Why was Winthrop tennis cut? Can fundraising bring the teams back? Here’s a closer look
When he first heard the news over the phone, Winthrop tennis coach Cid Carvalho didn’t believe it was over.
He’d simply seen too much. Winthrop tennis, Carvalho’s life’s work, had proven resilient through trying times before.
By the time Carvalho retired in 2019, the former Winthrop player and 34-year head coach had seen a small program — one that once could only pay him a graduate assistant’s annual salary of $3,000 and could only offer one scholarship per team per year — turn into a Big South Conference powerhouse. He’d seen the program sustain itself through tragedy, carrying on after the heartbreaking bus crash in 1993 that shook Rock Hill and reverberated throughout the country.
So the day before Winthrop discontinued the men’s and women’s tennis programs in light of financial limitations caused by COVID-19 and other budgeting issues, when he heard the news from Winthrop athletic director Dr. Ken Halpin via phone call — Carvalho didn’t know what to think.
“I offered to help,” Carvalho told The Herald last month. “I said, ‘Is there a way to save this program?’”
In the days since the program’s elimination, Winthrop tennis alumni and athletic supporters are still asking questions about the Winthrop tennis cut: Why did Winthrop have to eliminate an athletic program in the first place? Assuming it had to discontinue a sport, why did it single-out its tennis programs — a pair of teams that brought more Big South Conference championships (28 since 1994) and arguably more international notoriety than any of its peer programs?
And, of course, can the tennis programs be reinstated?
The answers stem from financial uncertainties the school will have to face in the immediate future.
“This was an emotionally difficult decision to reach,” Winthrop interim president Dr. George Hynd told The Herald in a phone interview last week. “But at the bottom line, it was a business decision.”
Winthrop University is preparing for a ‘fiscally tight’ year
Winthrop receives a majority of its athletic revenue from the university. Its athletics program is dependent on the revenue from its campus — like from students living in dorms and eating in its dining facilities — as well as the larger state economy, which funds the public university with taxes.
Before coronavirus, in 2019, the school’s athletic department ran a loss of about $967,000, according to an NCAA financial summary report obtained by The Herald via a Freedom of Information Act request — and that is including athletic department revenue via direct institutional support.
In a statement, Hynd wrote that the Winthrop tennis program cut was done because the athletic department was tasked with cutting $600,000 from its annual operating expenses.
The decision to cut Winthrop’s tennis programs doesn’t appear to be based on any losses the athletic department, specifically, has suffered due to coronavirus — which have been substantial, particularly after the men’s basketball NCAA Tournament was canceled, which cost the Big South and Winthrop nearly one-third of its distribution from the end-of-year tournament.
Rather, the cut is one of a constellation of reductions the university is making as it prepares for a “fiscally tight” year in 2021.
There are several reasons for why Winthrop is making cuts to its baseline budget. And the coronavirus pandemic looms large in each of them.
For one, Winthrop’s enrollments are trending “between 4%-7% less than they have in past years,” Hynd told The Herald. Fewer students on campus means fewer students living in Winthrop’s dorms, eating in its dining halls and paying tuition.
For another, it’s unclear how much funding Winthrop, like other South Carolina public universities, will receive from the S.C. Legislature, Hynd said. Winthrop is operating on a continuing resolution with the state, which means that it’s operating under the assumption that Winthrop will get the same amount of money from the state that it did last year, which constituted approximately 9% of Winthrop’s budget. But the idea that it’ll get the same amount of money as it did last year is unlikely, Hynd said — considering the fact that the state economy, like the campus economy, has been largely stifled by the coronavirus.
Also, Winthrop hasn’t decided how it will spend its $2.6 million that came from the federal government via the CARES Act, and it’s uncertain how much money in reimbursements Winthrop will receive from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Hynd said.
“We have a lot of unknowns at the beginning of our budget,” Hynd said. “We asked all of our units to help us reach a 10% reduction in our expenditures over the year because of these unknowns.
“Again, when we asked athletics to basically return about $600,000 from their budget, to help us cut our budget overall at the university, they did a very careful study of all the expenses they had.”
Why Winthrop tennis?
Knowing it had to make such a sizable cut, Winthrop’s athletic department ultimately recommended cutting tennis for a few reasons.
The primary reason? Tennis, when you combine the expenses of the women’s and men’s programs together, is Winthrop’s most expensive sport per athlete, only behind basketball, said Halpin, Winthrop’s AD.
The sum of the operating expenses between the men’s and women’s tennis programs last year was $813,140, per Winthrop’s 2019 NCAA financial summary report. The men’s tennis team’s operating expenses were just over $294,000, and the women’s tennis team’s total operating expenses were just under $519,000.
For both teams, over 50% of these expenses came from athletic scholarships.
Neither program brought in revenue from ticket sales.
“We had to balance the costs of supporting 17 tennis players and their coaches against the need to cut $600,000 each year from our athletics budget,” Hynd wrote in a statement.
The 2019 financial records also show that every other sport in Winthrop’s athletic department, besides softball, cost more than $600,000. Volleyball’s total operating expenses were over $753,000. The men’s and women’s soccer program’s operating costs, as well as the baseball program’s operating costs, topped $1 million each.
And the basketball programs, which Winthrop must have in order to maintain its Division I membership status with the NCAA, cost over $3.4 million.
Many Winthrop tennis alumni and coaches find it hard to believe that the programs cost so much money. Upon hearing the news right before the programs were discontinued, Chase Altieri, who played for Winthrop and graduated in 2014, told The Herald that he recalled being given hand-me-down jerseys, and he said he had to play in his tennis shoes until they had holes in them.
