Citadel athletic director Mike Capaccio said the school is planning to play football in 2020 until told otherwise. Lauren Petracca/Staff
While some schools have cut varsity sports teams or announced furloughs to deal with budget crunches caused by the coronavirus pandemic, The Citadel athletic director Mike Capaccio is hoping to avoid such drastic measures. Capaccio said last week that he hopes an across-the-board cut of 10 percent in the athletic department’s budgets will be enough to prevent having to take the more extreme steps that other NCAA Division I schools have had to take.
“Our money has been cut across the board right now, and we do have a financial hole to plug,” Capaccio told Citadel supporters in a Zoom call last week. “But I feel very good that we are going to be able to do that this year.
“But I’m a little worried about next year, so some of the steps we are taking are cutting budgets across the board, traveling closer to home, possibly having fewer competitions in some sports … We are looking at a straight 10 percent cut across the board that will allow us not to have to furlough anybody or reduce coaches’ salaries or things like that.”
The cancellation of the lucrative NCAA men’s basketball tournament this year impacted all Division I schools.
On March 26, the NCAA it would cut its annual distribution to Division I conferences to $225 million. That’s just 37.5 percent of its typical $600 million that was set to be distributed to those institutions at the end of the 2019-20 academic year.
That has led to hardships of varying degrees. ACC member Louisville cut 40 positions in its athletic department and is furloughing an additional 45 people. Old Dominion University dropped its wrestling program. At Florida International, the athletic director has deferred his salary for one year, while the department will furlough 22 employees and cut the men’s track and field team. Division II Florida Tech announced Monday that it will drop its football program.
Also Monday, West Virginia announced that its athletic director and some coaches would take a 10 percent pay cut, while 65 athletic department employees will be furloughed for 60 days starting May 24.
Capaccio doesn’t foresee such measures at The Citadel, though there’s very little fat in the military school’s athletic department budget, which had expenses of $17.6 million in 2018, according to the Knight Commission’s financial database. A 10 percent cut in expenses would amount to about $1.7 million, according to those figures.
“When you look at other schools in (the Southern Conference), there are a lot of schools that are struggling,” he said. ”… We are in decent financial shape. I’m not going to say good, because it’s definitely not good, but it’s a situation we can address and get a handle on this year. Next year is the unknown, obviously.”
Capaccio noted that the department has been able to get some major projects done, including a $250,000 renovation of the weight room, a new $1.5 million synthetic turf football field for Johnson Hagood Stadium, and new seating in McAlister Field House.
Two big projects on the drawing board are the east side stands and a new scoreboard at Johnson Hagood. Capaccio said fund-raising for the east side of the stadium will begin anew in the coming weeks.
“We will gear up again in the next few weeks,” he said. “But we have to have the money in hand. Right now, we are not going to incur more debt in anyway.”