Post by Lurkin McGurkin on Oct 22, 2020 8:54:14 GMT -6
Sounds like a lot of G5 universities
From the ESPN article:
Every day spent in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic seems to reveal a new financial problem for another Division I program. Tamica Smith-Jones is no longer surprised to see those headlines -- she's living one.
Smith-Jones, the athletic director at the University of California, Riverside, located an hour east of Los Angeles, entered a campus building last week and tried to convince the school's budget executives not to eliminate every team on campus.
The Big West school stands to lose all 15 sports (seven men's programs and eight women's programs), more than 300 student-athletes and the $23 million budget line attached to them in a cost-saving measure.
"[Elimination] would put us in the category as the only University of California school to not have sports," Smith-Jones said. "I don't think that's something we want to be known for."
In August, officials at UC Riverside listed the move as one option to address its financial challenges in this unprecedented chapter for college sports. Jones and her peers within the department, however, hope to convince UC Riverside's power brokers to consider an alternative that would involve a combination of increased student fees and expanding the department to encompass the school's recreational programs.
As many schools wrestle with conversations about their financial futures, some have made drastic decisions, including eliminating some sports programs. Power 5 universities such as Stanford and Minnesota have eliminated multiple sports. Ohio State recently announced a $107 million deficit tied to the pandemic. Oregon State plans to slash its operating budget by 20% this year. UC Riverside has faced the same hurdles as other non-Power 5 schools that lack lucrative football engines. In August, the school's budget advisory committee, which will make the final recommendations to Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox, listed elimination of athletics as a possibility because "they are not viewed as critical as other campus activities."
Smith-Jones said that view dismisses the impact the collegiate experience has made for athletes on a campus where minorities are the majority and 83% of the students receive some form of aid.
"It changes the trajectory of your life," she said. "And not just yours, but your whole family's. These students have been passionate about this."
Katie Wong, a sophomore soccer player, said her scholarship at UC Riverside has allowed her to compete against elite opponents and bond with her teammates. "To be given this opportunity to play Division I soccer against all of these great women, to lose that would be devastating for me and other student-athletes."
But the financial gap within the university's budget is not something that can be ignored. According to USA Today, UC Riverside is the most subsidized Division I program in the country (the list includes 227 programs) with more than 90% of its $23.2 million in annual revenue coming from student fees ($2.3 million) and institutional support ($18.7 million). School officials have pointed to those numbers as reasons to consider elimination of the athletic department, as they attempt to address a projected loss in state funds of $32 million.
"Those facts don't leave us in a very optimistic position for the future," Wilcox said in a July video about the school's financial future. "It means we're going to have to make a lot of very difficult decisions about our operations and how we're going to manage to support them with fewer and fewer financial resources."
The chancellor is expected to make a final decision sometime before the end of the calendar year but possibly as early as next month.
The pandemic has highlighted the collective and continuous financial problems for the "have-nots" in Division I athletics. Per USA Today, while 40 collegiate athletic departments generate at least $100 million in revenue, at least 117 universities fall below the $30 million mark. UCR is one of six athletic departments in the Big West that fit that description.
