Athletics accounts for
half decrease in reserves
Sports'
disproportionate draw on savings raises questions of WSU's priorities
The starting reserve
balance of $205 million in 2013 comes from a chart WSU published in the fall.
Deficits for the university and for athletics come from the Budget Office. The
athletics deficits differ slightly from those previously reported, and the
Budget Office could not immediately explain the discrepancy.
By CODY COTTIER, Evergreen reporter April 4,
2018
Newly released
financial figures show WSU Athletics accounts for roughly half the drop in
university savings, which administrators have used to justify system-wide
spending cuts of 2.5 percent.
Officials have
traditionally said the athletics budget is separate from the university’s, and
that athletics does not take money from academics or vice versa. But once
athletics began overspending its own budget, it dipped into WSU’s general
savings, draining about $50 million since 2013 and contributing to a precarious
financial situation.
The athletics deficit
of the past five years is nearly four times larger than the cumulative deficit
of all WSU colleges and academic units combined, excluding the new Elson S.
Floyd College of Medicine, according to data provided by the WSU Budget Office.
This reflects a
nationwide tension between athletics and academics. Universities — including WSU — insist robust sports programs boost their
appeal. WSU President Kirk Schulz has called athletics the “front door of the
university.” But some argue these priorities are misguided.
“Universities exist for
a reason: for higher learning,” said David Ridpath, a sports administration
professor at Ohio University and member of the Drake Group, which advocates for
an overhaul of commercialized college sports.
“It’s not about elite
sport development,” he added, “or our entertainment, or coaches getting paid
millions of dollars.”
As at WSU, overspending
on sports often carves a deep debt, with the consequences extending beyond
athletics. Schulz’s plan to curb the overall drop in central reserves has
resulted in the elimination of the Performing Arts program and a near-total
hiring freeze across all areas of the university.
TEVA MAYER | The Daily
Evergreen
Based on the figures
provided by the Budget Office.
Spending reductions
also threatened to cut several multicultural retention counselor positions and
part of some graduate students’ stipends, but administrators reversed the
decisions amid student outrage.
Though athletics has
implemented its own spending plan like the rest of the university, many feel
the department receives preferential treatment. Faculty Senate Chair Judi
McDonald said as much at a Senate meeting earlier this month, while discussing
home football game parking lot closures.
“Athletics gets what
athletics wants,” she said, “and the rest of us suffer.”
The value of reputation
One of the main
arguments for high-spending college sports programs is that the better the
teams — primarily football — the more prestige they bring to a university. This
is widely thought to lead to an increase in applications, donations and other
hard-to-measure benefits.
Administrators use this
reasoning to show the importance of staying competitive in athletics. It surely
helps with brand recognition, as anyone can watch WSU sports on TV. Some
studies have even shown a spike in enrollment for a year or two after a major
football or basketball victory, with others finding little correlation.
But Ridpath, the sports
administration expert, said it is also important to weigh the odds of, say,
winning a bowl game against the investment needed to do so. If WSU plays well
enough every other year, it may be worth it; if only once a decade, it may not.
“There’s only going to
be one winner and a lot of losers,” Ridpath said. “How often can WSU win the
outright title?”
Competitiveness is a
tall order. College sports programs are engaged in what is commonly referred to
as an “arms race” to build the most lavish facilities, hire the most effective
coaches and thereby recruit the most impressive athletes.
WSU spokesman Phil
Weiler agreed administrators nationwide are struggling to decide the role
sports should play in a public university.
“Every college
president in America that has athletics is asking herself or himself that question,”
Weiler said.
Schulz’s main priority
since arriving at WSU two years ago has been to transform the university into a
premiere research institution. His flagship “Drive to 25” campaign aims to push
WSU into the highest echelons of research by 2030.
Ridpath said top-notch
sports teams are not essential to this mission. He has argued in The Washington
Post that it is wrong for colleges to support athletics deficits at the expense
of students and academics.
“If Washington State’s
going to be a top-25 university,” he said, “athletics isn’t going to matter.”
Weiler noted that WSU
pursues many goals at once, and that high-quality sports teams and academics
are not mutually exclusive.
