How One NCAA Swimming Program Has Already Saved $150,000 to Preempt Cuts

Collegiate swimming programs, along with other college sports teams in the “Olympic” sphere (in other words, those that don’t bring in substantial revenue of their own), are growing increasingly worried about their futures in a post-pandemic economy. Those fears grew this week as commissioners of an additional 22 NCAA Division I Conferences asked for permission to di below the minimum program counts to remain in D1.

College coaches around the country are scrambling to fight to save their programs. The head coach of one Power 5 Conference team reached out to SwimSwam on Friday to share exactly how this coach’s program is accomplishing that. For purposes of this article, we’ll refer to the coach as “Coach Doe.”

While at present, Coach Doe’s athletics director has not asked programs to find ways to cut spending, Coach Doe felt that a proactive approach would give his program the best chance to survive. This is all cased in the fact that if football doesn’t happen in the fall, “there is no trimming that is going to save our program,” Coach Doe said.

Coach Doe has been able to cut about $150,000 off of about a $2 million annual budget using these strategies.

Measures taken to cut costs:

  • Cancelled a cross-country trip for a quad meet.
  • Requested no increase in Coach Doe’s new contract (though Coach Doe admits that this was not a substantial piece of the savings).
  • Requested to delay filling a vacant assistant coach position on the staff
  • Will only order 1 tech suit per athlete as opposed to 2.

These items come to about a 7.5% savings on the team’s budget. While in-and-of-itself that $150,000 isn’t quite nearly enough to save a program, if multiplied across, say, 14 programs, that comes out to $2.1 million, which is enough to save a program.

Publicly, programs are promoting their value to an athletics department – which of course is important in these decision-making schemes as well. But privately, coaches like Coach Doe should be working together to find enough money to save a program, if necessary.

Required Dates of Competition

Coach Doe advocated for the NCAA to, across-the-board, dramatically reduce the limit on dates of competition and reduce costs for all programs this way. This would be especially true in a sport like swimming, where regular-season competition is much less meaningful than in other sports like softball or soccer or volleyball, where post-season fates are dependent on regular-season records. In swimming, those mid-season invites and conference championship meets are the ones that matter.

  • (Author’s aside – maybe this will finally kill off Last Chance Meets?)

Currently for Division I, the maximum dates of competition is 20, not including conference and NCAA Championship meets. Perhaps Stanford is the model – the women’s team last year had 10 days of collegiate competition not including the Pac-12 Championships. That’s 7 single-day dual meets (6 of which were against Pac-12 opponents) plus 3 days at the mid-season Art Adamson Invitational. The men did even better, with only 9 days of competition plus the Pac-12 Championships.

This could come with some creativity, like “virtual meets” in swimming, especially for dual meets that for most don’t mean much beyond a chance at racing experience; or suffering late bus rides home after evening meets rather than getting hotel rooms.

“Our ability to save money is limited only by our creativity,” Coach Doe said.

Another solution is to swim home-and-home series against geographically close teams. Traditionally, college teams only swim each opponent once in a season, but there’s no reason that has to happen. In some cases, this could be a treat – two Arizona-Arizona State or Ohio State-Michigan matchups in one season? Sounds like double the fun to this author.

Budgets

In an old issue of SwimSwam Magazine (the print edition), we ran some sample budgets from programs at different levels of the sport that were provided by then-CSCAA director Joel Shinofeld. For Power 5 schools, budgets ranged from about $1.3 million annually to $5.3 million annually. For smaller Division I “FCS” teams, the budgets ran from $152,800 to $2.79 million annually, with a mean of $908,206.

While every program’s budget is structured a little differently, here’s a general look at what costs programs the most money. The numbers in parenthesis are a ‘scaling,’ to indicate the cost impact of each item. These are based on a co-ed program.

  • Facility rentals/upkeep (varies widely by school, but many athletics departments don’t own the pools they train in, and have to pay rental to other departments of the school, like rec sports).
  • Scholarships (80) – If fully paid. These costs drop dramatically as a percentage of budget at FCS, D2, and D3 programs. For FCS schools, these weight similarly to staffing costs. This will probably be a very unpopular area to reduce costs.
  • Staffing (50) – Coaches are expensive. But, if a program can make do with one fewer coach for a season, there could be substantial savings in one fell swoop.
  • Travel (10) – Not an insignificant cost, but on scale, much lower than the above categories. Travel is an easy place to cut, but a hard place to cut enough to save a program. This also varies by program. Teams from Alaska or Hawaii will have higher travel costs than teams in Southern California, where there are dozens of possible opponents a stone’s throw away. Finding more meets with fewer overnight trips, and more importantly that can be traveled to via bus rather than plane, is a big help here.
  • Equipment/Operating (7) – Running meets, pull buoys, suits, ‘swag.’
  • Administrative Expenses (5) – This is the billing for things like communications support, billing support, and student-athlete academic services.
  • Recruiting (3) – This includes bringing students on campus for visits and coaches going to visit students at their home clubs. Again, this is an easy place to cut, but not a place to save a ton of money.

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momof3fish
3 years ago

here is a thought… maybe the athletes should get academic scholarships. that would offset the cost.

Coach
Reply to  momof3fish
3 years ago

Depending on the school, some athletes do get academic scholarships. However, if they meet certain standards, those academic scholarships don’t count against NCAA equivalency limits. This allows coaches to spread the athletic aid they do have to more athletes. Therefore, academic scholarships received do not “save” programs anything in terms of scholarships $ out. They only save on equivalency (to be used elsewhere) to that particular student-athlete.

