Tom Wynne stood at the Register Complex last week, a familiar UND hat on his head. He was there coaching the Grand Forks Central girls tennis team, but his thoughts drifted to the college program where he once played and later coached for 35 years. Just days earlier, UND had announced the elimination of both its men's and women's tennis programs.

"I was somewhat surprised but not surprised," said Wynne, who retired from UND in 2021. "Tennis is in the crosshairs any time it seems there's an inkling of budget issues. It's three times that I've been in Grand Forks where it's been, 'We're going to drop tennis.' Two times, they did. One time, we eked out. So, it doesn't ever surprise me."

The timing of the cuts stung even more. Both the men's and women's teams had just reached the Summit League final the week before. For a program with such recent success, the decision felt like a gut punch.

But UND is far from alone. A nationwide wave of schools is cutting tennis programs to reallocate funds toward revenue-sharing in other sports, a practice now permissible under new NCAA rules. The University of Arkansas, St. Louis University, and Illinois State University all dropped their tennis programs last month. Illinois State was a fellow Summit League member alongside UND.

With Denver also leaving the Summit League for the West Coast Conference, the math becomes troubling. The league now has just four tennis programs—UND, Omaha, Drake, and Oral Roberts. The NCAA requires six members for an automatic bid to the tournament, putting the entire conference's tennis future in jeopardy.

"I talked to current head coach Tom Boysen right before and said, 'I'm glad I got out when I did,'" Wynne recalled. "Tom said, 'I get a little nervous when teams like Arkansas and St. Louis drop their programs.' I said, 'Yeah, that would make me nervous, too.' Illinois State probably sealed UND's doom. Now, Denver is out and Illinois State is out. Now, they have a way of saying, 'We don't have a conference, we're going to get out.'"

Wynne, a 1999 inductee into the UND Athletics Hall of Fame, admitted he was especially surprised the university didn't keep its women's program, which has long been a staple of the athletic department. He knows this landscape intimately—he played for the UND men's team in the 1970s, winning a North Central Conference singles title, and later guided the program through its ups and downs.

UND had cut the men's program once before, in 1990, but revived it in 2012 when the school joined the Big Sky Conference, where men's tennis was a core sport. After moving to the Summit League in 2018, both tennis programs survived—until now.

"Over the past five years, Division-I athletics has experienced more change than the previous 30 years combined," UND athletic director Bill Chaves said in a statement. "This has required us to adapt to a new landscape by reinventing the way we operate our athletic department."

For Wynne, the news is a painful reminder of how quickly the game can change—on and off the court.