However, athletics
represented more than half of the university’s overall deficit every year from
2014 to 2016. In 2017, startup costs for the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine
accounted for about a third of the overspending, and athletics spending for
another third.
Stacy Pearson, vice
president for finance and administration, acknowledged this results in a slower
recovery time for the university as a whole. Each unit must restrict hiring
even as WSU strives for research excellence, and those with surpluses are not
allowed to spend them.
But for many, sports
are closely tied to overall college enjoyment. Weiler recalled talking to a
student at one of his former universities who explained she had never been a
football fan, but the shared experience of attending home games was an integral
part of her college experience.
A. G. Rud, a former
Faculty Senate chair, said he researches college athletics informally. He
agreed the state of athletics spending is concerning, but that nevertheless,
sports are an important part of American universities.
“I do like the fact
that we’re trying to pursue athletic excellence,” he said. “If you’re going to
do big-time athletics, you have to do your best.”
The cost of competition
Perhaps the most
obvious and controversial expenses in college athletics are the salaries. After
a $1-million raise, football Head Coach Mike Leach is set to make $4 million in
2020 and is one of the highest-paid state employees in Washington, second only
to University of Washington football Head Coach Chris Petersen.
The issue has arisen at
Faculty Senate meetings repeatedly. While coaches’ salaries grow uncapped, Rud
said, faculty have been lucky to see a 1-percent raise.
“We have … professors
who have been here for many years, who work hard and teach hard and do
research,” he noted. “They make a fraction of what the football coach makes.”
But the largest slice
of the athletics deficit came from facility debts. When former Athletics
Director Bill Moos arrived in Pullman in 2010, he and late President Elson S.
Floyd developed a plan to revive a loss-ridden football team.
After hiring Leach and
men’s basketball Head Coach Ernie Kent, who earns $1.4 million per year, Moos
and Floyd spent $65 million on renovations to Martin Stadium, and $61 million
on a new football complex.
Various athletics debts
account for nearly half the 2013-2014 swing into WSU’s deficit spending, shown
in the two left bars.
But then athletics
received less in Pac-12 distribution revenue and institutional support from WSU
than expected, leaving the program unable to cover the cost of the building
projects. In its 2014 deficit of about $13 million, facilities accounted for
about $9 million.
Athletics also pays
millions each in student aid and team travel, as well as equipment, uniforms
and supplies, among other things. Rud said it all boils down to offering an
attractive package to student athletes.
“There’s a lot of that
going on,” he said. “It’s sold to people as ‘We need to attract these
18-year-olds that can throw a ball or make a tackle.’ ”
Weiler said it is
essential to have the best of everything to offer student athletes — and fans —
the best experience possible. But he acknowledged that doesn’t mean the system
is functioning properly.
“It’s not sustainable,”
he said. “No one thinks it is.”
Put simply, athletics
must spend less money and generate more. As a university far from population
centers, WSU has a challenging time bringing in home-game revenue, one major
funding source. It’s harder for people to get here, and Martin Stadium is the
smallest in the Pac-12, limiting ticket sales.
Additionally, Weiler
said fans and alumni aren’t donating as much as those at peer institutions, and
WSU athletics has one of the smallest budgets in the Power Five, the country’s
big-time sports conferences.
“They do have a lot of
challenges,” Pearson said, “but they also have a lot of opportunities.”
The path to profit
Under new Athletics
Director Patrick Chun, WSU is focused on revenue. Schulz has touted Chun’s
fundraising prowess as one of the main reasons for offering him the position,
and his history at Florida Atlantic University seems to support the claim.
Most notably, during
his tenure in 2015, the school received its largest-ever donation: a
$16-million gift for an athletics complex. One of WSU’s highest athletic
priorities is to build an indoor practice facility, to give all teams a
climate-controlled building for practices.
The Seattle Times
reported shortly after Chun’s hiring that he had already traveled to Seattle to
meet with constituents, and that he planned to keep it up.
Weiler agreed the
university has not maximized fundraising. WSU has loyal fans, he said, but its
athletics department is at the bottom end of the Pac-12 in donations.
However, Chun said he
believes athletics’ overspending has set the program up for success, which will
hypothetically lead to an increase in giving. He added that WSU’s brand is the
strongest it’s ever been.