There seems to be a great deal of ignorance about how college swimming works. Some comments on this and other articles really have me shaking my head. Dude up here talking about ridiculous salaries…what? There almost seems to be an antagonistic vibe towards college swimming in some recent comments on this site…weird.

SwammanJammaDingDong
Reply to  Coach
3 years ago

Hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for a swim coach is absolutely a ridiculous salary. There are plenty of examples if you simply look at news articles or public records. We need to be responsible stewards of our sport and of the money we are gifted from the universities. NCAA swimming only “works” if football and basketball keep making money, and in many cases our sport also requires money from student fees. The basketball pocket was drastically reduced due to the elimination of March Madness, football is looking questionable at this point as well, student fees are definitely not going up in this economy… Call it “antagonistic vibe” if you want, but it’s reality. Big budgets equal big targets… Read more »

200 SIDESTROKE B CUT
Reply to  SwammanJammaDingDong
3 years ago

I’ll agree with you here. As much as I love them, college athletics have become bloated as of late, an effect of things generally “going well” in this country for decades. As for the swimming salaries, I will reserve judgment until I see actual #’s… which I suspect will eventually be publicized as decisions get made.

Xman
Reply to  SwammanJammaDingDong
3 years ago

I don’t know how the coaches /assistance staff at the big California schools make ends meet without making that money.

Swimmom
Reply to  Xman
3 years ago

Along those lines, it would be nice if need based fed/school/scholarship opportunities would give consideration to the cost of living in California vs other states.

Lauren
3 years ago

SwimSwam, the average reader may need to have a $2 million dollar budget broken down. That number is inclusive of all student scholarships, coach/staff salaries, and operating budgets. (And I’m assuming a men’s and women’s program, combined)

SwammaJammaDingDong
3 years ago

The problem is that $150,000 in savings only represents 7.5% of the team’s budget. $2,000,000 for a swim team is exactly why the sport is doomed in the NCAA. Club teams with 350 athletes operate with a budget half that size… Stop the ridiculous salaries for coaches, stop the training trips, stop the cross-country dual meets, etc… Swim programs in the NCAA need to behave and spend like the charity organizations that they are.

Meeeeeee
Reply to  SwammaJammaDingDong
3 years ago

Not sure why this has so many down votes unless they are all NCAA swim coaches. $2 million for swimmming is certainly ridiculous.

Math
Reply to  Meeeeeee
3 years ago

14 women’s scholarships + 9.9 men’s scholarships. If you assume $45,000 per year to go to school is over 1 million dollars alone. 6 staff members if they have all assistants and diving coach. If they make an average of $50,000 per year you are now down to an operating budget of around $700,000 per year for the team of around 60 student-athletes.

If the budgets we are talking about include scholarships and salaries, then $2million goes quick.

SwammaJammaDingDong
Reply to  Math
3 years ago

$2M is just one program, not a combined men’s and women’s program. For reference, Penn State is one of the more frugal programs and they spent $1.2M for the Men’s team and $1.4M for the women’s team (referencing 2017-2018 data linked below). Texas spent $2.4M for Men and $2.3M for women (referencing 2015-2016 data linked below) but they did offset some of that with $1.5M of revenue from hosting meets and renting their facility. Both Texas programs still had a net loss of more than $1.5M per program… We need to be smart if we want to save the sport in the NCAA… Downvoters, when your alma mater is the next school cutting their program, you can go right ahead… Read more »

200 SIDESTROKE B CUT
Reply to  SwammaJammaDingDong
3 years ago

“Downvoters, when your alma mater is the next school cutting their program, you can go right ahead and blame that person in the mirror for not speaking up and asking for extreme cost cutting while at the same time endowing scholarships and coaching positions.” – Let’s not get carried away here. 1) One individual person’s impact here is meaningless in the grand scheme. 2) Alumni do not have limitless money to give away, especially now.

Ol' Longhorn
3 years ago

Braden, which areas of the programmatic costs is the naming endowment for the UF pool earmarked for?

Fly 100
Reply to  Ol' Longhorn
3 years ago

Aside from the fact that the pool is 40 years old; obviously it needs a major makeover; at least 8 scholarships for swimming are fully endowed. In addition, there is a booster club specifically for swimming. Everyone can start with the booster club.

Ol' Longhorn
Reply to  Fly 100
3 years ago

Why don’t they have Dressel do photo-ops with every Bull Gator there is until they endow all the scholarships and coaches’ salaries. It’s a pittance compared to the amount needed for major revenue sports. They paraded Tim Tebow around like he was the Second Coming (wait a minute… maybe) and money just flowed in.

DAN'S CONE
3 years ago

This definitely isn’t powerhouse Virginia, GO DESORBO!!!

Ol' Longhorn
Reply to  DAN'S CONE
3 years ago

A little levity always helps.

Fly 100
3 years ago

If you want to save your program these are great cost cutting strategies , nternally. Externally, alumni and fans should be donating to endow scholarships for the future, if not already started this process. Good luck on saving $ and saving programs

Jason Zajonc
Reply to  Fly 100
3 years ago

I agree. Alumni helps out in big sports as well..these will be interesting times ahead….maybe swimming and diving should finally be split up?

Ol' Longhorn
Reply to  Fly 100
3 years ago

And coaches’ salaries.

Ol' Longhorn
Reply to  Ol' Longhorn
3 years ago

Endow coaches’ salaries. Not split salaries up to those learning to follow a thread for the first time.

About Braden Keith

Braden Keith

Braden Keith is the Editor-in-Chief and a co-founder/co-owner of SwimSwam.com. He first got his feet wet by building The Swimmers' Circle beginning in January 2010, and now comes to SwimSwam to use that experience and help build a new leader in the sport of swimming. Aside from his life on the InterWet, …

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