Women’s college volleyball has never been more popular, especially across the Midwest.
Five Big Ten Conference programs rank among the top 10 nationally in attendance this season, with Nebraska (8,195 fans per game) again leading the nation and Minnesota (4,782) at No. 4. And one-off matches at large venues are gaining traction. Wisconsin drew an NCAA regular season-record 16,833 to a September match against Florida at the Kohl Center, the campus basketball and hockey arena, nine days after Nebraska and Creighton attracted 15,797 to the CHI Health Center in downtown Omaha.
Here’s an ever more impressive metric: On the Big Ten Network, only football and men’s basketball earn consistently higher ratings than volleyball, which jockeys with wrestling for third place. That popularity holds true at Minnesota, where only the three major men’s sports (football, basketball and hockey) draw better. Big Ten matches often sell out the 5,500-capacity Maturi Pavilion, aka The Pav, the former hockey venue attached to Williams Arena. The place rocks, with fans engaging a “Point U!” call-and-response with the Gophers’ public address announcer after each point.
(You won’t hear that Friday or Saturday when the U hosts first and second round NCAA Tournament matches, because the NCAA requires host schools to tone down the theatrics.)
Even so, college volleyball programs generally lose a lot of money, not only at the U but across the NCAA. Between coaching salaries and travel, it’s an expensive sport, with little to no media rights revenue to defray costs. Only Nebraska’s program turns a profit, mainly from ticket sales; the Huskers have sold out 303 consecutive matches in Lincoln since 2001.
At the U, volleyball ran a roughly $2.26 million deficit in 2019-20, according to the university’s annual NCAA Financial Report. (That covers the last season before the pandemic.) The loss might have been higher had COVID-19 restrictions not limited recruiting travel. And it’s not much different anywhere else.
[image_caption]Coach Hugh McCutcheon[/image_caption]
“I’m not saying volleyball needs to be a revenue sport tomorrow,” McCutcheon said. “But has volleyball shown, at least in this conference, that it’s possible? Yes, it has. Nebraska runs at a profit. Other schools are getting close. It’s certainly worth having that conversation.”
How can it happen at the U? Let’s look into it. Spoiler alert: It won’t come cheap.
The Nebraska way
It started as these things usually do, with an insult.
Shortly after Nebraska volleyball Coach John Cook took over from Terry Pettit in 2000, a Cornhuskers booster group known as The Beef Club invited him to speak. In Cook’s retelling of the story, his talk referenced a costly international trip the Huskers were planning that requiring significant fund-raising.
In the subsequent question-and-answer session, Cook said one attendee asked who was paying for the trip. Cook mentioned several independent funding sources, but apparently the man didn’t believe him. “If it wasn’t for football,” Cook recalled the man saying, “You wouldn’t be able to go.”
While inaccurate, the remark still stung, because Cook knew where it came from – the perception women’s sports freeload off “King Football.”
“I walked out of there and made a vow: Someday we’re going to shut that guy up,” Cook said at a recent press conference in Lincoln. (Cook, through a university representative, declined an interview request from MinnPost.)
The following season Cook challenged Nebraska fans to start a sellout streak like that of Cornhusker football, which began in 1962 and continues to this day. Spurred by an undefeated season and NCAA title in 2000, they responded. Sellouts continued even as the program moved in 2013 from the 4,000-capacity NU Coliseum to the much larger Bob Devaney Sports Center (7,907).
A $20 million renovation championed by former athletic director Tom Osborne turned Devaney into a cash machine, with six suites and 128 pricey courtside seats for high rollers who gladly pony up additional $2,000 donations for the privilege. The Huskers have led the NCAA in attendance every year since the move despite charging some of the highest prices in country – $16 to $18 per match for single seats, and up to $306 for season tickets. Five NCAA titles since 1995, four with Cook as head coach, keep fans coming.
Tickets for this season sold out before the first match, according to a Nebraska official, and the season ticket waiting list runs about 1,000 deep. Huskers volleyball generated $2.16 million in ticket revenue in 2019-20 per its NCAA Financial Report, more than three times as much as Minnesota ($686,558). Interest is so great all matches are broadcast on the Huskers Radio Network, with some even on Nebraska Public Television.