“We’re in a great
position,” Chun said, “because of all the investments that were made here in
the past.”
In the past five years,
WSU has played in four bowl games, after a decade without one. Contributions
are on the rise, and ticket sales reached a high in 2017, according to NCAA
financial reports.
Other aspects of the
spending plan athletics developed in 2016, however, have not panned out.
Schulz and Moos
proposed an athletics fee of $100 per year to the Board of Regents in September
2016, but after strong opposition from students, the fee never went to a vote.
They again went to
ASWSU in February, this time to propose a mandatory $265 student sports pass
fee. This would have increased sports pass revenue from $2.7 million to $4.3
million. The Senate voted not to include it on the election ballot.
Without the proposed
fees, WSU students paid about $40 each to athletics in Services and Activities
fees this year, for a total of about $750,000 or 7.3 percent of total S&A
fees. Part of another mandatory $1,250 in fees goes toward the Martin Stadium
renovations, and optional undergraduate sports passes cost $239.
Another significant
revenue was supposed to come from the sale of beer in Martin Stadium, but after
trying unsuccessfully for more than a year to obtain a permit from the
Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board, WSU stopped pursuing alcohol sales.
This would have provided an estimated $600,000 per year.
But season ticket sales
are on the rise, and Chun is confident Coug fans will open their wallets to
help nudge the program back into the black.
The problem with this,
according to Ridpath, is that prioritizing new revenue is a double-edged sword.
To generate money in ticket sales and donations, the football team must
continue to improve. This improvement implies more investing, and so on in an
unending cycle.
“Any type of gain is
typically offset by more stupid spending,” Ridpath said.
Instead, he recommended
spending less, comparing it to what the average person would likely do to save
money.
The only spending
reductions athletics has publicly announced are leaving some positions vacant
and “overall belt tightening.” Chun said he believes it is important to be
“great stewards of our resources.” But if a program is going to remain
competitive, there are no obvious areas to cut from.
“If there was an easy
answer,” Weiler said, “this wouldn’t be an issue that people are grappling with
across the country.”
Difficult answers
Some universities,
struggling to stay afloat, have eliminated sports to cut costs. Ridpath said
some have even done away with football. But this would not eliminate all the
costs associated with athletics, like bond payments, Pearson said.
Besides, sports are
still deeply important to many students, alumni and other fans.
“Cougs take great pride
in what we do in the athletics field,” Chun said.
Other institutions,
like the University of Idaho, have dropped to a lower division, realizing it
did not have the resources to be competitive at the highest level of college
football. Though many feel this implies sacrificing relevancy, Ridpath
disagreed. He said it may be a good option for some universities.
Weiler said WSU could
have this conversation to decide what is most important, but that it would need
to include all invested groups, from students and alumni to faculty, staff and
donors.
As Chun noted, the
pride and tradition of Cougar athletics playing top-tier sports would likely
outweigh any benefits in bowing out of the university’s current conference. He
said he would not consider this, reiterating that he believes fans will be
willing to help.
Pearson agreed joining
a lower division would not appeal to the WSU community.
“I think that there
would be a lot of heartburn over not being a Pac-12 school,” Pearson said.
She argues for a
conservative approach, aimed at saving rather than making money. If WSU has a
smaller budget than its peers, she said, that just means it must spend less
than its peers.
“Bottom line,” she
said, “focus on that expenditure reduction.”
The university has said
athletics, like all other departments, will eventually have to repay its debts
to WSU. But Pearson said it will likely take athletics longer to eliminate its
deficit than other departments, and the foremost goal is to balance its budget.
In the meantime,
athletics overspending ripples disproportionately through the rest of the
university, impacting even departments that have managed their budgets well, as
all areas reduce spending by 2.5 percent.
“I know a lot of things
we put forward are not popular,” Pearson said, “but if I’m going to be
responsible for the overall fiscal health of the university, I’ve got to get
this number up to here.”
She pointed to the
$100-million mark on the reserves chart. This would be 10 percent of the
university’s overall budget, sufficient as a rainy day fund to cover costs
related to incidents like the cybersecurity breach last spring, and to
jumpstart strategic initiatives like the medical college.
