Northern Iowa players stand for the national anthem in a nearly empty stadium May 9 in Waterloo, Iowa. Northern Iowa announced in February that the school would eliminate the baseball program after this season.

WATERLOO, IOWA ? It was about the worst day Northern Iowa coach Rick Heller could have imagined when he had to tell his team that the university was cutting the program at the end of the year to cover a budget shortfall.

Life hasn’t gotten any less miserable for Heller since he got the bad news in late February. He played a key role in an unsuccessful effort to save the program and helped his players find new teams for 2010 — while coaching them through 2009.

Oh yeah. He’s also had to look for a new job himself after 10 seasons with the Panthers.

“It’s been horrible. An absolute nightmare. I couldn’t imagine anything any worse,” the coach said.

Heller and the Panthers aren’t alone. Vermont also is eliminating baseball, along with softball, and Massachusetts reportedly considered ending baseball before deciding to cut men’s and women’s varsity skiing.

Economic problems

Dropping baseball in the chilly North and Midwest is nothing new, as Wisconsin, Iowa State, Providence and Boston University have dropped the national pastime in the past two decades. But as the economy continues to lag, more and more teams in cold-weather locales — where the sport faces much larger financial obstacles and is often a smaller priority on campus than in the South — could be in jeopardy.

“If there’s a program that is on the fringe, as far as what the cost is, what they feel it brings to the campus and the community with the alumni and so forth, those types of programs are always in question where there’s a lack of money,” said Dave Keilitz, the executive director of the American Baseball Coaches Association.

Weather a concern

Even in boon times, weather has been a major problem for programs north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Most cold-weather programs start the first month of the season on costly road trips down South. It’s often far from tropical when they return home, making it tough to generate local interest and revenue from fans unwilling to bundle up for spring baseball. All that puts a serious damper on recruiting, making it tough to lure top-notch prospects.

The numbers paint a chilling picture. Nebraska and Wichita State were the only schools in the North or Midwest to crack the top 20 in average home attendance in 2008, and Oregon State’s national titles in 2006 and 2007 went against the grain in the College World Series, which has been dominated by warm-weather teams since the 1960s.

“The weather is so unpredictable, other than we know it’s not going to be very good,” said Dr. Robert Corran, the athletic director at Vermont. “It’s just ‘How bad is it going to be?’ It really hampers your ability to develop a really competitive program.”

The Panthers and Catamounts trudged along anyway, until the economy took a nosedive.

At Northern Iowa, the math was simple. The state slashed the university’s budget, leading school officials to reduce athletic department funding by 9 percent. Northern Iowa’s athletic department needed to find up to $600,000 in savings. That put the baseball program, which is expected to run nearly $400,000 in the red, on notice.

Difficult decisions

Contacted by the Associated Press, Northern Iowa athletic director Troy Dannen declined to comment on the baseball team. But faced with the difficult choice of cutting one team or making smaller cuts across the board, Dannen chose the former.

Panthers supporters quickly formed a committee to save the program, promising to raise at least $250,000 on an annual basis while proposing that the university contribute $100,000 a year from its scholarship fund.

School officials rejected that plan, leaving an already wounded team fuming. The Panthers are scheduled to play their final home game today.

“It’s just $100,000 to keep a program that’s been alive for 103 years, you know? To do something like that was really disappointing,” Northern Iowa senior pitcher Zach Zirbel said. “I will never be able to get over this.”

Everything on table

The fiscal crunch was similar at Vermont, where budget cuts left the athletic department looking at a $1.1 million shortfall. Corran says the baseball team spends about $600,000 a year while generating about $75,000 to $90,000 annually in revenue.

UMass athletic director John McCutcheon wouldn’t discuss reports the school considered eliminating baseball, saying simply that officials “looked at everything.” The Minutemen will make administrative reductions and operating cuts across the board while converting skiing to club status.

“If finances continue to become hard to come by, if you’re in a situation where the budget is just not growing or not at the level it needs to be to support the number of sports that you’re playing, I think baseball is one of the sports in this region that is somewhat in jeopardy,” Corran said.