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#10: Sonoma State is implementing a hiring freeze and suspending nonessential travel and purchases as it works to shrink a $21M budget deficit. SSU has cut the 2024-25 budget deficit to $7.4M, with a university spokesperson stating the hiring freeze will save around $5M. (link)
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#9: Georgia College’s Athletics Day of Giving brought in over $171K from 961 donations. (link) |
#8: St. Edward’s Women’s Volleyball HC Jared Te’o resigns after almost two full seasons at the helm. AC Capri Davis takes over as Interim HC for the remainder of the 2024 campaign. (link) |
#7: The DIII Athletic Trainer Working Group has released its final recommendations to address the core areas of culture and communication, workload, work-life balance and compensation. With compensation as the most common response for why trainers have left institutions, the working group recommends benchmarking salaries for the entire industry not just college athletics, aligning contract length with job descriptions, ensuring pay for administrative responsibilities is consistent with institutional policies and more. The second most common reason for departure is hours worked with two-thirds of ATs working over 40 hours a week. Work-life balance recommendations include managing time more effectively through established expectations, establishing appropriate hours for communication, supporting time off and alternatives to augment staff and more. On culture and communication, the group recommends having the highest-ranking AT staff member on the department’s senior leadership team, implementing a policy for changes to practice and game schedules to allow their input to be included and more. With the average AT staff responsible for 489 student-athletes and 59% of trainers responsible for more than 100 athletes, the working group suggests establishing boundaries for in-season and out-of-season activities and considering their increased workload when evaluating sport sponsorship and roster sizes among others. Full report. (link)
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#6: Crain’s Cleveland Business’ Joe Scalzo profiles Lake Erie’s work to balance its enrollment away from being overwhelmingly full of student-athletes, with that population making up 83% of enrollment last year, and broader challenges of enrollment growth through athletics. LEC’s student population currently sits at 73% student-athlete, with President Jennifer Schuller hoping to get it below 50%, adding: “It’s not sustainable for institutions — particularly ones our size — to be reliant almost single-handedly on athletics for their enrollment. I love our student-athletes, and I don’t want to disparage them at all, but colleges have to be more than just that.” More broadly, North Florida (DI) Dean of the College of Education and Human Services Steve Dittmore notes of the six recent closures with less than 1,000 students, all had at least 44% of its population made up of athletes. “If the goal for smaller, liberal arts-based institutions is to have an integrated and inclusive environment, having more athletes might do the opposite. Athletics isn’t always integrated with the rest of the student body. It risks alienating certain segments of campus and creating a division between athletes and non-athletes. […] merely adding sports in an attempt to grow enrollment may not be the savior administrators hope it will be.” John Carroll (DIII) AD Brian Polian says the sweet spot for JCU is between 30 and 35%. Further: “We feel like, right now, we’re able to provide kids with a really positive experience. If you’re paying tuition to play football and there are 220 members on the roster, what kind of coaching are you getting? What kind of personal attention are you getting? When you have rosters that are cumbersome, that starts to speak to the student experience. And if the student experience is negative, that’s not good for anyone. I’m not going to ask coaches to manage rosters that are simply cumbersome because they want to get people through the door. That’s irresponsible.” More. (link)
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#5: West Virginia Wesleyan AD Rae Emrick gets promoted to VP for Athletics. (link) |
#4: The Ohio Department of Higher Education has placed Central State on fiscal watch citing the university’s financial challenges. (link)
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#3: The latest Field Hockey regional rankings are live with Shippensburg and Assumption atop each region. (link) Check out the initial regional rankings for Football (link), Men’s Soccer (link) and Women’s Soccer (link).
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#2: “I do feel like my role is to stir things up a little bit and to call things out and try to make a positive change where I think it can happen.” That’s MIAA Commissioner Mike Racy on how he sees his role as a leader in DII. Racy believes the wheels are turning, although slowly, on changes around the Football postseason and regionalization. On membership, Racy emphasizes the shift in strategy across the industry that there is strength in numbers. As for the conference, the presidents have not set a goal, but have said “they want to continue to grow and continue to get bigger. They don’t want to stay at 14. … They have said, let’s try to get to 16 and if we get there, let’s see what 18 looks like.” Asked about the potential for DI members to move to DII, Racy believes that conversation will get easier in the next year or so given the litany of changes happening in DI. More. (link)
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#1: Chico State selects UC San Diego (DI) Executive Senior Assoc. AD for Scholar-Athlete Success Eric Coleman as its new AD, starting December 2. VP for Student Affairs Isaac Brundage: “All of Eric's experience, from his time as a Division II student-athlete to his focus on student success, management, and strategic planning have prepared him for this role at Chico State. His values and mission match those of our University, and I am confident that he will lead a department that is successful across the board, producing champions in competition and in the classroom and setting our student-athletes up for success not only while they are here at Chico State but also as they head into the future and continue to make us proud.” (link)
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