She hopes to reach this
point within three to five years of operating in recovery mode, she said, and
reining in athletics spending is a key piece of that puzzle.
Chun noted that
athletics spent less than it projected in 2017. However, Chief Financial
Officer Matt Kleffner said this was due to one-time money from the NCAA.
Kleffner is unsure what
deficit the program will post this year, saying he should have a better idea by
early June. Athletics does not have scheduled spending reduction targets, he
said but continuously revises its financial plan.
“It’s in flux,” he
said.
Ridpath argues the
overarching issue in college athletics is that it is poorly operated. The
surest route to turning a profit is simply to spend less, he said. Pearson
echoed this sentiment.
“It’s not without
value,” she said. “It just needs to be managed.”
……..
Understanding WSU
athletic costs requires look at past & future
Commentary: After a
decade of neglect, WSU had no choice but to invest heavily in athletics if it
wanted to be a credible member of Pac-12
By Barry Bolton – Cougfan.com
4.5.2018
THE DAILY EVERGREEN'S
Cody Cottier wrote an excellent article this week detailing how Washington
State University's central reserves -- in essence, the school's savings account
or rainy day fund -- has dropped by 50 percent, down from $200 million to just
less than $100 million, since 2013.
Half of that drop, or
$50 million, is due to deficit spending in athletics. The rest stems from
investments in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, WSU Everett, classroom
space and more.
The drop in central
reserves, Cottier notes, is the basis on which President Kirk Schulz and his
team have implemented a university-wide spending reduction of 2.5 percent, with
the aim to use the savings to add $10 million
to the central reserve this fiscal year and then again in the subsequent two.
To read WSU's full plan for restoring the university's fiscal health, click
here.
The Daily Evergreen
story, which can be found here, raises important questions about the
"nationwide tension between athletics and academics" on college
campuses.
The drop in central
reserves is no doubt an anchor on the university. But for perspective on
athletics' piece of the puzzle, it's important to note a couple of facts:
WSU was at crossroads
with football when Dr. Floyd became president in 2007. While most of the rest
of the Pac-12 had invested steadily in their programs over the years, WSU
basically stopped doing so after the new weight room in the Bohler Complex was
opened in the 1990s.
The ensuing years of
ignoring the long-term health of the program was basically a reserve ticket for
the cellar. So the investment in football that Floyd and former AD Bill Moos
made with the premium seating expansion of Martin Stadium, the Cougar Football
Complex, the nutrition program and more, ought to be amortized over the
decade-plus of neglect they inherited -- and the next two decades in which
those investments will allow WSU to compete on a a level playing field in the
Pac-12.
The debt service for
the Cougar Football Complex and the premium seating is more than $9 million per
year. That -- with an assist from the never-realized money expected from the
Pac-12 Networks -- is the primary driver
of the department's deficit spending over recent years and, consequently, the
department's reliance on the broader university's central reserve to balance
the books.
That investment,
though, simply can't be viewed properly without sandwiching a decade of time in
front of it and decade-plus in back of it.
Those investments are what allow the football team -- the single-biggest and best
marketing tool any Power 5 school owns -- to compete. As we noted in a column
following the announcement of Mike Leach's new $4 million-per-year contract,
football's marketing power is immense. The Cougars' donnybrook with USC last
October, for instance, was one of the most-watched Friday night games ever on
ESPN. ESPN charges an average of $30,000
for a 30-second ad. The math says that single night of football yielded $10.8
million worth of marketing exposure for Washington State.
The old bromide that
athletics is the front porch to the university is a bromide for a reason: it's
true. College sports boost the broader appeal of the university. If the sports teams are down, it sours how
the world perceives the university as a whole. As the Daily Evergreen article
notes, some argue that point. But if you plot the number of student
applications received by WSU over the last 20 years you’ll find four major spikes: two followed
WSU appearances in the Rose Bowl, and two followed WSU appearances in March
Madness.
Moreover, football pays
for just about everything else in athletics. Men’s basketball pays for itself,
but every other sport is a money sinkhole. Simply put, WSU’s 16 other sports
can’t exist without football.
