With the daily announcement of cuts to athletic departments at universities across the country, the impact of COVID-19 on educational budgets weighs heavily on the tennis community. With the shocking termination of men’s tennis at UConn and men’s and women’s tennis at Winthrop (programs with staunch alumni and historical success), it feels like no program is safe. As of July 14, CovidTeamTracker.com lists 65 college sports cut since March at Division 1 schools. Men’s tennis leads all of those sports with 11 cut programs.
Connecticut Men
Northern Colorado M&W
Southern Utah M&W
Winthrop M&W
Appalachian State Men
Arkansas Pine Bluff M&W
Wright State M&W
East Carolina M&W
Florida A&M Men
UMKC Men
USC Upstate M&W
There has been no shortage of preaching from college tennis’ privileged class on strategies coaches can use to keep tennis off the chopping block. Most of it is how to run a good tennis program when you have a massive athletics department around you. I always chuckle when a Pac-12 coach at some symposium advises coaches of at-risk programs to bring a suitcase of hats and t-shirts whenever the team travels, to distribute among supporters in the airports, hotels and tennis clubs. Forming those relationships is certainly critical to fundraising and creating excitement about your team. Having those t-shirts, having a budget to fly, having tennis courts to even host a match, having alumni all over the country is why the Pac-12 coach has a six figure salary and a stable job. The coach of a tennis program that is about to be cut is often part-time, the 5th coach the program has seen in the last 10 years, managing both the men and women, and making do with outdated or off-campus facilities in an environment of limited resources and mismanagement.
Economic crises always expose fiscal mismanagement, no matter what industry you’re looking at. Cutting sports is a tacit admission of mismanagement for a university. At mid-major schools like those listed above, the culprit is often delusional ambition. So many of the schools now cutting tennis have gotten out over their skis in funding projects peripheral to their educational mission and the mission of athletics as curriculum (or at least complimentary to curriculum). This usually takes the form of over-emphasis on football.
The trend of $500K strength coaches, the mere existence of “quality control” coaches, locker room waterfalls, and team hotels the night before home games, are just a sprinkling of the waste around college football. Increasingly, we see schools with zero national recognition in football following a fantasy path to BCS riches in lieu of professional planning and fiscal realism. The money wasted expanding football stadiums and press box suites at universities like East Carolina, Northern Colorado and UConn are prime examples of failing to know your market. At East Carolina, we’re talking about a region saturated with football, where the SEC and ACC take up nearly all the oxygen in the room. At UConn, the idea that college football will be a golden goose, worth substantial investment, could not be more preposterous. With the Patriots, Jets and Giants, Connecticut is in the middle of pro sports Mecca. The Northeast has shown far more appetite for indoor college basketball than cold, blustery Saturdays of mid-major football. Even the first college football program, Rutgers, and their Big-10 neighbors, Maryland, struggle to fill their stands.
A school like Stanford, which is not a mid-major and did not cut tennis, has an endowment of $27.7 billion. Yet, Stanford cut 11 sports this month to cover the university’s $12 million deficit. Something is off here. The school is still required to honor coaches’ contracts and student athlete scholarships. So it’s hard to fathom how cutting the operating budgets of 11 “Olympic” sports plugs a gap athletics did not cause. The intention is clear: the 240 student athletes affected by the cuts is the exact number of students needed at full-price tuition to cover $12 million per year. Instead of cutting those sports and praying the remaining athletes will transfer, if Stanford transitioned a segment of incoming athletes to non-scholarship, made intelligent cuts to operating budgets and future coaching contracts, one could argue adding sports would have been a better path.
Adding sports may seem irresponsible in a fiscal crisis, but athletics-generated tuition is an underappreciated, quantifiable, revenue stream. What school doesn’t covet increased tuition revenue and capacity enrollment? A school without tennis programs, could add non-scholarship men’s and women’s tennis and attract 20-25 tuition-paying athletes who would not have considered the school without the offering of competitive Division 1 tennis. At a state school, many of those students would come from out of state and pay a higher tuition rate. Depending on the school, that could translate to $1.25 million in annual tuition from tennis alone. The school could fund tennis with 15-20% of that $1.25 million and have over $1 million left, each year.
