This is an annual topic for the offseason as basketball ends and we wait for football season to begin.
In terms of adding new sports, I'd say that there would be a few priorities:
1. Title IX Balance - with 85 football scholarships, it's hard to get to 50/50 on men's and women's scholarships. CU must add at least as many women's scholarships as men's scholarships and it's preferable to add more women's scholarships with any varsity additions. This makes a sport like Wrestling tough to do, with its 9.9 scholarships and no women's equivalent.
2. Facilities - construction costs and the future maintenance costs for facilities makes some sports more viable than others within the budget. Baseball & Softball, for example, would require new stadiums and they would be for use by only 1 sport. Same with Ice Hockey (M & W). While they would be popular with fans, they are tough to do.
3. Fan Interest / Competitiveness / Season - it doesn't make a lot of sense to add a sport simply for the sake of adding one. So any considerations would have to be viewed through the lens of whether the sport is something that would attract fans and community interest, whether CU would have the potential to compete for a championship, and whether the sport fills a void in terms of maximizing facility usage for fall/winter/spring. CU is currently light on spring sports, for example.
As a start, Rick George addressed the facility side at the February 16th Board of Regents Meeting. LINK Specifically, he mentioned some facilities initiatives beyond further improvements to Folsom and Coors:
In addition to raising funds to pay for the completed upgrades, CU has a long list of projects it would like to tackle in the future. On the list is a lacrosse complex, upgrades to the lacrosse and volleyball locker rooms and an indoor tennis facility.
That points to a couple things, I believe:
Indoor Tennis Facility: makes sense to bring back Men's Tennis if that happens
Lacrosse Facility: suggests that Men's Lacrosse is a consideration. Also, it would seem that this would be most utilized as a "Field Sports Facility" that would lead to Men's Soccer and Women's Rugby as varsity additions.
Based on that and an educated guess on the sports that would most likely be coming over the course of the plan, here's the scholarship breakdown:
Men's Tennis: 4.5 (spring)
Men's Lacrosse: 12.6 (spring)
Men's Soccer: 9.9 (fall)
Women's Rugby: 12.0 (fall) - of note is USA Rugby is based in Boulder County and is the key player in the sport becoming NCAA sanctioned as a new "emerging sport"
The obvious problem here is that this adds 27 scholarships for men's varsity while only adding 12 for women's varsity. Where might another 15 come from on the women's side?
Rowing (20 scholarships) - We already have 7 Pac-12 programs with Women's Rowing, so scheduling is less challenging. There's often an extremely low recruiting budget with this, too, as it's rarely a high school sport and what many colleges have to do is teach athletes to row once they're on campus. CU could likely fill out a Rowing team by offering scholarships solely to in-state honor roll students who were all-state in another sport and then develop them as rowers once they got to CU. In terms of facilities, this could be done at the Boulder Res. Drawback: not a lot of fan interest and it's questionable whether CU could compete for championships against Pac-12 coastal schools that are producing Olympians.
Adding Rowing would be the easy one since it covers the balance between Men's and Women's sports (and then some). But there's another way to cover that 15 scholarship shortfall that I think I like better:
Triathlon (6.5 beginning 2017-18) - This one's an NCAA "emerging sport" that not a lot of schools have picked up yet. ASU added it, though. Definitely a local interest sport in which CU would likely emerge as an annual national championship contender.
Beach Volleyball (6 scholarships) - CU, OSU and WSU are the only Pac-12 schools not participating. Seems like a natural in terms of a sport that would be popular in the spring, easy to schedule with the conference having heavy participation, and CU would likely be as competitive as it is on the court in volleyball.
Bowling (5 scholarships) - No one in the Pac-12 sponsors this sport, there's little fan interest, and I have no idea how CU would go about recruiting. So what? With CU approving a $280k in renovations and improvements to the on-campus bowling alley at the University Memorial Center that will finish this summer, it looks like the facility is already in place. And most importantly - Bowling is the pinnacle of sports achievement at the University of Nebraska. 5 national championships since it became an NCAA sport in 2003 and 10 before that, all of these within the 19 years the Nubs have had the sport. CU needs to add Bowling in order to tear down this Husker dynasty.
That's my plan, based on what I think is in RG's mind and what needs to be added to fill it out for scholarship balance.
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NCAA scholarships by sport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Division_I
I actually think that this or something very similar is likely to happen at CU. First move, if I had to guess, would be Rugby and Men's Soccer being added.