If you’re going to
battle at this level, you must invest. And that investment at WSU, which has
had consequences for the university's central reserve, needs to be seen as a
capital investment amortized over decades, not the limited window of 2013-17.
And here's a final
point: these budget realities highlight the need for WSU alums and fans to step
up to a greater degree when it comes to buying season tickets and underwriting
the scholarships that put WSU student-athletes on the field. CF.C guest columnist
Glenn Osterhout has written extensively on the subject and some of his
insightful recent work can be found here and here.
…………………..
WSU ranks first in
national pharmacy competition
Students get hands-on
experience with pharmaceutical compounding
By Taylor Nadauld, Moscow
Pullman Daily News staff writer Apr 5, 2018
A team of Washington
State University pharmacy students snagged first place at a national
pharmaceutical competition last month in Florida.
The team, made up of
Shauna Leggett, Katie Cashman and Megan Baker, currently co-interns at the same
compounding firm in Spokane, proved their pharmaceutical knowledge and skills
at the eighth annual Student Pharmacist Compounding Competition, co-sponsored
by the LP3 Network, MEDISCA and the MEDISCA Network on March 17-18 in Aventura,
Fla.
The women were some of
approximately 600 students to compete in regional competitions across the
country and part of the 10 percent to advance to the national stage, LP3
Network General Manager Maurizio De Stefano said.
There, students
competed in a variety of events including a classic practical lab, an
innovation challenge, a game-show style knowledge-testing round and a new
challenge in compounding, the pharmaceutical science of preparing specialized
medicine for patients. The team earned a final score of 81.6 percent, what De
Stefano called "exceptional."
Team members recalled
some of the tasks they faced throughout the competition, including forming
innovative ideas about the future of 3-D printers and medications, creating
effervescent power packets and creating prescription gelatin troches for
patients who may have trouble swallowing solid pills.
To Leggett, 25, the
competition was about more than just learning to dispense pills to patients.
"What's really
cool about this competition is that you have the opportunity to kind of use
your scientific background but also your creativity to solve a problem that
they pose to you," Leggett said.
This is the first time
a WSU team has ranked first in the competition, said Connie Remsberg, the
team's faculty mentor and an assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences at
WSU. The university typically places in the top five.
Some of the challenges
educators face in teaching their pharmaceutical students is the expensive price
tag often associated with purchasing pharmaceutical compounding equipment,
Remsberg said. With the additional challenge of keeping up with increasingly
new innovations, De Stefano said some faculty do not have all the resources
they need to expose students to pharmaceutical compounding.
SPCC organizers sought
to provide an outlet where students could get a feel for what the pharmacy
field is about, he said.
"A lot of the
students are not exposed to this level of skill set necessarily in their day to
day life, so this is really, it's very challenging and it does give them a
taste of the real world and what a compounding pharmacist would be faced with
on a day to day basis," De Stefano said.
:::::::::::
The Los Angeles Times
As Todd McNair's
lawsuit against NCAA nears trial, both sides are sparring over another set of
emails and documents
By Nathan Fenno Los Angeles
Times April 4, 2018
Two weeks before former
USC running backs coach Todd McNair's defamation lawsuit against the NCAA is
scheduled for trial, the parties are sparring over more than 1,000 emails and
other documents the organization wants to redact or withhold.
The cache includes
scores of emails to or from members of the NCAA's Committee on Infractions that
sanctioned USC and McNair in the aftermath of the Reggie Bush extra benefits
scandal.
Though the NCAA has
handed over more than 150,000 pages of documents in the lawsuit, the dispute
over the remaining emails, reports, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations
underscores the contentious nature of the proceedings.
"Simply put, there
was no attorney-client relationship between the independent committee members
and counsel for the NCAA," McNair's attorneys wrote last month in a motion
in Los Angeles County Superior Court to compel the NCAA to produce many of the
documents. "It is the NCAA's burden to demonstrate that the documents at
issue are privileged and it has not done so."
The NCAA wants to
redact portions of 351 emails sent between 2010 and 2017 in addition to
withholding an additional 886 documents for reasons including attorney-client
privilege or their relevance to the case.
