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Joanne Merrill
Director of Athletics and Physical Education
Rivier College, Nashua, N.H.
NCAA Division III

As much as possible, we are scheduling doubleheaders for our men’s and women’s teams so we can send two squads to the same place. Our conference has been doing this for the last couple of years, and it is helping out whenever else it can.
For example, last year, both our men’s and women’s basketball teams were in our conference playoffs in Boston, but playing different schools. We sent both teams on the same bus, and asked for one game to start half an hour later than originally scheduled. The bus dropped our women’s team off at one school and our men’s team off at another school.

We’ve also combined trips with another college in town. Both of our schools’ cross country teams, which don’t have a lot of participants, have gone to the same meets together.

For air travel, we used to have a charter bus drop the teams off at the airport and pick them up, but we’re going to switch to using public bus transportation to the airport, even though it’s definitely less convenient for our athletes.
For many years, we contracted with a small local company for charter bus service, which gave us really great prices. But the economy has affected them, and they’re not going to be providing that service anymore. So now we have to do more business with national companies. That’s really affecting our budget.

John Jentz
Associate Athletic Director for Business Operations
University of Wisconsin
NCAA Division I

We’re really being hit by the problems in the airline industry. We’re in a regional airline market, so our teams usually have to take two flights to get anywhere. As a result, we’ve extended the radius of where we take a bus versus a plane.

Cost is definitely a concern, but availability is every bit as challenging. For instance, Delta and Northwest, our two biggest carriers, have merged. So now, no matter the cost, there may not even be enough seats for all our athletes.

We’re emphasizing regional travel for our teams, but we’re not restricting them at this point. We set a bottom line budget for each team. If a coach decides they’ve got to make a road trip to California to play certain teams to improve their RPI [Ratings Percentage Index], that might mean they’ll have to give up a closer regional competition to make the budget work.

We have a handful of ideas on the table for next year to reduce costs in other areas so we don’t have to take away any more from team travel budgets. For example, support staff will have to cut back on professional travel, and we may look at saving costs with how we produce our media guides and game tickets. Our goal is to create a little wiggle room, but not affect our teams’ ability to be nationally competitive.

Forrest Karr
Director of Athletics & Recreation
University of Alaska-Fairbanks
NCAA Division II

In the 2008 fiscal year, travel accounted for 24 percent of our department’s entire budget. We’ve had to make some tough managerial decisions to reduce expenses, including eliminating a road trip in each sport this year. By necessity, we have become experts at identifying opportunities for cost savings.
For example, when the cost of oil dropped, we re-priced all our outstanding group travel to see if lower prices had become available. We were able to re-book some of these trips and saved $9,430.

Our coaches also set pregame meals at specific times to secure lower lunch prices at restaurants. Our cross country team even tries to stay in hotel rooms with mini kitchens so they can buy and prepare their own food. Not only is this option cheaper, it is also healthier.

We have corporate sponsorship agreements with Northwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and a regional airline called Frontier Flying Service that continue to help us save on air travel. We also have similar corporate sponsorship agreements for hotel room and vehicle rental discounts.

Finally, we recently entered into a reciprocal tournament hosting arrangement with the University of Alaska-Anchorage in men’s and women’s basketball and men’s ice hockey. In each of these sports, we will participate in two four-team tournaments every year—one in Anchorage and one here in Fairbanks.

This will allow us to play a lot of games without traveling far. An NCAA Division I bylaw that allows visiting schools to exempt contests played in Alaska against a school located in Alaska, along with a Division II bylaw that allows schools to exempt up to four contests from their season during a single trip to Alaska, make these tournaments beneficial for our guests, too.

Bill Ashby
Athletics Director
University of Maine at Fort Kent
NAIA

Our conference is pretty big. It goes from Fort Kent to Canton, N.Y., which is about 15 hours away, so our travel expenses are also pretty big. I’ve been asked to trim the budget by 10 percent, and we’ll accomplish that by cutting back wherever we can.
For instance, we’re purchasing fewer hotel rooms on overnight stays. In the past we put two people in a room, while this year we’re putting three and four in a room. We’re trying to travel the day of the game as much as possible and come home as soon as we can after the contest. And we’re trying to reduce our travel team size.
We can’t change much else other than play fewer games. But if we play less, student-athletes will find other schools to go to where they’re playing more games. These are tough times, no question about it.