“We could have lost a generation of fans by staying the Coliseum, because people weren’t giving up their seats, and we have an older crowd,” Cook said at the press conference. “We didn’t have a student section. If a high school team wanted to come in, they couldn’t get into the Coliseum, There were no tickets.
“By opening Devaney, we got 4,000 more season tickets and a whole new generation of fans. A lot of those are younger families and younger kids. I see how many kids are down there in the hallway after matches. It was a great move.”
Minnesota’s task
So what can the Gophers do to match Nebraska?
Start with the obvious: A major renovation and expansion of the Pav into a modern, 8,000-seat venue with suites. That’s more likely than building a new arena, though neither option will happen soon. Travis Cameron, the U’s assistant athletics director and chief revenue officer, said there’s nothing of that scope in the university’s Six Year Capital Plan for building projects through 2027. (A 2018 remodel of the Pav added air conditioning, up-to-date training facilities and a club room upstairs for boosters.)
Plan B involves moving some popular Big Ten matches to a larger venue. Cameron said the U has looked into playing at the Target Center, site of the 2018 NCAA Final Four, as well as Williams and Mariucci Arenas on campus.
McCutcheon isn’t keen on the 14,624-seat Williams Arena for two reasons. He’s reluctant to give up the Pav’s familiarity and raucous atmosphere. And he considers The Barn’s raised floor unsafe.
“It’s kind of goofy,” he said. “When I first got here (in 2012) we played in there a couple of times. But if you’re pursuing a ball, chasing or diving, and you know there’s three-foot drop at the end of it, it gets a little dicey, I think.
“The venue’s a great venue in terms of seating and the juice in the building, all that good stuff. Great. You could sell tickets and get it going. But the floor, in my opinion, is probably a limiting factor.”
Mariucci, which holds about 10,000, makes more sense, though it would mean temporarily displacing Gopher men’s hockey. (Gophs skaters could practice next door at Ridder Arena, where women’s hockey plays; a tunnel connects the venues.) Cameron said the U prefers on-campus venues to the Target Center, where building rental and related costs would eat up a big chunk of the profits.
Then there’s Plan C: Higher ticket prices paired with more aggressive fund-raising.
Gopher tickets are among the best deals in town. Season tickets top out at $250. Regular-season individual match tickets, once as cheap as $5, go for $15 and $10, the same as Gopher women’s basketball. But that top price is only $4 more than Nebraska charges for standing room ($11). Defending national champion Wisconsin, meanwhile, gets $525 for its top season ticket and up to $24 for single seats.
McCutcheon wonders whether the Gophs are charging enough for a nationally-ranked program with NCAA title aspirations.
“When you see tickets on StubHub going for $150 and we’re charging $5 a pop or whatever it is, it seems like there’s a disparity there between the actual value and the perceived value,” McCutcheon said. “We also know our fans are price sensitive. We’re not saying we’re going to gouge anyone. I’m just saying, what will the market bear? There are some indicators that maybe there’s some opportunity there.”
Ticket prices remain a touchy subject at the U, roughly 10 years removed from former athletic director Norwood Teague’s widely unpopular scholarship seating plan requiring mandatory donations on top of the cost of season tickets. Most “seats” at the Pav are still bleachers, and Gopher fans are notoriously frugal. What’s a fair price for a wooden slab at a pre-World War II venue?
There’s also the matter of McCutcheon’s departure as head coach after this season. McCutcheon took the Gophers to 10 NCAA Tournaments and three Final Fours in 11 seasons. If the U bumps prices too much and things go south under the next coach, how many season ticket holders would bail? Cameron said the U weighs all that in any discussion of pricing.
“With volleyball, the biggest revenue streams (are) ticket sales and fund-raising,” Cameron said. “If we can’t sell more tickets, the only thing we can do is charge more, and we’re always cautious when we have those conversations.
“One of the best opportunities I think Nebraska capitalized (on) is the venue they play in. Not only do they have a lot of seats in their venue, but a lot of quality seats … The number of high-quality or standard-quality seats in Maturi Pavilion is significantly less than a number of our counterparts.”
