In late spring, a group of college sports and Olympic sports officials met at Duke University. Topic A: What is the future of our sports now that we’re paying extra for our student-athletes?
The conclusion: we must hang together or be left hanging separately. The immediate issue: paying “full cost of attendance,” – which adds travel and other expenses to the value of a scholarship – on top of the usual money allotted for athletic scholarships may be the last push into the red for already-strained collegiate budgets.
“As Olympic sports look at their entrenchment on college campuses, that’s gotta be a concern,” said USA Wrestling executive director Rich Bender, whose sport has been dropped from scores of colleges over the past 25 years. “How do we make sure the solution to make an athletic budget balance isn’t cutting sports?”
The response, in addition to the summit at Duke: the US Olympic Committee is hiring a director of collegiate partnerships, with the mandate of ensuring that those relationships continue and thrive. The USOC hopes to fill the job in early 2016.
“What I’ve seen in the last year is a real coming together of the leaders of the Olympic community and college community, saying we’re all in this together,” USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny said. “What can we do to change the rhetoric on this and realize sports is an important part of our culture and important part of the collegiate fabric?”
Gymnastics is one of the sports that has been pruned back on college campuses – from 112 women’s teams in 1988-89 down to 82 last year, from 47 men’s programs down to just 16 over the same period, according to NCAA figures.
A few other sports – men’s and women’s skiing, men’s and women’s fencing, and men’s water polo – have posted modest declines. Men’s rifle has plummeted in the past 15 years from 45 programs in 2000-01 to 25 in 2014-15. Men’s wrestling has dropped from 286 teams to 229 since 1988-89.
Like Penny, Bender is glad to see Olympic sports banding together to stop the trend. “Many within the Olympic family recognize the importance of college sports to our pipelines and how it contributes to the relevance of our sports. That’s good for Olympic sports. We think it’s good for our institutions, too.”
And it’s good for the USOC, which sees many Olympic medalists spend their peak development years in college sports. In 2012, current and former college athletes provided the bulk of the USA’s gold medalists in swimming, track and field, rowing, basketball, women’s water polo and women’s soccer. Then add the Bryan brothers (doubles tennis), Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings (beach volleyball), Jamie Gray (shooting), Jordan Burroughs (wrestling), Jake Varner (wrestling) and David Boudia (diving).
But there’s a value beyond producing Olympic gold medalists. A university is supposed to bring together talented young people and help them harness those talents to become productive citizens. That’s the value Kevin White sees, and he’s taking a lead role as a former track and field coach, a US Olympic Committee board member (named in March), and the athletics director at Duke, which hosted the summit earlier this year.
“Student-athletes generally enjoy an experience unlike any other students on a college campus,” White said. “There’s a dramatic leadership component baked into the student-athlete experience. I say we’re in the leadership development business, whereby sport is simply the medium.”
And getting that message out is the challenge. “We need to change the national narrative and refocus on the educational value that is at the heart of being a student-athlete.”
Rising costs
College sports, like everything else on a college campus, are becoming more expensive. The “full cost of attendance” money added to the value of a scholarship is just the latest expense.
The “cost of attendance” is calculated by financial aid offices, and it varies widely by school. A CBS Sports survey of athletics departments found a wide range of budget estimates – typically $1m to $2m in big-money conferences but under $250,000 at a couple of schools.
But schools are already losing money on sports. An NCAA study – released in September, based on 2013-14 numbers – showed a median loss of $14.7m in the Football Bowl Subdivision (the top Division I schools). The losses were slightly lower – medians of $11m and $11.2m – in the Football Championship Subdivision and Division I schools that don’t play football, but the “generated revenue” (not student fees, not university subsidies) in those divisions were far lower – more than $44m in the FBS, around $2.6m-4.1m in the other divisions.
And colleges are making up some of the deficits through little-publicized student fees. Students are paying more and more for sports whether they go to the games or not – a recent Huffington Post/Chronicle of Higher Education investigation found fees had gone up 10% in five years.
