The University’s Athletics review, released June 27, makes 18 recommendations for the Queen’s athletics and recreation department, including raising student fees for athletics and recreation and cutting up to 14 of the 24 interuniversity teams the school currently funds.
Principal Karen Hitchcock told the Journal she’s inviting on the report before making any final decisions on it, and expects to be in a position to make those decisions by Dec. 31.
Written submissions are due to the principal by Nov. 16.
Hitchcock said an additional consultation period is necessary because there are specific recommendations on which she wants community .
“A lot of consultation has occurred; my concern was, now there are specific recommendations, I want everyone to have the opportunity now to react to those specific recommendations,” she said. “The most minor change as where an office is located in a building can cause angst and concern, so that’s why we want to have this additional consultation.”
Hitchcock said it’s too premature for her to comment on the review’s recommendations.
The review was commissioned by Dean of Student Affairs Jason Laker, whose office is responsible for Athletics and Recreation. It was originally scheduled to be released March 30.
Hitchcock said the report took longer to go through than anticipated.
“We just wanted to be sure that we had it in a form that would be the best for this next step.”
The review was written by Bob Crawford, computing professor and former dean of student affairs, and Janice Deakin, dean of the School of Graduate Studies and Research.
It recommends funding between 10 and 16 interuniversity teams, down from the 24 receiving top-tier funding right now. Interuniversity teams include men’s and women’s squads in basketball, cross-country, fencing, ice hockey, rowing, rugby, soccer, swimming, track and field, and volleyball. The other interuniversity teams at present are men’s football and women’s field hockey, lacrosse and figure skating. Queen’s also funds 23 other programs to a lesser degree at the interuniversity club and competitive club levels, for a total of 47 programs.
In order to suggest which teams should be maintained, the review ranked the 47 interuniversity programs based on 20 criteria.
These included recent team performance, coaching leadership, quality of competition, marketability, fan , revenue generation, cost per athlete, facility requirements and the role each team plays in developing professional or national team athletes. Based on these criteria, men’s volleyball was ranked first and women’s soccer was ranked second.
Crawford said the criteria came out of looking at what other schools had done.
“You have to have ones that are measurable,” he said. “We came up with what we thought would be a valuable set of criteria for Queen’s, but it was starting with a larger set than that, working down to that particular set, seeing what some other institutions had done and so on.”
The rankings were out of 34 and programs where the men’s and women’s teams train together, have the same coaching staff and compete at the same events were combined for ranking purposes. Thus, programs such as rowing, track and field, cross country and fencing had their men’s and women’s teams combined.
Programs in danger of being cut based on their rank include women’s field hockey (24th), fencing (23rd), women’s lacrosse (22nd), swimming (18th), women’s rugby (16th), figure skating and men’s ice hockey (tied for 14th) and women’s ice hockey (11th).
One of the 18 recommendations would increase the annual fee students pay to athletics and recreation, currently set at $126.63. According to the review, students at nine other Ontario universities pay more than this per year. The review recommends raising the fee to put Queen’s among the top five.
Crawford said ultimately a fee increase would be up to students.
“Nobody’s going to change the fee because we recommend it. The only way that students can be charged such fees is if they agree to pay them, so it would have to be a referendum question,” he said. “If students were to say, ‘We’re not paying any more,’ then I think we do have a real issue on the deficit, and there can’t really be deficits.”
According to Crawford and Deakin’s research, funding and focusing on the success of 10 interuniversity teams with their current athletics budget would lead to Athletics and Recreation running an annual deficit of $40,000. If 11 teams were funded at this level, this jumps to $270,000, whereas funding 16 teams would lead to a projected annual deficit of $1.3 million.
The extra funding each of the teams would receive would likely go towards hiring full-time coaches and improving facilities, as well as for athletic scholarships, which were only recently allowed by the OUA. The research also assumes each team receives significant additional funding above their current intake from sources outside the departmental budget, such as booster clubs, ticket sales, and sport-specific camps.
The recommendations allow for sports that don’t make the list of interuniversity teams to be potentially retained as clubs, but with significantly less funding than they currently receive. Crawford and Deakin recommended further studies be done on the club model before club funding guidelines are set.
Crawford said the review’s conclusions aren’t set in stone, and he hopes it will be reviewed every few years.
“The group that would be doing that would look first at the criteria, and say, ‘Maybe we should change our criteria, maybe we should change some weighting.’ But a tremendous amount of work went into transferring, ‘Here’s what we’ve what we’ve heard people saying was important at Queen’s,’ into a model,” he said. “Having a model in place was probably the most important decision we made throughout the report, and therefore maybe the most difficult. “
With files from Anna Mehler Paperny
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