A Lifeline to Let College Teams Play On

ANCHORAGE — The gymnastics coach at the University of Alaska Anchorage called last August, just as Brooklyn Kopsack checked into her freshman dorm.

University leaders, pressured by years of strained state budgets, had decided to drop the team — the one Kopsack had watched growing up in Alaska, the one she was supposed to be joining — at the end of the season. The hockey and skiing programs would be shutting down after one more season, too.

“We came here to be athletes,” Kopsack recalled recently as a seaplane whined overhead, “and then from the day I moved on campus, we found out that the team was being cut.”

But almost a year later, Kopsack and the other gymnasts are looking toward a 2021-22 season after all, and the school known as U.A.A. has become a test case for a long-shot lifeline: allowing embattled teams to continue if they can attract enough private money to pay for themselves.

In an unusual approach within college sports, U.A.A. staked the scope of its athletic program on the idea that candor and specific goals might stir supporters to give millions of dollars. Although dozens of universities have recently considered reducing sports programs, often because the coronavirus pandemic upended budgets, administrators have almost always publicly refused to entertain ideas for how teams could be reinstated.

Since Alaska Anchorage’s decision last summer, donations to the threatened sports and cost reductions have added up to more than $3.7 million, saving at least two programs for now. The ski team met its $628,000 mandate over the winter. Gymnastics has done enough to compete in the coming season, though its future beyond that is still at risk. Hockey, an expensive sport for any school, has drawn close to $2.6 million in support, short of the $3 million it needs by Aug. 30.

University leaders acknowledge that their strategy is not a permanent fix. Instead, they see it as a way to buy time for sturdier fund-raising efforts and lower expenses to take firmer hold in Anchorage. But industry officials said that U.A.A.’s interim approach could become an emergency template for campuses elsewhere.

“Schools aren’t usually that transparent with the accounting and what it’s going to take to save something or continue to do something,” said Mike Racy, a former N.C.A.A. executive who is the commissioner of the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association, a Division II conference. “But maybe that’s the future in athletics.”

A school like many others

A wall in the N.C.A.A.’s glimmering lobby in Indianapolis bears the logos of hundreds of colleges, universities and conferences. Some of the schools, like Clemson and Penn State, are instantly recognizable, celebrated for their athletic exploits and enriched by television contracts and sponsorships that propel billions of dollars into college sports each year.

Far more schools are like Alaska Anchorage. They have modest athletic programs, sporadic successes and comparably few deep-pocketed donors. But with just 65 Power 5 universities drawing the biggest audiences and revenues — the N.C.A.A. has roughly 1,100 member schools — they are the homes of the vast majority of college athletes.

Alaska Anchorage, the state’s biggest university, has fewer than 5,000 full-time undergraduate students on its main campus, where orange fliers at the Seawolf Sports Complex caution people to watch out for moose. The university draws most of its students from Alaska and has had some athletic highlights. Mandy Kaempf, a six-time all-American, qualified for N.C.A.A. championship events in skiing, cross country and track and field. In Alaska Airlines Center, a sign proclaims the men’s basketball team “Giant Killers” and documents when the Seawolves beat a Division I program. The victims have included Michigan, Notre Dame, Tennessee, Texas and Wake Forest.

U.A.A. does not have a wealthy athletics program, though. In 2019-20, according to federal data, the university spent $804,162 on salaries for 11 head coaches — a sum just higher than each of the “contract completion” payments that Alabama recently agreed to give its football coach, Nick Saban, whose deal eventually calls for him to earn more than $10 million a year.

Still, the athletics budget came under scrutiny in a state where economic fortunes are closely linked to oil prices. Oil from Alaska fetched almost $145 a barrel in 2008, but when the Board of Regents met last year to consider the sports cuts, North Slope crude was trading below $39, part of a long slide that led to a protracted state budget crisis. (Prices have more recently surged.) The university system had agreed to trim $70 million over three years, and U.A.A.’s academic offerings were ravaged — regents decided to cut the undergraduate sociology and theater programs, for instance — before officials turned greater attention toward the athletic department.

“The vulnerability of athletics has been masked, and to a large degree, that mask has been removed,” said Greg Myford, the university’s athletic director. “We didn’t find ourselves in a spot that was very different from many other programs that were facing the same realities.”

On Aug. 19, the university announced it would eliminate the gymnastics, hockey and ski teams to save about $2.5 million a year. Cathy Sandeen, who was then the chancellor, said the decision was “devastating.”

Sparky Anderson, the ski coach, was on a father-daughter camping trip when he learned about the proposal to cut teams.

“It’s not going to work,” he thought to himself. “But it’s going to be a lot of work for me.”

‘Athletes set goals.’

One of the surest ways for college administrators to provoke an outcry is to eliminate sports. Iowa and Michigan State wound up in court. Brown became the target of a well-coordinated campaign that political strategists might have envied. Stanford, one of the most revered programs in all of college athletics, faced months of public and private pressure before it reversed its plan to eliminate 11 teams.

So less than four years after Anderson and others prevailed in another skirmish over athletic funding, a new wave of anger swept through Alaska. Sandeen, who had arrived in 2018, was the target of much of the grumbling.