Volleyball fundraising at the U, overseen by the Golden Gopher Fund, also lags behind Nebraska and Wisconsin. In 2020 contributions at the U totaled $96,855, significantly less than the Badgers ($291,161) and Huskers ($270,532). The Gophers’ volleyball booster club disbanded several years ago.
There’s one more piece to this that longtime Gopher fans and boosters find incredulous: Despite strong ratings, volleyball programs receive no direct revenue from the Big Ten Network. Cameron says it all goes to football and men’s basketball. Carving out some TV money for volleyball would reduce deficits significantly. Gopher volleyball also has no local TV agreement, and its limited radio broadcasts essentially break even, Cameron said.
There’s certainly plenty of TV money out there. The Big Ten’s new agreement with Fox, CBS and NBC reportedly calls for $80 million to $100 million annually to each school. That’s up from the $53.4 million most received in 2019-20, according to USA Today as reported by ESPN.
“If we really want to flip the dialog, we’ve got to figure out how to monetize volleyball on TV and radio,” Cameron said. “But we also have to squeeze what we have. We have to take a look at ways to play in larger venues. We’ve got to take a look at maximizing revenue from the tickets we’re selling.
“We’re looking at new and creative stuff, but every time we look at the numbers, there’s not a silver bullet. Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be little things that add up over time that get us closer to that revenue positive piece. And every step in that direction is good. If we close that gap to $1 million or $1.5 million or $500,000, that helps the athletic department’s bottom line and the university’s bottom line. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to ensure.”
Nebraska is a smaller state without professional teams and the city leaders cultivate that. They tend to not have big nearly out of control events with crowded and expensive parking. Their highlight is NCAA baseball playoffs……..I don’t know thinking that every sports program at the U is special is so very expensive when there are bigger needs in the lower grades. There are like Jack Horner sitting in the corner sticking their hands in the tax pie and pulling out a plum.
Well, one way to make volleyball show a profit is to allocate some of those football and basketball TV revenues to it. The fact is, for various legal and political reasons, in order to run those allegedly super profitable men’s programs, the university needs women sports, preferably sports that aren’t too expensive to run. How they manage to run up costs in the volleyball program, I don’t know, but surely the cost would be far more than running a woman’s football program at the U. If women’s volleyball fills a need the U has to avoid discrimination suits, surely it makes sense to consider the value of avoiding those suits to the women sports. I think if they did that, the volleyball financials would look a lot better.
Accountants and those who enable them love to categorize things. But what is important to remember is that it all comes down to dollars, how we characterize them.
I am often told that college sports are all about the money. I read in the newspapers about vast sums of money flowing into college sports. I hear of assistant coaches making millions of dollars in salaries. My question is this. If college sports are so amazingly lucrative, why is it necessary to fund raise for them?
Thanks for sharing this info.
I am a long-time season ticket holder but never knew about the funding mechanism.
UM Volleyball is the best ticket in town.
Great article Pat. Thanks for the work.
$2 Million dollar deficit. So you are saying each player gets a subsidy of $100,000? That’s a lot of money esp considering there are some kids who don’t get a decent lunch.
Nice attempt to simplify the issue. Men’s major athletic programs (Football, Basketball) has always subsidized non major programs—men’s and women’s, including men/women’s hockey (most expensive sport). Volleyball’s expenses are directly related to program’s success—article addresses failures re home venue/TV revenue. This is an ADMINISTRATION problem—a male-centric group that has no vision, marketing nor forecasting skill sets. Those young women are NOT getting the administrative support they deserve, full stop.
See Hiram Fosters first comments. Various legal and political reasons are why we have woman’s sports. I am with the beef, wheat and potatoes crowd. You are with the white chicken and broccoli crowd with a side salad….Actually I with neither crowd. Did you know you can go to many musical performances at the U for free? I am with the arts crowd. Pee on sports. Let it be intramural like God intended.
The men’s Golden Rats hockey team is not subsidized.
A better way to look at it is to view the athletic program as a whole, and not make policy decisions based on entirely arbitrary divisions within it. We need to look at the bottom line numbers. How much money does the athletic program bring to the university general fund? What other benefits does it bring to the U? The university and the state generally should not get hung up on internal issues within the program to drive overall policy decisions. An athlete is an athlete, and the university’s obligations to each student is the same.