Among the documents the
NCAA seeks to keep private are three emails from Shep Cooper, the infractions
committee liaison, to committee chairman Paul Dee and members Brian Halloran
and Rodney Uphoff sent Aug. 18, 2010. That was the day after McNair's appeal of
the committee's finding he engaged in "unethical conduct" became
public.
As with the other
documents — they include emails to or from NCAA President Mark Emmert, public
relations staffers and enforcement staff — only the file type, sender,
recipients and date are included in court records. There's no subject line or details
about the contents of the emails.
The NCAA's explanation
for keeping Cooper's three emails private is similar to others in two logs of
documents that span more than 200 pages: attorney-client privilege and
work-product communication "reflecting legal advice regarding ongoing
infractions matter(s)."
Though the exchange
didn't include an attorney representing the men, the NCAA claims the
communication remains privileged. That's an argument the organization leans on
for many of the documents in question.
"Our position is
that those communications reflect or convey the advice of an attorney and are
therefore privileged," Julie Rubenstein, part of the NCAA's legal team,
wrote in an email to McNair attorney Christian Nickerson last month.
Another point of
contention: large batches of emails involving NCAA attorneys sent or received
by infractions committee members and others outside the organization.
"It is our
position … that the documents were either not communicated to an attorney or were
communicated to a committee member outside the NCAA and are therefore not
privileged," Nickerson wrote in an email to Rubenstein.
She disagreed, writing
that the privilege remained even though the infractions committee members
aren't NCAA employees.
Judge orders NCAA
President Mark Emmert's deposition in Todd McNair lawsuit
Emails and other
internal documents have already been a point of contention in the case. The
NCAA fought for years to keep more than 700 pages of deposition excerpts, phone
records and emails between infractions committee members private before a
three-justice panel in California's 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected the effort
in 2015.
Those documents, which
became public later that year, included an email from Cooper to Uphoff that was
critical of McNair.
"As [infractions
committee member] Roscoe [Howard] said at some point during the Sunday morning
deliberations, individuals like McNair shouldn't be coaching at ANY level, and
to think that he is at one of the premier college athletics programs in the
country is outrageous," Cooper wrote on Feb. 22, 2010. "He's a lying,
morally bankrupt criminal, in my view, and a hypocrite of the highest
order."
The NCAA wants more
documents from McNair before trial, too. It filed a motion seeking an
unredacted copy of his settlement agreement with USC. The school didn't renew
McNair's contract after the infractions committee issued its report in 2010.
::::::::::::::::::::::
WSU Cougars
In the wake of Tyler
Hilinski’s death, WSU must do more
The Cougars need a
concrete, innovative plan for helping student-athletes suffering from mental
illness.
By Jeff Nusser Coug
Center Mar 28, 2018
Spring football has
commenced at WSU, which means the death of Tyler Hilinski is back to the front
of the mind as a handful of hopeful quarterbacks vie for the privilege to fill
the spot vacated by their deceased teammate.
The tone of interviews,
as would be expected of the first practices heading toward a new season, is of
hope and optimism. At this point, you won’t find a whole lot of deep reflection
on Tyler’s absence.
In response to a
question about what, if anything, he plans to do differently during this year’s
spring practices in the wake of Tyler’s death, WSU coach Mike Leach said,
simply, “Next question.”
I’m sure Leach has his
reasons for not wanting to talk anymore about Hilinski, his death, and how it
continues to impact his team going forward. After all, Leach never talks about
injuries, and he spends an inordinate amount of effort avoiding discussing much
of anything else of substance as it relates to his team. I get that.
But it’s as if the
process of forgetting about Hilinski has already started.
I can’t say I like it.
In the week or so
immediately following Tyler’s death, the outpouring of grief included an
incredible amount of focus on the role that mental health plays in the lives of
college students in general, and college athletes in particular.
It’s only natural; when
in a crisis, humans have a tendency to want to feel like they are doing
something when, in fact, there usually is practically nothing truly meaningful
to be done.
So people said things
about what a wonderful person Tyler was, how he was the most popular guy on the
team, how there really were no signs that anything like this was possible, and
gosh we just have to do a better job going forward of helping these kids
through their tough times. This is what we do, even though it won’t bring Tyler
back.
