Pima Community College Chancellor Lee Lambert laid out the future for the Tucson campus’s scaled-back athletic program from a lectern tucked inside a glass-enclosed lecture hall.
Lambert, who less than a day prior had formally announced the elimination of the school’s football team, along with one of the two tennis and golf programs, said such a decision was a matter of simple economics.
“I think it’s very important that we not lose sight that the college is facing tremendous amount of
challenges and pressures that are helping us to make some very difficult decisions,” Lambert told the crowd of journalists. “Our enrollments had been declining for a period of time. This year, fortunately, for the first time, our enrollments were up. But because of the enrollment challenges, it impacts other aspects of our operation and athletics is not immune to that.”
Lambert and Athletic Director Edgar Soto fielded questions about the college’s decision to cut some $600,000 from its $2.6 million athletics budget.
Lambert said their decision to cut the school’s 100-man football squad, which started in 2000, came down to its outsized costs ($406,000 in 2017) and the lack of local competition.
The latter part of that equation became a reality earlier this year when the Maricopa County Community College District announced the elimination of football in 2019 at Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa and Glendale community colleges.
That move left Pima, Arizona Western and Eastern Arizona College as the lone schools with football teams—rendering it economically inefficient.
Lambert said the football program was created as a self-supporting program, meaning it would not draw funds from athletic fees or the school’s general fund.
But the economics didn’t work out, forcing the college to implement a student processing fee, with 80 percent of that fee going towards the programs. A second fee was implemented, stipulating 50 percent of its proceeds to the programs. The two fees generated roughly $1.9 million for the school.
The school received an additional $732,000 via the general fund for athletics department positions and general funds transfers, according to PCC Executive Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration David Bea.
Lambert said the college officials believed football and other programs would soon draw enough fan interest to support themselves.
“Unfortunately, that external support never really materialized at the college to sufficient levels to support a football or other athletic programs in any real meaningful way,” he said.
A big issue for the programs was the college’s use of enrollment numbers, which have decreased year-over-year of-late, as a benchmark for fees.
“When you benchmark your fees against enrollment, then as enrollment goes, so goes your fees,” Lambert said. “Enrollments have been declining, therefore the revenues generated by the fees have done so too, which unfortunately creates this reality that we are now having to face.”
Soto said that he’s received an influx of messages from the community since the decision to cut sports was announced, but that most of those messages have been constructive.
Lambert said that while the decision is sure to sting in the immediate future, football players can take solace in having their scholarships honored throughout their time at PCC.
“Most of those kids, even if they were able to come to Pima, will never reach that pinnacle of success being able to play in the NFL,” he said. “But the main point is really giving them
access to higher education…. I saw higher education as a critical option for me and I know that’s true of lots and lots of young boys, young men in our community here across the country.”
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2018.
I have not seen definitive facts about the actual enrollments in football, or the graduation rates over time of football players to truly evaluate effectively how successful the program was in its avowed mission of bringing opportunity to local high school players to advance their post-secondary education. I have heard a lot of emotion and vague numbers promising thunder and lightning if the college carries out this decision. But no one can deny that there will be nowhere to play in AZ or in the neighboring states. It’s tough, but it’s necessary.
This is a very disappointing article. Sport for some people is the only thing that can keep them going. Sport gives you energy. Sport gives people stress relief and makes people more active at what they do. Sport gives people the time to relief an overload of writing assignments. If the leaners cannot ease the work overload with the sports, they can use the help of professional essay writers review on the web online whenever they want to. thanks for an informative article.