swanson is the author of The Strenuous Life: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete (2019) and When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a National Pastime (2014), which won the 2015 Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) research award.