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.

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 is also eliminating baseball, along with softball, and Massachusetts reportedly considered ending baseball before deciding to cut men's and women's varsity skiing.

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.

Even in boom 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 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 weather is so unpredictable, other than we know it's not going to be very good," said 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.

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.

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.