NCAA leaders meet about economic turbulence

OXON HILL, Md. – It’s a long way from Orem, Utah to Newark, N.J. Just ask the Wolverines of Utah Valley University.

Utah Valley is a member of the Great West Conference, one of those geography-gone-nuts NCAA Division I leagues with two California schools at one end and the New Jersey Institute of Technology at the other. Every road conference game for Utah Valley athletics director Mike Jacobsen’s teams involves a long plane flight, and this year his travel costs are up 10 to 12 percent due to the twists and turns of the slumping economy.

He realizes it would make more sense to be in a league with nearby schools – certainly with at least one or two from Utah – but most Division I conferences abandoned the tight-knit concept long ago.

“It’s a huge burden,” Jacobsen said. “It’s what we have to do right now to be in a conference. We’ve got the Big West, the Big Sky. We’ve got several that are regional conferences. It’s just that at this point we’ve not been able to get into one of those conferences.”

Jacobsen was among scores of attendees Wednesday at a forum at the NCAA Convention on how to reduce travel budgets.

Among the tips: have the players get together the night before a road trip and combine their belongings to help reduce those new baggage fees imposed by the airlines. Grand Valley State associate athletics director Lisa Sweany said her Division II school frequently asks the athletes to pay for flights themselves.

“It’s the strangest, most confused state I’ve ever seen in travel in my career,” said Texas travel manager Kevin Maguire.

Juanita Sheely, who oversees travel for the NCAA, said the organization’s transportation costs increased 25 percent – about $8 million – in the 2007-08 school year and were headed for a $10 million increase this year.

Shorter road trips would be an obvious solution, but the expansion of conferences to increase television revenue has schools locked into laborious excursions. Louisiana Tech is in the same conference as Hawaii (Western Athletic), and the Atlantic Coast Conference – in which nearly every trip used to be a reasonable bus ride – now spans the seaboard from Boston College to Miami.

Penn State’s membership in the Big Ten forces its teams to spend a lot of time in the Midwest, but assistant athletics director Jan Bortner said the meatier competition is worth it – even though the school’s travel budget is expected to increase by 15 percent this year.

“It’s raised the bar for our teams,” Bortner said. “Yeah, we need to do more travel, but we’re traveling to play great teams.”

Bortner said the school is opting for charter buses instead of planes for some trips, and that more non-conference games are being scheduled against schools closer to home.
Terry Holland has more radical solutions. The East Carolina athletics director feels that, in the current environment, sports departments have “an over-arching moral and patriotic obligation to reduce the consumption of oil and other limited resources.

“If intercollegiate athletics sends a message of ‘business as usual’ while American citizens are losing their jobs, homes and even more precious possessions, then we will deserve any dire consequences that are visited upon us,” Holland, who is not attending the convention, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.