“Immediately, the phones started ringing,” said Kathie Bethard, a former booster club president whose son played hockey at U.A.A. “Hockey is ingrained here. Skiing is ingrained here. My God, the two main winter sports and she’s cutting them? It was just like, ‘Are you kidding me? This is Alaska.’”

An athletic program with a national footprint, she continued, was what separated a university like Alaska Anchorage from a community college.

Like-minded people besieged regents with calls and emails. Sandeen, now the president of California State University, East Bay, recalled it was “fairly early” into the uprising that Alaska officials began looking for a way to salvage the sports.

They settled on a plan to shift the funding burden from tax dollars to philanthropic contributions, an approach that many higher education executives have considered over the years as a partial shield from constant political warfare. But Alaska Anchorage’s leaders also openly set objective measures to determine the fates of the programs — a strategy that other schools had mostly avoided.

“It’s fair to the teams and to the supporters to have a definite target rather than a moving bar,” said Sandeen. “We didn’t want to put forward a proposal that we thought will never ever, ever have a chance of happening, but I did think it was quite a bar to cross.”

Sandeen told almost no one about the option until the regents met in September. The gymnasts and their coaches had gathered in a park to watch the meeting together on their laptops. They expected the board to ratify the original proposal to cut sports. Instead, Sandeen laid out the “alternative” plan, which passed and also called only for the possible elimination of Alpine skiing.

Gymnastics needed $888,000, a figure that officials said would cover the program’s operating costs for two years and an amount that seemed daunting to Kopsack.

Her coaches were more optimistic.

“There was no doubt in our mind that we weren’t going to do it,” said Kendra Daniels, an assistant coach who had been a gymnast at U.A.A. “We went into coaching-for-fund-raising mode.”

And a clear metric mattered, she said.

“Athletes,” she said, “set goals.”

Selling leotards and dialing for dollars

Each team took a different approach.

Anderson’s wife suggested that the ski coach focus on finding 314 people who would each contribute $1,000 and, better yet, pledge to do it again a year later.

“It kind of sounded crazy at first, but it kind of put into perspective: I realized there’s got to be 314 people who will sign on and do this,” Anderson said. “As soon as it was business hours on the East Coast, I started making phone calls.”

He argued to one prospective donor after the next that collegiate skiing was an Olympic pipeline. He told them that he worried universities would see a school in Alaska, of all places, cutting skiing and decide they could also do without. For months, assistants largely ran the program while Anderson focused on fund-raising and sought to protect his athletes from the worries that sometimes seemed overwhelming.

The hockey coach was more hands-off, largely deferring to Bethard and an energized band of supporters who wrote a business plan, negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the university and built a website. A $2 contribution arrived; so did one for $100,000. Corporations with vast presences in the state sent money, as did individuals like N.H.L. owners and a man who works for a plumbing and heating company. Business titans called their colleagues. About $100,000 came in one day in July, in part because of a golf tournament.

“We’ve always had to do grass roots type of stuff, but never to this degree before, and it was never mapped out,” Bethard said. “Everybody has to have a goal, everybody has to have something to shoot for. If you can give us that goal, we’re going to get there.”

A similar sentiment enveloped the gymnastics program. The women began writing to club gyms across the country in search of support and doing handstands on social media to spur donations. There was a silent auction and a leotard sale. Some gymnasts even sold their hair.

As the effort gained momentum and the gymnasts prepared for a season they knew could be their last, U.A.A. announced that none of its indoor teams would compete over the winter because of the pandemic. There was a benefit, Kopsack said: Freed from many training obligations, the athletes and coaches could devote more of their attention to saving their program.

In June, the university announced the gymnastics program had raised and cut enough to compete for at least one more season.

“I don’t know that it could or should be the model for everyone,” Myford said. “What our decisions have resulted in was the opportunity for provide a future for our programs, and when we set out for it, everyone was very aware that the possibility of not hitting the goal or goals was real.”

A reprieve, not a resolution

Indeed, the strategy has assured the Seawolves of more meets, more competitions, maybe more championship berths. But the solution does not go beyond a couple years. And it will not resolve the age-old argument over the extent to which athletic programs should rely on tax dollars.

“We raised the money because it was an emergency — an emergency of sport and not a national emergency, but people were passionate about it,” Anderson said. “You can’t run a successful program if you’re spending all of your time with your hand out.”

At the same time, he said that coaches of all teams should assume larger roles in keeping athletic departments solvent.

“It’s fair to go out and educate people on what we’re doing,” he said. “I think coaches should go out and be able to say, ‘Hey, here are all the great things we’re doing for the community. We have some needs.’”

Others insist that policymakers should not eviscerate funding for sports teams just because they are sports teams.

“If they want to keep their brightest and their best in the state, they’ve got to grow that university,” said Bethard, whose team has seen all of its players depart and recently lost its coach to a junior team in Des Moines. “And what we’re telling them — and I believe it’s true — is that your athletic teams are your best marketing tool.”

It is a debate that student-athletes normally watch from a distance, if at all. But they have now seen how precarious their standing can be. They know everything stands to vanish again. In the coming months, though, they said they will try to regain the focus that their sports demand.

“We’re just going to be so grateful to compete,” Kopsack said. “That first meet, when we get out to compete, I think …”

Daniels filled in the rest.

“We’re going to be living in the moment.”