Tough financial times for college sports Pt. 2

BOWLING GREEN, Ohio - The increasing trend in college athletics is to eliminate media guides.

The University of Toledo only prints media guides now for four sports: football, men's basketball, women's basketball and women's soccer.  All the rest are on disk.

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MORE: Athletics score points for local economy
Kristen Rapin, The Toledo Free Press
a FOX Toledo News media partner

 

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It's a cost-cutting measure Bowling Green has taken to the next level.  At BGSU, media guides don't exist anymore.  Instead, they're on a hard drive.

This has provoked understandably varying reactions from within the coaching staffs.

"Your knee-jerk reaction as a competitive advantage with the story that we get to tell... we were disappointed at first, but understand the landscape across the country," said Curt Miller, Bowling Green's women's basketball coach.

Meanwhile, the gymnastics program has embraced the new technology.

"Whether it's YouTube or a blog, we're really just trying to cater to our demographic that we're recruiting, and their choice of research is typically online," BG gymnastics coach Kerrie Beach said.

"They want to say, 'Friends, get on here and take a look at what we're doing or Mom and Dad, you can see how I did in my last meet,' especially if they're from farther away and we do some recruiting out of state."

Overall, though, media guides are a small piece of the pie.

Falcon fans may think of the GMAC Bowl as a great memory for the football program, but that meant an increase of over $600,000 in travel from 2007 to 2008.

That more than offset a nearly $400,000 increase in revenue for men's basketball over that same time period.

Overall, BG athletics lost over $950,000 in 2007 followed by around $1.35 million in losses the next year.

Those numbers are typical of similar-sized schools.

Even still, it got to the point where school officials considered demoting a hockey program that had previously won a national championship.  However, that talk is in the past after Athletic Director Greg Christopher confirmed that the hockey program's not going anywhere outside of Division I anytime soon.

What made this possible is a study that researched the feasibility of fundraising.  After the study came out positive for BG hockey, several prominent alumni such as NHL All-Star Rob Blake and U.S. National Figure Skating Champion Allisa Czisny have formed a committee for an endowment campaign that'll generate funds for the Ice Arena and for future scholarships.

"(It) doesn't matter if it's a hockey scholarship or a football scholarship or a softball scholarship - that's ultimately going to help our entire budget," Christopher said.

"We've got 45,000 students who come through the various BGSU events and you look at the public piece of this - the fact that somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million people last year viewed Bowling Green sporting events on television.  That's where you start putting the total value of what athletics brings to a campus."

In other words, through all the budgetary stress, through all the tough economic times, no matter what, both Bowling Green and Toledo both deem their respective student-athletes' futures to be... priceless.