When it comes to colleges nationwide, club sports tend to be an important outlet. A major part of campus life, they allow students to stay active and competitive while also meeting and establishing bonds with new people.
In a meeting on March 23, the SUNY Oswego Student Association passed a bill intended to cap funding for club teams at $110,000 for the upcoming year. The bill referenced the association being “cash poor” as one of several reasons for the decision.
“We’ve kind of been on this new stride to get our organization back to where it needs to be financially,” said Asheem Calixte, SA’s vice president. “We are an organization that is essentially cash poor, but we’re very asset-rich … we don’t have a lot of cash on hand to say, ‘if an emergency happened, we could pay our bills.’”
Previously, the budget was set at $135,000. Both figures include a $20,000 “championship fund” intended to be used for club teams that advance to the championship level of their seasons. This leaves the new working budget for all club teams on campus at $90,000 total.
For club sport athletes, the decrease in funding will potentially limit opportunities for them to play and could also force the athletes to fund a higher percentage of the team themselves. It is another disheartening turn for those who have been unable to compete since COVID-19 initially shut down the campus last March.
Sam Chapman, president of the club baseball team, said that continuing competition without significant financial burden can be a big part of why people play club sports.
“I think part of the big appeal of [club sports] is it’s something that you don’t have as huge of a commitment as if you were playing on [a NCAA] team or something like that,” Chapman said. “But that you’re still able to do something competitive, and you didn’t have to worry about paying for certain things. That’s maybe the biggest appeal to people … I think budget cuts in any area are usually not a good thing.”
Chapman said that as costs rise, they could potentially prevent interested athletes from joining club teams.
“If it was a few hundred dollars per person,” Chapman said. “I would be concerned that if everybody had to pitch in for gas, or everybody needed to buy jerseys on their own, that would discourage individual people from [joining the team].”
Christopher Timmons, head coach of the ACHA men’s club hockey team, echoed Chapman’s sentiment, as he said this decision will lead to his team to require more financial contributions from their players.
“Essentially, it’s just going to be more of a self-funded program, rather than relying upon SA to cover some of our necessary costs,” Timmons said.
He acknowledged that this could potentially burden some players unable to afford the cost, although he also said that most players are already “aware of the costs” coming in.
Overall, the decreased funding may render some students unable to commit to the teams, which can potentially cause them to miss out on important college experiences.
“I think probably the most important part of being in college is that you find people with similar interests and join some kind of community,” Chapman said. “It would be a shame if people were discouraged from doing things like that.”
However, Calixte stressed that he does not believe the cuts will be permanent and said that funding could increase in future years. He cited a combination of COVID-19 and several years of poor budgeting by SA as the major factors in the decrease in funding.
“We are not cutting [club sports] because we want to budget in the green anymore. We’re cutting you because we simply just do not have the money for it,” Calixte said. “If we were budgeting properly the past couple years, and we had a lot of money in the reserves, we could still fund that money, or fund [club sports] the same way we did in the past.”
Photo provided by Alexis Fragapane