Lauren Proctor, a four-time Big South Player of the Year and one of the greatest players in Winthrop women’s tennis history, told The Herald that she understands tennis as a college sport costs a lot of money to put on.
“The reason why it costs so much is because of how great the program is,” Proctor said. “You don’t get these kinds of results and these kinds of accomplishments without paying to help support that.
“I obviously understand it costs a lot of money for them. But like I said, I didn’t see how you could put a price on the kind of results that we gave to the university, and the recognition we gave to the university.”
Winthrop tennis courts in ‘dire need of substantial repairs’
In its initial announcement of the tennis programs’ discontinuation, the university claimed that in addition to the fact it had a “structural issue with athletics budgeting,” the university’s tennis facilities are in “dire need of substantial repairs, causing both programs to train and compete at off-campus locations.”
Winthrop Memorial Tennis Courts — named after those affected by the aforementioned bus crash in 1993, where a player was killed and two people connected with the team were critically injured — have a structural issue with the land and subsoil underneath the courts, said Carvalho, the former coach. Cracks in the courts form, and water and weeds seep through those cracks, making the court dangerous to play on.
Less than five years ago, both teams stopped playing matches there and instead started playing at the Rock Hill Tennis Center, Carvalho said. (Winthrop did not pay money to rent the Rock Hill Tennis Center from the city, The Herald confirmed with Winthrop’s athletics department.)
“It got to the point where you really couldn’t play the matches there anymore,” Carvalho said. “You had to redo it. The problem is the asphalt. The asphalt, through the years, has crumbled, and it needs to be redone.”
Hynd told The Herald a full renovation of the tennis facility, so that it would be usable in perpetuity, would cost anywhere from “$750,000 to $1 million or more.”
Many Winthrop alumni have argued that the university did not give them a chance to raise funds and renovate the courts.
“If we were given a chance to do a fundraiser, I can guarantee you that within a couple days, three days, we would be able to raise enough money to solve that issue,” said Clayton Almeida, who played for Winthrop from 2002-06 and was the first four-time Big South Conference men’s tennis Player of the Year.
Almeida, like others, also said that even if a substantial portion but not all of the funds were raised, the university would be able to renovate most of the 12-court facility.
“We believe there is a chance to save the program, given that their main excuse is the condition of the courts,” Almeida said. “We believe there’s a chance to save the program by raising funds to at least re-patch six courts … and to completely fix the other six courts.”
The university also made the decision to cut the tennis program because it had to “pay attention to the fact” that the cuts it was making were equal for men’s and women’s sports, Hynd said. Winthrop now sponsors 16 NCAA sports, nine for women and seven for men — two more than the NCAA minimum number of sponsored sports, and about the same amount of sponsored sports as its Big South Conference counterparts.
Will tennis come back?
When asked about the possibility of reinstating the tennis programs, Hynd said that he wasn’t going to make any promises, but that once a vaccine for the virus comes available, and once “we get past the budget situation that is on our horizon,” reinstating the program is possible.
“It is not inconceivable that the next president would come along, donors would start stepping up to help reconstruct the tennis facility, and we would restart a tennis program,” Hynd said. “But that’s downstream.”
Carolina Blouin, a Winthrop tennis alumna who was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 2006, told The Herald that if the program was going to be reinstated, the university would “need to do it quickly.”
“It takes years to build a program,” Blouin said. “It’s an inertia thing. The best programs attract the best players. So if you stop a program for more than a year, for you to start over, you’ll have to start over from the bottom.”
Reinstating an athletic program shortly after it was cut is not unprecedented. According to Sports Illustrated, more than 30 programs at the Division I level have been cut over the past 10 weeks — and some schools, including the University of Alabama-Huntsville, dropped its men’s hockey team but then reinstated it after the program raised over $500,000.
Big South Conference Commissioner Kyle Kallander told The Herald that he understands the difficult financial situation his institutions, as well as other universities around the country, face due to the coronavirus pandemic.
He also said that Big South member schools had expressed their worries about the financial effects of the COVID-19 shutdown to him well before Winthrop’s cut of tennis.
“I’ve heard from coaches that there’s concern about the stability and the financial situation that we’re all in right now,” Kallander said. “I don’t know that Winthrop’s move heightened it. I think as we went into this environment — when we started talking about ways to save money and cut costs — I think people were on high-alert regardless.”
‘Won’t be enough’
Frustrated Winthrop alumni and tennis supporters have started their own campaign called “Save Winthrop Tennis,” creating a Facebook page and a GoFundMe for the cause. The group’s website, headed by Almeida, indicates that the campaign began about two weeks ago, and that it has raised over $11,000 from 91 donors as of Sunday afternoon, about 6% toward its goal of raising $200,000 by July 15.
The “Save Winthrop Tennis” Task Force claimed that in addition to the GoFundMe campaign, additional monies pledged — which are conditioned upon the reinstatement of the tennis teams — exceed $550,000 via multiple donors, many of whom want their donations to be tax deductible.
The GoFundMe page calls the Winthrop tennis cut an “outrage” and articulates several of the grievances alumni have shared with The Herald: “Why was there no option given to the program to save itself? Why did the discussion (at the Board of Trustees meeting Jun. 19) happen behind closed doors in Executive Session?”
The site also claims that Winthrop’s tennis programs can be brought back.
“We have put together a detailed, three-year fiscally responsible budget and plan that includes tennis court renovations, and we need your help to achieve this goal ...” the website reads.
“The reality is that $200,000 won’t be enough, but we have to start somewhere.”
CLARIFICATION: A previous version of the article did not include the claim by the Save Winthrop Tennis Task Force that it has collected more money than shown on its GoFundMe website. The information was added once it was disclosed to The Herald.
This story was originally published July 6, 2020 at 6:30 AM.
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