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The 2-3 huge money-maker sports tend to fund all the rest. Paying athletes real money will cut into those profits (especially if a strong labor market for stude

The 2-3 huge money-maker sports tend to fund all the rest. Paying athletes real money will cut into those profits (especially if a strong labor market for student athletes develops) with a plausible result being that other sports will be cut as budgets tighten. The only ones that would be for sure safe would be whatever women's sports are needed to achieve Title IX parity with the income-generating men's sports. Of course, it's also possible that colleges will find other ways to pay for the "lesser" sports, and there would be no cuts.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> tend to fund all the rest How much 'funding' does an amateur university sport need? I don't think my fencing club at university had any 'funding' we just met and fenced. Occasionally we borrowed a van to go to a competition. We had a coach we paid from a few pounds of membership fees we collected from ourselves.
- csa 5y ago
  In the US, in no particular order: - equipment - coaches - travel/hotel/per diems, sometimes long distance depending on league - trainers - workout facilities (typically shared) - practice facilities (might be shared) - game facilities - additional dining options to accommodate training - nutritionists - doctors - scholarship money for tuition - scholarship money for room and board - video review areas and equipment (shared) - video recording equipment and videographers - insurance - announcers for events - recruiting - tutoring - event management - publicity/advertising - title ix compliance official Note that at some universities (even some high schools), there are self-funding booster clubs that will pay for a lot of this stuff for some sports. That said, there is still some stuff that the university has to pay for directly. As a simple example, Alabama football (big program that makes tons of money) also funds Alabama’s championship teams in golf, softball, and gymnastics (and many other sports that have not led to national championships).
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    I just don’t get why a university amateur golf team needs anything but a few people and their golf gear. Why take it so seriously?
    - chrisBob 5y ago
      That is an easy argument for an outsider to make in virtually any situation. The answer is probably similar to the reason you aren't doing your programming job on an 11" chrome book.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        Other countries don’t even remotely approach social university sports teams like this and still have fun and generate elite athletes.
        csa 5y ago
        Outside of the US, elite athletes are often members of non-university clubs. These clubs are supported well and often have very good funding.
    - yupper32 5y ago
      Because everyone else you're competing against is taking it seriously. Please try to step back and understand why people take it seriously and truly care about sports. You don't seem to understand and don't seem to be actually trying to understand. It's exhausting trying to have conversations like the OP topic when people come in and degrade high level sports at its core.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        People take sports seriously in other countries as well. I took sports seriously. I just didn’t have an expectation of professional facilities for a social sports team in spare time at uni.
- camgunz 5y ago
  I think OP is referring to the spectacle that is collegiate football/basketball/baseball; not that there won't be these teams, they just won't be multi-billion dollar enterprises.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Since the ostensible point of colleges and universities is education in various academic subjects, the absence of high-dollar athletic teams wouldn't be an actual problem.
- labcomputer 5y ago
  From a US perspective: Most "rec sports" are self-funded university-affiliated student clubs. I was the treasurer of one such club for three years. My school's cycling team ran about a $20k-$25k/year budget to cover race transportation, motels, entry fees, coaching and an annual 2-night training camp. That was for a full collegiate road season with an average of 6-8 riders and about 75% of a MTB season with 2-3 riders. Funding came from sponsors (mostly selling space on the team jersey), selling jerseys and bibs to alumni and donations. Most of the sponsors were alums with local businesses, but we also had a couple bigger brands (energy bars and cycling clothing) who gave "in-kind" donations of steep discounts on merch (>50%). Team members paid for their own equipment. We did discuss buying a couple team bikes to bring in people who could not afford them, but budget constraints and concerns about damage/jealousy/competitiveness nixed the idea. I'd guess that you could run a competitive "varsity" cycling team, including everything I mentioned above plus mechanics and equipment but excluding scholarships, for around $40k-$50k/year (assuming mechanics are paid a day rate at races and piecewise for maintenance and the coaching staff is not full-time university employees).
fiftyfifty 5y ago
Yes! This is exactly what I was alluding too in my original comment. I will also add that there are a number of demographic factors that are going to come to a head over the next 10 years or so that are going to put a serious squeeze on non-revenue men's sports: First college enrollment is likely going to drop significantly starting around 2025 due to severely declining birthrates in the US that started during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It is expected that 2025 will be the smallest graduating high school class in the US in the last 30-40 years. Every college and university is going to be fighting over a smaller pool of applicants. Fewer people are going to attend games and fewer people will be watching college sports on TV which means smaller TV contracts. The percentage of men attending college has been declining, in 2017 57% of college students in the US were women: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 And it looks like the declining rate of men in higher education is only speeding up: https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-mass-disappearance-of-men-from-college/ https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-... College men and male alumni disproportionately support college athletics, they attend games and donate to the athletic department more than their female counterparts. Fewer men on campus in the long term likely means less money for the athletic department as a whole: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nvsm.34 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nvsm.34 Lastly, Title IX only requires that sports opportunities for both men and women be proportional to the percentage of men and women in the student body. With only 43% of college students nationwide being men now, and football being the juggernaut of college athletics that it is (with typically over 100 players on a college football team), there will be little room left for any other men's sports in college athletics, and no incentive for the athletic department to keep them around. Over the next decades many men's sports will likely become nearly extinct at the D1 level: tennis, golf, rowing, wrestling, hockey, volleyball, swimming and diving, cross country, even track and field and baseball look to be in big trouble as athletic departments try to keep the revenue from college football flowing in while dealing with these challenging demographic factors.

