Our Neighbors
to the South
Students in the University of North Carolina system are trying to prepare themselves for “tuition and fee increases for the 16-campus system of between 8 percent and 20 percent,” but they draw the line at athletic fees:
Daneen Furr, the student body treasurer at UNC-Chapel Hill, said students "overwhelmingly oppose" a $50 increase in the university's athletic fee, especially because the fee increased $100 last year. She also said the athletics department has new sources of revenue, including an advertising contract with Wachovia worth $9 million over eight years.
I mean they’d like to draw the line, but they aren’t going to be able to. They’ll have to cough it up.
Meanwhile, at Florida Atlantic University, things are shitty with their hotshot sports teams:
A year after vowing to get its sports program out of the red, Florida Atlantic University is hustling to head off another shortfall -- despite meeting or even blowing past many financial expectations.
Unexpected expenses [Don’t let your eye blow past that “unexpected.” Only idiots don’t prepare for contingencies, and this sports program - like many others - made big promises and didn’t prepare for contingencies.] and lagging corporate sponsorships [FAU has done all it can to prostitute itself to corporations, but apparently it wasn‘t enough.] could put athletics about $300,000 behind on roughly $13 million in spending for the academic year, FAU leaders said Wednesday. But they stressed that they aim to catch up before the academic year ends in June.
They're planning a full-court press on corporate deals. If that doesn't work, they say they can break even by deferring some expenses to the next budget year.
"We're working feverishly to try to close the gap and to make sure we balance at the end of the year," said FAU athletics director Craig Angelos. "... There's no other option."
To FAU, even scrambling for $300,000 feels something like a victory. At this time last year, the university was looking at a $1.7 million deficit, on top of millions more in debts.
Intercollegiate sports have bled red ink since FAU launched a football team in 2001. To make up the difference, athletics ultimately borrowed about $3.7 million from donations, student rents, cafeteria profits and other parts of the university. [Note the list. UD especially likes “other parts of the university.” I wonder what those might be.]
FAU leaders pledged last year to stop that. They hammered out a sports spending plan that breaks even and starts repaying the debts. It includes increasing fund raising, ticket sales [Sales don‘t go up unless you have a long winning streak - another contingency!], corporate sponsorship and other income. But it depends heavily on a sorely contested 17 percent boost in the student sports fee. At $13.75 per credit, it's now higher than any other Florida public university. [Hm, that pesky sports fee again. Students really don’t seem to like how high it is.]
About halfway through the budget year, ticket sales have surged. Attendance at men's basketball games has more than doubled since last year, and single-game football ticket sales nearly tripled, according to figures released Wednesday. Support from collegiate sports groups has brought in $107,000 more than expected. And the sports-fee hike has provided a roughly $1.1 million lifeline.
But corporate sponsorships -- current and projected -- are only 60 percent of the way to a $282,000 goal.
And expenses have ticked up. FAU had to spend an unforeseen $100,000 replacing a videocamera and coaches' headsets, Angelos said. [More unexpected expenses! Who could have foreseen that a videocam and a headset would break? It’s just these acts of God that keep the academic program at FAU down.] When hurricanes [Hurricanes? Florida?] grounded the company that usually flies FAU's football team to games, last-minute airline tickets and charters added another $175,000 or more in expenses, though the university hopes to recoup some of that, he said.
Still, sports finances this year represent "a giant leap forward," trustee Norman Tripp said. "There's a lot of hard work to do, but (sports administrators) are up to the task."
Meanwhile, FAU is considering a deal with outside developers to build an "athletic village": a domed stadium rimmed by student housing, shops and parking garages. The developers would pay for the project, in exchange for income from student and shop rents and as many as 200 stadium events a year. [You read that right, folks. Two hundred events a year!]
The university hasn't committed to the plan. But trustees got a look Wednesday at conceptual sketches of a tree-lined arena neighborhood on the western edge of FAU's Boca Raton campus. A potential timetable envisions adding the 40,000-seat stadium, housing for 2,100 students, a fitness center, 3,000 parking spaces and 65,000 square feet of retail space by fall 2009.
"It's an exciting thing, to think that we might be able to do this," Tripp said.
Still, FAU and the team of developers, led by veteran stadium builder KUD International, say they need to nail down key financial and other aspects of the plan [What? You don’t want to take on yet more debt? Surely you’ve accounted for all contingencies.] before even deciding whether to carry it out. FAU trustees on Wednesday raised a few of the many as-yet-unanswered questions, such as what the developers would charge students for the housing and how stadium events would affect educational goings-on. [Educational goings-on. Cute phrase.]
"When we're looking at having an event every other day, having such a facility in such close proximity to the academic core of our campus has the potential to have a significant impact on the rest of the campus," trustee and faculty leader Roy Levow said. [What are you trying to say, Roy? You got a problem with a university where the only action’s in the athletic village/ shopping mall?]
|