As administrators at Tabor College deliberated over plans for the fall semester, the question of whether it would compete in football and other fall sports proved difficult.
“It’s just a matter of, honestly, survival,” said Rusty Allen, executive vice president for operations at the Mennonite college, in Hillsboro, Kan., which enrolls nearly 600 undergraduates. Campus officials wanted to keep students and employees safe from the coronavirus but also had to consider the financial impact of canceling athletic contests. “If we don’t have sports, our enrollment is probably going to decrease by about 50 percent,” Allen said.
If athletics is the proverbial “front porch” at major NCAA programs, it’s more like the foundation at places like Tabor, which competes in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. More than a third of the men enrolled there are members of the football team. That’s among the highest such percentages in the country, according to figures compiled by Willis Jones, an associate professor of higher education at the University of South Florida.
Without the lure of sports, many colleges fear that athletes among their applicants will choose a different college, one that continues to compete in sports or, perhaps, one that is less expensive, even though they would be denied varsity sports. “The financial pressure to continue football is the same as pressure to be in-person,” said John J. Cheslock, an associate professor of education policy at Pennsylvania State University. “You’re concerned about losing students if you don’t offer it.”
Despite the potential loss of students, many small colleges have decided that the threat of the pandemic is a far bigger problem and moved their fall contests to the spring semester.
“We can’t just make a cold, financial decision,” said Jonathan Sands Wise, vice president for enrollment management at Georgetown College, in Kentucky. “We have to weigh athletes’ desire to play against the safety and health of the entire campus.”
Postponement of fall sports by the heavy-hitting Big 10 and Pac 12 conferences will certainly have an impact on the athletic budgets of their member universities.
Football and men’s basketball are the sports that pay most of the bills for other sports in marquee athletic programs. The loss of revenue from television contracts, sales of tickets, and jerseys is already taking a toll at some institutions.
The University of Iowa, for example, has permanently eliminated four teams and is projecting revenue losses of $100 million because of the Big 10’s decision to postpone fall sports, according to an open letter from the athletic director.
At small colleges, the revenue that institutions get from athletics is in the form of tuition, said Jones, the South Florida professor. Among member colleges of the NCAA’s Division III, a fifth of enrolled students participate in athletics, he said.
Many of those small colleges are already facing enrollment challenges because of the nation’s shifting demographics: a declining birth rate across the Northeast and Midwest that is set to fall further after 2025.
Without athletics, it can be hard to persuade some students to come to a place like Hillsboro, said Allen, the vice president at Tabor College. “It’s a great place to live, a hidden gem, but it’s not something that’s going to jump out to society.”
The price of small, private colleges is also a hurdle for some students and families, said Steve Gast, athletic director at Presentation College, in Aberdeen, S.D., where more than 40 percent of the male students are on the football team. Presentation is scheduled to open its nine-game football season on September 12.
If there’s no athletic program to attract students, Gast said, the choice of college becomes a purely financial decision for families, and they may choose a less expensive option.
Even at colleges where fall football has been being postponed, scheduling team practices and supervised workouts played a role in attracting students back to campus.
“If we were to go completely online, that would have had a pretty big impact,” said Lonnie Pries, athletic director at Concordia University Ann Arbor, where some sports, like women’s soccer, will compete this fall, but conference football games have been pushed back until spring.
Now the question those institutions face is whether they can complete the fall season, as well as the academic semester, without causing an outbreak of Covid-19.
“We want it to work, but we also want it to be safe,” said Gast, at Presentation. To prevent spreading the coronavirus, the team has been limiting use of the locker room, and distancing players on the field and in the weight rooms.
But the team will still have to be on buses to travel to road games and will have to use the locker rooms during games. Those kinds of risks were too much for many small colleges.
In the NCAA’s Division III, only one of 24 conferences voted to allow teams to play in the fall, according to the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College.
Fewer than half of the member colleges in the NAIA, 95, will play all fall sports, said Jim Carr, president and CEO of the association. “It’s inevitable that we’ll see some positive cases at institutions,” he said. “We’re relying on members to be smart about it and put athlete health and safety above sports.”
At colleges where sports have been postponed, administrators said it was a difficult choice but the safest option.
Football players account for 42 percent of the male students enrolled at Kentucky Christian University, but “the pausing of football has not particularly affected the enrollment,” said Terry Allcorn, president of the university, where enrollment is about 5 percent less than the previous fall.
At Georgetown, in Kentucky, freshman enrollment is up significantly from last year, in part because of a new scholarship program for students who live in the region, said Wise, the enrollment official. Things might have been different if the football season was canceled instead of just postponed, but many of the athletes would still have returned, he said.
But what if the spring season is canceled? At small colleges, the academic experience is just as important as athletics participation, said Brian Evans, athletic director at Georgetown. “If there is no spring season, we will focus on academics and work on getting them to graduation and keep them healthy,” he said. “This is an opportunity to do student athletics the right way.”
