WILLIAMSBURG — Expanded fundraising, major facilities upgrades and construction, and budget increases for individual teams are centerpieces of an ambitious and detailed plan for William and Mary athletics.
Every William and Mary athlete should graduate having won a conference title or participated in NCAA championship competition at some point in their careers, reads a report prepared by the school’s Committee on Competitive Excellence released Tuesday.
“It was a logical, long-term approach,” athletic director Terry Driscoll said. “We hadn’t really done a strategic plan, like many schools do. In some respects, it has a strategic element to it. It’s aspirational, strategic, and for us at the end, operational.”
The report, almost a year in the making, outlines the success of William and Mary teams on and off the field: high graduation rates among athletes, as well as more Colonial Athletic Association championships than any other school.
But the number of conference titles won annually has slipped in recent years, and the report concluded that W&M athletics is “under-resourced to compete in this environment.”
The report’s goals include an additional $8.1 million in annual fundraising above present levels, and up to $125 million in “transformative investments” in facilities. It calls for increases in coaches’ salaries, available scholarships and operating budgets, as well as a more streamlined process for identifying and admitting athletes.
Facility investments include a multi-sport indoor practice building (pricetag: $20-25 million) near William and Mary Hall that would be used by men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball.
Forty-four year-old W&M Hall also requires attention. The department is just beginning to study whether it would be best to replace it with new construction ($60-75 million) or renovate it, as the University of Richmond did with Robins Center ($22-28 million).
A swimming facility for the Tribe’s CAA championship team ($15-20 million) is also in the report. W&M does not have a competitive swimming or diving facility, or locker rooms, yet routinely competes for conference titles.
The most transformative investment is a call to increase scholarship endowments. It costs $1.3 million to endow a single scholarship — in an endowment, the principle is never touched, and schools spend only the interest earned — and would cost $192 million to fully endow all scholarships.
Scholarship endowments allow the athletic department to spend funds raised annually elsewhere — coaching salaries, recruiting, operations.
Driscoll said that W&M isn’t attempting to keep up with Power Five conference schools, but to compete within the CAA and among peer institutions regionally and nationally.
“What we’re saying is as we envision moving forward,” he said, “these are the things that we think we would need, and if we could ever get to all of the things there, we believe that we would have a really good chance to be able to say to any one of our student-athletes that we’re recruiting: You come to William and Mary, world-class education, plus the opportunity to compete for a championship during the time that you’ll be here.”
The path to financial solvency and facilities upgrades is through private giving. William and Mary’s student fees are among the highest in the state, and the report said that students should not bear the burden of increased costs.
W&M’s high student fees are a product of a broad-based program that offers 23 sports and a relatively low enrollment, just 6,200 undergraduate students. Still, student fees fund 56 percent of the athletic budget, a significantly lower percentage than state schools such as James Madison (79 percent), Norfolk State (80 percent), Old Dominion (73 percent), Radford (88 percent) and George Mason (84 percent), according to the USA Today database.
Recent legislation that sets limits on the percentage of athletic budgets that can be funded through student fees have made schools even more sensitive to increases.
Driscoll said that W&M’s University Advancement office, through targeted research, identified thousands of potential new donors to athletics. The report said that there are more than 10,000 possible new donors.
Driscoll emphasized, as did the report, that the school’s lofty academic standards not be compromised for athletic goals.
“Everyone here understands that we bring in kids who are academically qualified, we want to graduate them at a high rate, and we want to be as competitive as we possibly can,” Driscoll said. “How do we get there? Hopefully, this plan speaks more clearly to that.”
The current plan greatly expands on a gauzy 2006 report that essentially confirmed that William and Mary exhibited the proper balance between academics and athletics, and that athletics contributed to the school’s core mission.
“I don’t want the plan to seem wild, because we put the numbers in there,” Driscoll said. “We put the numbers in there to give people a sense of the magnitude of what we’re talking about. We have gotten as far as we’ve gotten through some methodical planning and trying to address things, trying to be opportunistic when we could.
“We’re going to continue to do that, but we’ll have more people athletically doing it, and we’re going to have what appears to be more opportunity to engage people. And if we can engage people and they can read the document and say, you know what, this is what I think intercollegiate athletics should be and this is what I want to do, then we’ve got a shot. That’s all we want is a shot.”
Fairbank can be reached by phone at 757-247-4637.