Mario Moccia
Director of Athletics
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Ill.
NCAA Division I

For us, it’s helped a lot to talk to our coaches and get them to realize that travel costs are an issue. We address travel in our coaches’ meetings because I don’t think we can just assume they all listen to the news. It’s important they hear straight from the horse’s mouth that this is a big concern.

We ask them to be as judicious as they can when making their travel plans. We want to give our student-athletes a quality experience, but things like regionalizing the schedule can help a lot. We’re in a part of the country where we can drive to a lot of non-conference competition, and our coaches have done a good job of looking for schools we can bus to so we don’t have to fly.

We also allow our teams to fundraise on their own. If they want to take a special trip—our softball team recently went to Hawai’i and our women’s golf team to Mexico—they can go as long as they can fundraise to cover the costs. This also gets our teams involved with the community and boosters without interfering with our general departmental fundraising.

Norma Carr
Athletics Director
Salt Lake Community College, Utah
NJCAA

Here in the West, we’re so spread out that we have to travel pretty far to compete against anyone. We had pretty much phased out using 15-passenger vans because they’re less safe, and put more teams on buses, but with the diesel gas prices, we’ve had to go back to using vans again. It’s affecting us big time.

For shorter trips, we travel during the day instead of going the night before to spend less money on hotels. Unfortunately, that makes it harder for our athletes to compete because they’re basically getting off the bus and playing right away. A lot of the time we have our athletes drive home right after their game, which also isn’t great.

Occasionally we fly because of distance, but now we’re being charged for even the first piece of luggage. I just flew our volleyball team to nationals and we actually got a pretty good rate—under $300 roundtrip. But by the time we paid $15 for one piece of luggage for each person coming and going, it cost another $1,500 for the team.

We’ve always had trouble getting opponents to visit us because it can be a long distance to travel. Now, it’s an ever bigger problem. In order to get some institutions to come here, we’ve had to give them a guarantee and sometimes a big guarantee.

Jim Jackson
Athletic Director
Cameron University, Lawton, Okla.
NCAA Division II

I’m asking for more money! That may be a pipe dream, though, so we’re also looking a little harder at our schedules to see where we can be smarter and more efficient.
We’ve had our teams ride together for bus travel and that’s saved us a lot, but not without a little bit of a dilemma. If our men’s and women’s basketball teams travel together during the week, we have to pull the men out of class earlier. Then the women have to stay for the men’s game. That’s good for fan support, but means they get home later.

We have a mandatory policy that student-athletes attend their 8 a.m. class (if they have one) on the day after a game—even if they get home at 3:30 a.m. By making the women’s team drive home later, I worry if what we’re doing is good for their academics.

For next year, or maybe even this spring, we may have to cut some staff travel. I think it’s important that our staff has opportunities for career development, but we might not be able to afford it. For example, I normally send my sports information staff to their annual convention every year, but if it’s in Orlando or somewhere even farther next year, I’m not sure they’ll go.

Paul Moyer
Athletics Director
Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pa.
NCAA Division III

We did some contingency planning in advance of this year’s budget to make sure that we had a reserve for travel. We also worked in partnership with our transportation provider, who we’ve had a longstanding relationship with, to think about ways we might be able to save. In fact, they even recommended we take a different form of transportation in some cases, like a minibus through another company.

Right now we’re thinking about how to continue containing costs next year. We’re looking at limiting non-conference travel and insisting that any overnight stays are approved in advance and fundraised for. We may even limit travel with hotel costs strictly to conference requirements.

Our teams already fundraise for trips during their nontraditional seasons, and in the past we’ve supplemented those costs, but we may not be able to in the future. As a last resort, we may look at reducing the number of contests or eliminating scrimmages.

Abigail Funk is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management.