Winston-Salem State University has abandoned its campaign to become an active member of the NCAA’s Division I, electing to remain in Division II for financial reasons.
The unusual announcement came late Friday following a special meeting of the historically black college’s Board of Trustees. In a unanimous vote, the board closed the door on Winston-Salem State’s years-long effort to join the NCAA’s most competitive division.
“The resources to complete the reclassification simply were not available, currently nor prospectively, in sufficient amounts,” Donald J. Reaves, the university’s chancellor, said in a written statement. “If there were any reasonable way to complete this transition without diverting resources from competing academic priorities, I would have recommended that we stay the course.”
The university competes in Division I now as a provisional member. It began the reclassification process in 2005. A spokesman for the NCAA said Winston-Salem State was the first college to choose to remain in Division II after already having begun the transition to Division I.
Mr. Reaves came to the university two years after trustees approved the plan to move to Division I in an attempt to raise the institution’s profile. But on Friday, he said the decision to abandon that effort was “probably the hardest one I have ever had to make, because I believe that WSSU belongs in Division I.”
A Costly Ambition
In the four years since Winston-Salem began the transition to Division I, the university nearly doubled its athletics budget, added four more sports, expanded the number of scholarships available to athletes, and joined a prominent athletics league for historically black colleges.
But the quest proved too costly to sustain. The Rams racked up a $6-million deficit in four years, and projected gaps as high as $15-million by 2012 if the university remained on the path to full Division I membership.
From 2005-6 to 2008-9, athletics expenses nearly doubled, growing from $2.9-million to $5.6-million. Revenue, though, lagged, increasing from $2.1-million to $3.8-million during that time, largely because of the department’s dependence on student fees.
At $579 per student, the athletics fee is among the highest in the University of North Carolina system—but one of the lowest in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, the Division I league the university had joined. In February, the state university system’s Board of Governors rejected a proposal to increase the fees, effectively killing any hope of raising additional revenue.
Meanwhile, gate receipts and private giving—two revenue streams essential to a viable, if not solvent, athletics program—were negligible. Winston-Salem’s football and basketball teams play their games in a city-owned coliseum, meaning the university takes home only a fraction of the money generated by gate receipts. And private donations never surpassed $250,000 annually.
‘No Rational Way’
Deficits are common among Division I programs. In 2006, only 19 institutions in Division I-A, the NCAA’s most elite grouping, made more money than they spent, according to a 2008 NCAA study, while the average deficit for the remaining programs was nearly $9-million. For Division I-AA, in which Winston-Salem was seeking full membership, the numbers are even more dire: In 2006, the most recent year for which data were available, no athletics program posted a profit. The average deficit was more than $7-million.
At Winston-Salem State, officials diverted funds from elsewhere in the university budget to cover the gaps. But the reshuffling came at the expense of other, more pressing academic needs, officials said. The practice did not sit well with trustees—or with Mr. Reaves, a former chief financial officer at the University of Chicago and Brown University.
As the athletics deficits continued to mount, “there appeared to be no rational way we could continue the process,” Mr. Reaves said.
The NCAA says Winston-Salem State may begin competing in Division II next fall. This year, though, the Rams and their 14 sports teams will stay in Division I.
Next year’s program will almost certainly be smaller and leaner, officials say, though they decline to provide specifics. There will be fewer scholarships for athletes, smaller teams, and perhaps a smaller staff.
Officials have said they hope to rejoin the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the Division II league in which Winston-Salem’s teams competed previously. A spokeswoman for that league said Monday that no formal conversations had yet taken place between Winston-Salem officials and the league’s commissioner.
