Who's counting?

Thanks to Conor and Lisa for their comments on last week’s post about the possibility of a winter XC season. It’s very rare to get comments, other than the occasional bots that are not actually human, on this blog. To hear from two very loyal Forever Foxes with very interesting and relevant questions was awesome. Their questions were complicated and I’m not sure I can fully answer them. But I’ll try. First of all, as I have stated here repeatedly as well in that aforementioned post, our “sport” is actually 6 sports. This is an often overlooked metric that bears repeating over and over and over. Back when I was a part-time head coach lobbying to become full-time (which happened, in large part, to the lobbying efforts of the 2000s era alums, and I’ll never forget that), I made the point that as “Director of Track/Cross Country,” I was overseeing more than 25 percent of the entire athletic department’s teams. Do the numbers. We have 23 D1 programs and 6 of them are “us” … pretty difficult to justify having more than 25 percent of your athletic program run by part-time coaches.

But I digress. Conor asked if our three-season athletes “count” three times … and again, I’m not sure I know the answer. I think it’s yes and no. Yes, in that each roster is distinct and the total of each roster is counted as such. No, in that when we give a final head count of overall athletes and male athletes vs. female athletes, for the purposes of equity, I don’t think a distance runner who does all three seasons “counts” as three distinct athletes. By the way, words matter: “Equity” and “Title IX” are close cousins but they are not the same. Please don’t ask me the distinction – I’m not smart enough to parse it. But they are different. Title IX is federal legislation and thus mandated accordingly. Equity is something that each individual school strives for, but without specific guidelines, in terms of the proportion of male and female athletes. There. I think I just did it. If a compliance person is reading this, they probably just cringed at this crude explanation.

Let’s keep going on this. Clemson University just cut its men’s programs – all three, XC, indoor and outdoor. Travesty. Atrocious. Make up any other adjective or adverb. It sucks. All of it sucks. Lisa’s point about the numbers is spot on. Football is a big driver of equity and Title IX decisions, because it is an all-male sport with a huge roster. Conor’s point about Lisa – a legit two-sport athlete in rowing and track – is quite interesting, actually. In that case, maybe she DID count as two athletes! I honestly don’t know. I can ask Liz Donohue, our outstanding long-time Senior Women’s Administrator and Compliance Officer, about this. Here’s the thing: These schools that are cutting sports – men’s track is a popular and easy target – in many cases are using the Covid crisis as cover to pay for the sins of poor budgeting or gross overspending in the big-ticket sports – football, men’s basketball. In most cases, quite frankly, it’s bullshit, and it’s young student-athletes’ lives that suffer. Some schools (Brown, William and Mary) have walked back their original decisions. In almost all cases, though, the damage is done and cannot be reversed. Cut is cut. And that sucks.

It’s about the money. It’s always about the money. But oftentimes, cutting our sport doesn’t actually “save” universities a lot of money. In our case, with men’s XC and track, we are relatively low budget in every way – scholarship allocation, operating expenses, etc. Anyone reading this that has any close association to the program knows this well and probably lived it for 4-5 years. We survived, we will survive. We are most definitely a loss leader, but so is pretty much every other college athletic team! However, if you look at the amount of income our athletes provide for the college in terms of what they pay to attend? Based on that metric, we are making the school a lot of money. Grab the back of an envelope and do the math. Between our three sports, we currently have about 45 men (again, Conor, that’s not double-counting the 27 guys on the XC roster who also do both tracks). Let’s say, after you deduct merit scholarships (academic, athletic) and need-based aid (from financial aid), each student is paying roughly half of the sticker price to attend Marist ($30,000). With a little bit of research, we would probably find that to be an enormous under-estimate – we dole out very little athletic aid (for men), our financial aid “gaps” almost all students (not meeting full need) and our academic scholarship allocation is proportionally much smaller than our competitors (we are the most competitive school, admission-wise, in the MAAC). Bottom line: Our guys and their families are likely paying a lot more than $30k a year, on average. But let’s just continue to scribble on the envelope. Based on this? Here’s the total: $1.35 million. Again, the total is probably a lot higher than that. Now, subtract salaries for coaches, athletic scholarships and operating budget costs – trust me, if this were a car accident, the “dents” in these areas would barely cover the deductible – and “we” are making a lot of revenue for the college. This is a long-winded way of saying that, while there is always grave concern of program cuts making their way to schools like us, the bottom line is literally the bottom line. For a tuition- and enrollment-driven school like ours, cutting sports is almost always bad business. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I wake up in the middle of the night sweating out news of another program in another conference getting cut.

Phew. A lot here to digest. I hope this makes a little sense and answers some questions while raising some others. Thanks again for the comments. Keep them coming.