While scholarship athletes may take space from paying students at capacity enrollment Stanford, that isn’t the case at most mid-majors. Adding sports, transitioning to non-scholarship athletes, or both, is a great way for mid-majors to increase tuition income. Don’t tell me non-scholarship teams can’t compete. There are nationally ranked tennis programs that are part of Division 1 conferences like the Patriot League and the Ivy League where athletic scholarships are prohibited. Columbia’s Men’s Tennis team has never lost to Pac-12 power Stanford. Ever. Non-scholarship can be a very competitive model, even at the Division 1 level.
COVID will certainly have its way with university budgets and enrollment. The financial implications of not playing college football this fall will vary from school to school. Among mid-majors, where tennis is most at risk, canceling football is going to save some schools money. Others, that miss out on a payout from playing a Power 5 opponent, could suffer. Of course, university leadership will always mandate cuts in the face of financial hardship. Institutional focus and accounting are often two ships passing in the night. It’s up to athletic directors to demonstrate revenue, push expansion of a tuition-paying athletics model and explain how cutting sports often translates to lost tuition and larger deficits. Non-scholarship athletes, who enroll specifically for a sport, are a stream of revenue that is not easily replaced during difficult times.
Bad accounting practice is so pervasive in education that athletic directors, under relentless budget pressure from above, have been accused of colluding to determine which sports they can cut, together, across a conference. When that starts happening, you have a few rogue administrators making existential decisions for a conference of their competitors and for student athletes across that conference. That gets into the realm of unfair business practice laws that prevent industries from colluding in a way that damages competitors or eliminates a segment of the industry.
This is where national-level leadership comes into play. The ITA (Intercollegiate Tennis Association) the governing body of college tennis, works with the NCAA, NJCAA, USCAA and NAIA to administer tennis across the country. College tennis is under assault. It would be great to see the ITA take a more aggressive stance in matters where a member job disappears, athletic directors engage in unfair business practices or a school cuts a tennis program in violation of Title IX. Too often, tennis coaches and parents are alone in mounting legal challenges to obvious Title IX violations (see Albany, Pitt). Other sports don’t have an ITA to file grievances. If we are to keep the interests of tennis on the forefront, the ITA needs to be willing to fight back. If college presidents and athletic administrators know that tennis is the sport you will get sued for cutting, the dynamic would change rapidly.
Title IX is not just a proportionality law. It’s an opportunity/access law. When schools make the short-sighted decision to cut sports, they cannot cut women’s sports without counterbalancing the proportion of male athletes. They eliminate men’s sports to “stay compliant.” This is where men’s tennis so often gets cut. However, it is false compliance to reduce opportunity for women. The choice to eliminate any women’s sport, while protecting a bloated football budget, is discriminatory. What women’s sport commands protection from any and all cuts the way football does? When eliminating no sport or adding sports is a reasonable, feasible alternative, any cut to women’s sports is a Title IX violation that deserves its day in court. If cutting men’s tennis is “compliance” for cutting women’s rowing, the ITA needs to be in court on behalf of those rowers and the interests of tennis. The ITA has had no in-house counsel until [checks notes] yesterday! Here’s hoping they found a Marvin Miller!
There is another flicker of good news amidst the wave of program cuts and COVID madness. While Division 1 mid-majors are most likely to exhibit the unreasonable expectations and poor fiscal management that lead to sad reckonings, several Division 2 schools have demonstrated proper planning as part of their efforts to join Division 1. Where several mid-majors have collapsed under the financial strains of 2008 and 2020, a new crop of fiscally sound Division 1 programs has risen from Division 2, with healthy tennis programs in tow. Welcome St. Thomas, Bellarmine, Merrimack, Dixie State, Tarleton State, UC San Diego and North Alabama. We’re going to hear a lot more about you (if we can ever learn to wear a mask in this country).
On a bit of a side note, the Division 2 model is increasingly bizarre. Any school that can pay young athletes to study there and has steady enrollment should be in Division 1. The process of moving to Division 1 is a good litmus test of sustainability. Ultimately, I am optimistic that well-managed Division 2 institutions can continue taking the place of declining mid-majors. Still, without a little sanity in college football and a little fight from college tennis’ governing body, the drip drip drip of poorly conceived (and sometimes illegal) program cuts will continue.
– Jeff Menaker
Play The Let 