Some critics point out that colleges are simply spending a ton of money on bells and whistles. Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins, in response to her own paper’s investigation, pointed to non-necessities such as Rutgers’ football team spending money on hotel rooms for home football games.
Basketball commentator Jay Bilas, a fervent NCAA critic, enthusiastically retweeted Jenkins’ column: “These athletic departments don’t lose money. They spend like drunken sailors.”
In some cases, yes. The Washington Post investigation honed in on Auburn’s $13.9m video screen in its football stadium along with expenses at deficit-ridden Rutgers, who fired their football coach and athletics director on Sunday. But other schools have less margin for error.
USA Today put the “cost of attendance” estimates alongside each university’s total spending from a previous year, finding that the spending is a drop in the bucket for some schools (at SEC power Auburn, the new expenses are $2.1m out of total expenses of more than $126m) but considerably more of a stretch for others (at MAC school Toledo, it’s $850,000 out of $26.3m).
And football money doesn’t necessarily flow through an athletics department. Jenkins notes the difference between Nike-fueled Pac 12 power Oregon and Ivy League school Princeton: “While Princeton fields 36 varsity sports, Oregon offers just 18 — but it has a football locker room with 60-inch plasma TVs, Xboxes and a state-of-the-art ‘no-squint’ lighting system.”
So whether it’s poverty or greed, Olympic sports and others that don’t bring in money are threatened. “These people won’t control their spending voluntarily,” says Jenkins. “You think Auburn administrators are going to eliminate the 15 athletic department jobs they created in the past decade that pay more than $100,000 each annually? You think Tennessee Athletic Director Dave Hart is going to cut away the extra $150,000 a year he makes for “media appearances” (When is the last time anyone asked to see an athletic director on TV?) to save a non-revenue team?”
Working towards a solution
The new “cost of attendance” rules aren’t all bad news for Olympic sports. Their athletes can earn additional money just as football players do. It’s simply a time for adjustment.
“We all have the same issues, we all have the same concerns,” USA Fencing director of sport performance Kate Reisinger said. “We’re glad the USOC is working with NGBs [national governing bodies, which run each sport in the USA] across the board.”
And the NGBs are willing to change. The USOC’s director of collegiate partnerships job description calls for the new hire to work with each party “to develop actionable plans to reduce expenses associated with sponsoring sports while maintain quality experience for student athletes.” That could include trimming travel – the ACC now covers most of the East Coast, and the ironically named Big Ten now stretches from Nebraska to New Jersey, but that shouldn’t obligate every volleyball team and cross-country team to travel throughout the conference. That could include trimming days off championships.
“We’ve got to be more efficient in how we allocate resources,” Penny said. “There are so many other solutions and pro-active steps we can take to look at this.”
Wrestling is trying to stave off concern over Title IX, the gender-equality law, by boosting women’s wrestling, building on the USA’s success in World Championships and the Olympics. Bender says they now count 25 varsity programs in the NCAA and NAIA, with the hopes of gaining “emerging sport” status and eventually championship sport status from the NCAA.
“For a long time, we’ve felt that anyone who has participated in our sport is better for it, and we think that’s not just for men,” Bender said. “We’re passionate about growing those opportunities.”
Colleges aren’t likely to find one solution that fits all. White says the funding models and philosophies vary widely even within Division I or the football power conferences.
“I liken college athletics to the bar scene in Star Wars – all different shapes and colors,” White said.
But there’s one similarity: Within the confines of a nonprofit university, plenty of popular activities carry the financial weight of less-popular fare.
“Every university I know makes a zillion dollars from freshman comp, and it costs them a zillion dollars to have metaphysics,” White said.
These days, metaphysics classes are threatened, too. So the challenge for the philosopher and the wrestling coach is similar. White and those who joined him at Duke earlier this year are ready for the fight.
“A lot of the conversation we had in that summit has inspired them to rethink what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and to better tell the story,” White said. “I think all of us, including me, walked away with a strong sense of that. Which is incredibly positive. But we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