chrisseaton 5y ago

> tend to fund all the rest How much 'funding' does an amateur university sport need? I don't think my fencing club at university had any 'funding' we just met and fenced. Occasionally we borrowed a van to go to a competition. We had a coach we paid from a few pounds of membership fees we collected from ourselves.

csa 5y ago
In the US, in no particular order: - equipment - coaches - travel/hotel/per diems, sometimes long distance depending on league - trainers - workout facilities (typically shared) - practice facilities (might be shared) - game facilities - additional dining options to accommodate training - nutritionists - doctors - scholarship money for tuition - scholarship money for room and board - video review areas and equipment (shared) - video recording equipment and videographers - insurance - announcers for events - recruiting - tutoring - event management - publicity/advertising - title ix compliance official Note that at some universities (even some high schools), there are self-funding booster clubs that will pay for a lot of this stuff for some sports. That said, there is still some stuff that the university has to pay for directly. As a simple example, Alabama football (big program that makes tons of money) also funds Alabama’s championship teams in golf, softball, and gymnastics (and many other sports that have not led to national championships).
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  I just don’t get why a university amateur golf team needs anything but a few people and their golf gear. Why take it so seriously?
  - chrisBob 5y ago
    That is an easy argument for an outsider to make in virtually any situation. The answer is probably similar to the reason you aren't doing your programming job on an 11" chrome book.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Other countries don’t even remotely approach social university sports teams like this and still have fun and generate elite athletes.
      - csa 5y ago
        Outside of the US, elite athletes are often members of non-university clubs. These clubs are supported well and often have very good funding.
  - yupper32 5y ago
    Because everyone else you're competing against is taking it seriously. Please try to step back and understand why people take it seriously and truly care about sports. You don't seem to understand and don't seem to be actually trying to understand. It's exhausting trying to have conversations like the OP topic when people come in and degrade high level sports at its core.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      People take sports seriously in other countries as well. I took sports seriously. I just didn’t have an expectation of professional facilities for a social sports team in spare time at uni.
camgunz 5y ago
I think OP is referring to the spectacle that is collegiate football/basketball/baseball; not that there won't be these teams, they just won't be multi-billion dollar enterprises.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Since the ostensible point of colleges and universities is education in various academic subjects, the absence of high-dollar athletic teams wouldn't be an actual problem.
labcomputer 5y ago
From a US perspective: Most "rec sports" are self-funded university-affiliated student clubs. I was the treasurer of one such club for three years. My school's cycling team ran about a $20k-$25k/year budget to cover race transportation, motels, entry fees, coaching and an annual 2-night training camp. That was for a full collegiate road season with an average of 6-8 riders and about 75% of a MTB season with 2-3 riders. Funding came from sponsors (mostly selling space on the team jersey), selling jerseys and bibs to alumni and donations. Most of the sponsors were alums with local businesses, but we also had a couple bigger brands (energy bars and cycling clothing) who gave "in-kind" donations of steep discounts on merch (>50%). Team members paid for their own equipment. We did discuss buying a couple team bikes to bring in people who could not afford them, but budget constraints and concerns about damage/jealousy/competitiveness nixed the idea. I'd guess that you could run a competitive "varsity" cycling team, including everything I mentioned above plus mechanics and equipment but excluding scholarships, for around $40k-$50k/year (assuming mechanics are paid a day rate at races and piecewise for maintenance and the coaching staff is not full-time university employees).

fiftyfifty 5y ago

Yes! This is exactly what I was alluding too in my original comment. I will also add that there are a number of demographic factors that are going to come to a head over the next 10 years or so that are going to put a serious squeeze on non-revenue men's sports: First college enrollment is likely going to drop significantly starting around 2025 due to severely declining birthrates in the US that started during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It is expected that 2025 will be the smallest graduating high school class in the US in the last 30-40 years. Every college and university is going to be fighting over a smaller pool of applicants. Fewer people are going to attend games and fewer people will be watching college sports on TV which means smaller TV contracts. The percentage of men attending college has been declining, in 2017 57% of college students in the US were women: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 And it looks like the declining rate of men in higher education is only speeding up: https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-mass-disappearance-of-men-from-college/ https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-... College men and male alumni disproportionately support college athletics, they attend games and donate to the athletic department more than their female counterparts. Fewer men on campus in the long term likely means less money for the athletic department as a whole: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nvsm.34 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nvsm.34 Lastly, Title IX only requires that sports opportunities for both men and women be proportional to the percentage of men and women in the student body. With only 43% of college students nationwide being men now, and football being the juggernaut of college athletics that it is (with typically over 100 players on a college football team), there will be little room left for any other men's sports in college athletics, and no incentive for the athletic department to keep them around. Over the next decades many men's sports will likely become nearly extinct at the D1 level: tennis, golf, rowing, wrestling, hockey, volleyball, swimming and diving, cross country, even track and field and baseball look to be in big trouble as athletic departments try to keep the revenue from college football flowing in while dealing with these challenging demographic factors.