(Side note: I know this
well, having had a child diagnosed with cancer before his third birthday, which
he went on to beat over the next three years without a lot of tangible help
from me. But we sure did do a great job raising money for Make-A-Wish,
something that made me feel a little better, even if it had no bearing on my
own child’s health.)
I went to the vigil for
Tyler. I stood with the hundreds of others holding candles, if only to say to
his parents in some very small way, “your son mattered,” because I would start
to break down a little thinking about what it would be like if it was my son
whose skull ended up on the wrong end of a rifle whose trigger he inexplicably
pulled himself. I watched Tyler’s teammates hold each other, and sob. I saw the
young man standing across the way, holding up the suicide prevention awareness
sign.
The prevailing
sentiment that night was: Never again.
It’s now been two
months and nine days since that vigil, and I’m wondering: What, exactly, is WSU
doing to make “never again” as close to reality as possible?
French Ad and Bohler
have been quiet on the topic. Pretty much everything we know about what’s being
done at the moment comes from this Cougfan piece, published three weeks ago.
However, that story is
fairly limited in scope, focusing generally on how the football team is
recovering from the trauma of Hilinski’s death. Unfortunately absent is any
substantive talk of meaningful change to WSU’s general approach to
student-athlete mental wellness going forward — not just for football players,
but for all student-athletes.
As such, I’m calling on
WSU president Kirk Schulz and athletics director Pat Chun to unveil an
overhauled comprehensive mental health and wellness program for athletics before
the next academic year.
Despite the freshness
of the issue at WSU, this is hardly a new frontier in college athletics. Less
than three months prior to Hilinski’s death, The Ringer looked at this very
topic, using the story of Madison Holleran as the backdrop. Holleran was a
runner and soccer player at the University of Pennsylvania who ended her own
life almost exactly four years before Tyler. Many living athletes have opened
up about their own struggles with mental illness. The NCAA has published guidelines
for student-athlete mental health and wellness.
And yet, it seems not
much practical-level progress has been made at universities, and certainly not
at WSU. Because let’s go ahead and be blunt: If the processes WSU had in place
were good enough as they were, I probably wouldn’t be writing this.
I don’t know exactly
what the solutions are — I’m certainly not an expert in the field — but here’s
what I do know: WSU has an opportunity to be a leader in this area, a model for
other institutions. Ideally, that would include teaming up with Hilinski’s
Hope, something that would have the added benefit of keeping Tyler’s memory
alive at the school that he loved, and which loved him back. It also would help
his family continue to heal, since having a a tragedy mean something can have a
profound impact on overcoming grief. (Again, I can speak to this.)
Whatever it is, it
needs to go beyond raising awareness and being available. Those things are
great, and I don’t want to minimize initiatives such as Oregon State’s #DamWorthIt.
That needs to be a component of the plan, and I think it’s fantastic that
students are the ones leading the way on that campus. But, frankly, the
universities need to be more invasive than that — the school actively tracks
athletes’ physical well beings, and the same attitude needs to be taken with
regards to mental well being.
Additionally, WSU
should make available a channel for direct financial support of student-athlete
mental health services. If a fan feels compelled to donate to this cause rather
than the general CAF, they should be able to do that directly. And any donation
given to the school in Tyler’s name — which I know has been happening since
Tyler’s death — should be sent that way, also, rather than ending up in the
general scholarship fund.
I fully recognize the
“remembering Tyler” portion of this is a bit tricky for WSU to some degree,
given the circumstances of Tyler’s death. There’s certainly a stigma around
suicide, and there’s always the question of the degree to which someone who
took their own life should be memorialized.
As an institution, WSU
is in the somewhat uncomfortable position of acknowledging that Tyler’s death
happened on their watch while also continuing to tell parents, “we’ll take care
of your kid.” The school certainly isn’t to blame for Tyler’s death. However,
it’s possible to say both that Tyler died of his own mental illness and that
WSU as an institution can do better.
WSU cannot simply deal
with the immediate fallout of Tyler’s death and then wash its hands of it and
go back to business as normal with some stickers on helmets.
We can — we must — do
better.
President Schulz, Mr.
Chun ... it’s time to step up.