In terms of adding new sports, I'd say that there would be a few priorities:
1. Title IX Balance - with 85 football scholarships, it's hard to get to 50/50 on men's and women's scholarships. CU must add at least as many women's scholarships as men's scholarships and it's preferable to add more women's scholarships with any varsity additions. This makes a sport like Wrestling tough to do, with its 9.9 scholarships and no women's equivalent.
2. Facilities - construction costs and the future maintenance costs for facilities makes some sports more viable than others within the budget. Baseball & Softball, for example, would require new stadiums and they would be for use by only 1 sport. Same with Ice Hockey (M & W). While they would be popular with fans, they are tough to do.
3. Fan Interest / Competitiveness / Season - it doesn't make a lot of sense to add a sport simply for the sake of adding one. So any considerations would have to be viewed through the lens of whether the sport is something that would attract fans and community interest, whether CU would have the potential to compete for a championship, and whether the sport fills a void in terms of maximizing facility usage for fall/winter/spring. CU is currently light on spring sports, for example.
As a start, Rick George addressed the facility side at the February 16th Board of Regents Meeting. LINK Specifically, he mentioned some facilities initiatives beyond further improvements to Folsom and Coors:
In addition to raising funds to pay for the completed upgrades, CU has a long list of projects it would like to tackle in the future. On the list is a lacrosse complex, upgrades to the lacrosse and volleyball locker rooms and an indoor tennis facility.
That points to a couple things, I believe:
Indoor Tennis Facility: makes sense to bring back Men's Tennis if that happens
Lacrosse Facility: suggests that Men's Lacrosse is a consideration. Also, it would seem that this would be most utilized as a "Field Sports Facility" that would lead to Men's Soccer and Women's Rugby as varsity additions.
Based on that and an educated guess on the sports that would most likely be coming over the course of the plan, here's the scholarship breakdown:
Men's Tennis: 4.5 (spring)
Men's Lacrosse: 12.6 (spring)
Men's Soccer: 9.9 (fall)
Women's Rugby: 12.0 (fall) - of note is USA Rugby is based in Boulder County and is the key player in the sport becoming NCAA sanctioned as a new "emerging sport"
The obvious problem here is that this adds 27 scholarships for men's varsity while only adding 12 for women's varsity. Where might another 15 come from on the women's side?
Rowing (20 scholarships) - We already have 7 Pac-12 programs with Women's Rowing, so scheduling is less challenging. There's often an extremely low recruiting budget with this, too, as it's rarely a high school sport and what many colleges have to do is teach athletes to row once they're on campus. CU could likely fill out a Rowing team by offering scholarships solely to in-state honor roll students who were all-state in another sport and then develop them as rowers once they got to CU. In terms of facilities, this could be done at the Boulder Res. Drawback: not a lot of fan interest and it's questionable whether CU could compete for championships against Pac-12 coastal schools that are producing Olympians.
Adding Rowing would be the easy one since it covers the balance between Men's and Women's sports (and then some). But there's another way to cover that 15 scholarship shortfall that I think I like better:
Triathlon (6.5 beginning 2017-18) - This one's an NCAA "emerging sport" that not a lot of schools have picked up yet. ASU added it, though. Definitely a local interest sport in which CU would likely emerge as an annual national championship contender.
Beach Volleyball (6 scholarships) - CU, OSU and WSU are the only Pac-12 schools not participating. Seems like a natural in terms of a sport that would be popular in the spring, easy to schedule with the conference having heavy participation, and CU would likely be as competitive as it is on the court in volleyball.
Bowling (5 scholarships) - No one in the Pac-12 sponsors this sport, there's little fan interest, and I have no idea how CU would go about recruiting. So what? With CU approving a $280k in renovations and improvements to the on-campus bowling alley at the University Memorial Center that will finish this summer, it looks like the facility is already in place. And most importantly - Bowling is the pinnacle of sports achievement at the University of Nebraska. 5 national championships since it became an NCAA sport in 2003 and 10 before that, all of these within the 19 years the Nubs have had the sport. CU needs to add Bowling in order to tear down this Husker dynasty.
That's my plan, based on what I think is in RG's mind and what needs to be added to fill it out for scholarship balance.
Sport | Scholarships |
Lacrosse (M) | 12.6 |
Soccer (M) | 9.9 |
Tennis (M) | 4.5 |
TOTAL MEN | 27.0 |
Beach Volleyball (W) | 6.0 |
Bowling (W) | 5.0 |
Rugby (W) | 12.0 |
Triathlon (W) | 6.5 |
TOTAL WOMEN | 28.5 |
NCAA scholarships by sport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Division_I
I actually think that this or something very similar is likely to happen at CU. First move, if I had to guess, would be Rugby and Men's Soccer being added.
