CEO’S MESSAGE
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CORPORATE PARTNERS
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SA Volleyball and the sport of volleyball have experienced tremendous growth in the past decade within our junior and High Performance categories, both indoor and on the sand. Our membership numbers continue to increase at a consistent clip and the sport across all disci- plines has never been healthier. We’d like to think people join USA Volleyball for the enjoyment of the sport and the quality of our programming, but we understand that a number choose to continue playing our sport over sports such as basketball, soccer and softball as a realistic option in trying to earn a schol- arship to play in college. However, our continued growth could be threatened by recent changes in NCAA legisla- tion. NCAA Division I schools are now allowed to provide a scholarship worth up to the full cost to attend a university. While this may sound like good news, and it surely will be for some volleyball programs, the cost to add these dollars for hun- dreds of student-athletes across all sports will put a strain on budgets at most D1 schools. Football and men’s basketball – the two revenue sports – will be funded fi rst; the second group to receive the extra allotment will be a corresponding number of women’s sports; the last in line will be the rest of the men’s sports, including men’s volleyball. In total, the extra money needed to fund these increased scholarship allotments is between $500,000 and $1 million per school. We fear that Olympic sports may be discontin- ued at some schools so their resources can be redirected to fewer student athletes in the revenue sports. While men’s volleyball is the most vulnerable in this scenario, women’s volleyball could also be impacted. Hesitancy to fund new
Fighting for our sport U
“While men’s volleyball is the most vulnerable in this scenario, women’s volleyball could also be impacted. Hesitancy to fund new sports may slow the growth of college sand volleyball, even though it just became the 90th NCAA championship sport.”
sports may slow the growth of college sand volleyball, even though it just became the 90th NCAA championship sport.
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I’m sharing this information because, as we work with leaders in intercollegiate athletics and across the Olympics sports space, we have found that most of our members do not under- stand this threat. The concentration of more and more resources to fewer and fewer student- athletes has been happening in Division I on the men’s side for much of the last 20 years. Our worry is that, without your attention to this matter, this new legislation will accelerate that trend and may, in certain parts of the country, spill over to the dropping of women’s volleyball teams. The cuts of programs won’t likely occur at the schools you see on television the most. In- stead, they’ll come at the other 80 percent of the schools – those that do not play in the Big Ten, Pac-12, Big 12, ACC or SEC. The “Power 5,” as they are called by the media, have new dollars coming from television contracts that the rest of DI can’t match. So schools in other confer- ences will feel the most stress to “keep up with the Joneses” in football and basketball without new resources to handle the cost. While college men’s volleyball sponsorship has risen by 35 percent in the past fi ve years, all of that growth has been at the Division II, Division III and NAIA levels. Clearly, these schools are playing at a highly competitive level as evidenced by DII Lewis University’s runner-up fi n- ish in this year’s NCAA men’s national championship, and we celebrate this surge in opportu- nity and quality. But we must also keep and expand men’s DI programs; these are the schools that produce the bulk of our national team rosters and almost 100 percent of our Olympians. Knowledge of the landscape and awareness of these threats are our most effective weapons.
TRAINING CENTER PARTNERS
USA Volleyball, the USOC and the AVCA are all focused on these issues and spending time and resources gathering data, developing strategies and educating our members. Our short- term goal is to create reasonable solutions to these issues so that dropping Olympic sports and decreasing opportunities becomes a non-solution. Long term, we have to continue fi nding campuses for men’s volleyball in DI and convince athletic directors and presidents that their investment will pay dividends for the institution. Our work is cut out for us, but we’re equal to the challenge.
Doug Beal
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