Ottawa University women’s basketball coach Bruce Tate sits in his office at 5:00 on a Friday afternoon.
And while Tate isn’t strategizing how the Lady Braves can improve their defense for the upcoming season or what their next practice will focus on, he’s working on something equally as important. He is planning for one of his team’s many fundraisers that will take place the next day when they will sell programs and t-shirts at Ottawa’s first home football game.
“We do a lot of different fundraisers,” Tate said. “It’s a goal for every athletics department to get stuff paid for without it coming out of your team’s budget.”
Tate and all of his players participate in concentrated fundraising events to defray the high costs associated with supporting a collegiate athletic team. Tate, also the assistant athletics director at Ottawa, said that each of the college’s thirteen sport teams uses fundraisers and they add up to $25,000 per year for each team.
The game plan for receiving additional cash is not exclusive to Ottawa. The trend of raising money through fundraisers is sweeping the nation. At least four colleges in the vicinity of Lawrence use the method.
“The majority of our athletic programs use outside fund raising projects to help supplement their team budgets,” Baker University Sports Information Director Jerod Kruse said.
Baker and Ottawa Universities are part of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, an athletics association for the country’s smaller schools. But that that doesn’t mean the fundraising movement is only found at universities with fewer students.
According to the New York Times, major collegiate athletic departments are also implementing fundraising events for its non-revenue sports. Across the country, from Penn State University to the University of Utah, non-revenue squads are generating extra cash with activities ranging from cleaning football stadiums to holding bake sales.
The Ottawa athletic department reported a grand total of more than $2 million in revenues last year. The number, of course, is far from the revenue Division 1-A colleges bring in during a fiscal year. Nearby Division 1-A school, the University of Kansas, earned a grand total in revenues that exceeded Ottawa’s measly figure by more than $60 million, according to the U.S. Department of Education. But both athletic departments share something in common: its non-revenue sports out-number its revenue sports.
Only football and men’s basketball made money for the University of Kansas last year. The two sports combined revenue of nearly $23 million easily cancelled out the money the other twelve teams lost. The numbers are similar at other major colleges, which has driven those schools to require the programs losing the most money to hold fundraisers.
But the University of Kansas has not held any fundraisers for its athletic teams. Sports with the highest expenses and smallest revenues like the rowing team, swimming and diving team, and track and field team have never held fundraisers in Lawrence.
“We don’t really use fundraisers except for the Kansas Relays,” KU Track & Field Administrative Assistant Debbie Luman said. “But that’s not to say we wouldn’t do one in the future.”
One person that wouldn’t be surprised to see Kansas jump onto the fundraising bandwagon is Bruce Tate. He said that the sheer economics of athletics have gotten to a point where fundraisers are unavoidable – even for major state universities.
“Some of the stuff coaches want eat up a good percentage of an operational budget,” Tate said. “Some administrators don’t see things like new practice jerseys or shoes as a necessity, you just have to hold fundraisers to get money for your program now.”
It’s also become easier than ever to start the fundraising process for a program. Instead of starting at the grassroots level, organizing events and promoting them, at least one Kansas City area company allows teams to skip those steps.
Crowd Systems provides entire staffs to work at everything from concerts, festivals and Kansas City professional sports games. The company is helpful in hiring college teams as employees and giving them opportunities to raise an excessive amount of money in just one day. Tate said Ottawa often went through Crowd Systems and that it provided benefits other than just monetary ones.
“The Royals and Chiefs games, it’s just going through such a hectic day and getting money at the same time,” he said. “It’s a good team-building activity and shows an athlete a way to earn the things they are enjoying in athletics.”
The activities can do more than just improve team camaraderie and allow coaches to buy simple necessities like shoes, though. At Ottawa, the women’s basketball team takes a trip every other year to play in a tournament largely financed by its fundraisers.
These tournaments aren’t in Pittsburg, either. The locations the Lady Braves descended upon in the past include Las Vegas, the Virgin Islands, and the Bahamas. Tate said the cost would be around $1,500 per player but is minimized by the school’s dedication to fundraising. He also said the ability to impress potential recruits with a promise of a basketball vacation makes a difference that would be too valuable to forfeit by cutting fundraising programs.
But not every athletic department using the route of fundraising to get extra money is planning on keeping it that way. Every team at Park University in Parkville, Mo., held fundraisers in past years to help with things like equipment costs. However, Athletic Director Claude English recently developed a booster club in hopes that it will bring support through contributions.
“We’re in the very ground level stages right now with our formal support organization, the Pirate Club,” Park Sports Information Director Steve Wilson said. “Our teams do fundraise on the team level to supplement their budgets but the Pirate Club should really get the fundraising efforts off of the ground.”
With luxurious trips, recruiting advantages and not having to worry about a team’s budget hanging in the balance, it’s clear that fundraisers in collegiate athletics are here to stay. The only question now is how many more universities will begin to rely on the technique.