I’ll remember that Full Caps. Men are the problem. Couldn’t agree more. We have a disability. It is called Testosterone. Read the book on it.
That “Subsidy” comes from the athletic department which is funded by the football, men’s basketball, and men’s hockey.
University sports (except for track) disgust me. They are too powerful of an interest group. To think that the amount of pay for an offensive line coach is more than that of the Governer’s is telling….And then since the line coach is well paid so goes the weight coach and the womans coach. Meanwhile bigger heros at the middle and high school level do the same thing for virtually free. And there are kids who do not get a hot lunch. The schools and public buildings are not properly ventilated. But we do have our circuses.
The offensive line coach at the U most likely works a lot harder than the governor. D1 college coaches work ungodly hours.
The only college sports that make money are Mens Football and Mens Basketball. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Its the world we live in. Everything else is subsidized by those sports.
Men’s hockey is a net generator of revenue.
I am not convinced any college sport makes money at Minnesota. My suspicion is that in effect, Minnesota subsidizes the one or two programs in the Big Ten that show a profit such as Michigan and possibly Ohio State. It does seem to me that with all the vast sums of money that pass through the program the general fund sees remarkably little of it.
One issue is he huge buyouts required every few years for coaches for football, and men’s basketball and hockey.
Revenue from athletics covers the cost of athletics – about 85 million. Even though basketball and football account for roughly 80% of the revenue, they account for only half of the spending. Men’s Hockey is also a revenue generator. The rest (nearly half) goes to the non-revenue generating sports. In a sense, subsidizing all sports.
University athletics provides some of the best athletes in the country an opportunity to compete here in the state of MN. Athletics also provides a local, affordable option to professional sports. Athletics also brings around 1000 tuition-paying student-athletes to campus every year.
Volleyball needs a bigger venue and some sponsors to be cash-positive. I hope they do.
Once you factor in the cost of the stadium, the coach, and the occasional lawsuit, I doubt the football team makes much money either.
Easy to find.
Correct. The U posts its NCAA Financial Reports on gophersports.com going back to 2012. Not every Big Ten school does. Here’s a link: https://gophersports.com/sports/2018/5/21/ot-financial-reports-html. The Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) Surveys are less detailed but good reads for Title IX-related data.
What is the number on the check the University athletic department writes to the university each year. How much money does the University of Minnesota make from its athletic programs?
Part of what needs to happen is more women need to make philanthropic commitments to their sports as well. Consistent alumni support is important in providing the resources to bridge gaps and legacy gifts keep programs from relying too heavily on attendance revenue to make budget. It’s all got to be part of the package.
My suspicion is that with all the talk about how college sports are all about the money, at Minnesota at least, they lose money and those are deficits that must be made up by charitable contributions. This is not to say that there aren’t people who make huge amounts of money from university sports, they just aren’t the people of Minnesota. They may not be the people of Ohio or Michigan, but it is just possible they are the people of Alabama an otherwise impoverished state.
There is an urge among many to create arbitrary divisions in the way we finance college athletics. We say this group makes many and that group doesn’t. When we make these distinctions, we are in effect making policy and priority decisions. The fact is that for a variety of reasons the major sports need the minor sports and could not exist without them. Given that is the case, it simply doesn’t make sense to isolate the finances of minor sports from an overall budget that needs them to sustain its very existence.
Are there any retired volleyball players that have extra cash laying around?
I wonder if they would consider more dynamic pricing options? Set a floor of $10 0r $15 for most matches, but let that increase for the rivalry matchups and those with other ranked programs. If they could get an extra $5-$10 per ticket for some of those, it could serve as one of those steps that Cameron talks about.
Market discipline is a foreign concept at the U of M athletic dept. They just don’t get it.
The average athlete, the median athlete, at the university isn’t a star no matter what sport he or she plays. As students, the obligations of the university to each student are the same, and it’s particularly important that the univesity fulfill those obligations to the typical athlete for whom their university experience is the end of their athletic role, This is as true of the kids in the revenue producing sports as it is for the kids in non revenue sports. The fact is, as much money as the football team makes, the average kid on the squad is probably a bench warmer to whom very little of the vast sums of money the program generates, can be attributed. In terms of financial value to the program, he or she might as well be the captain of the golf team.