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CMU has goal to fully fund athletic scholarships

CMU has goal to fully fund athletic scholarships

Bryan Rooks has a goal: To tell every head coach at Colorado Mesa University they can stop pinching pennies and checking the budget line when it comes to awarding athletic scholarships.

“It would be nice to tell Taylor Wagner that ‘You get 10 full-ride scholarships, that’s what the NCAA allows women’s basketball. You don’t have to worry about the dollar figure, but to go give a 0.5 scholarship, a 0.75 scholarship, a 0.3 scholarship, and when you give your 10 out, you’re done and you don’t have to worry about the dollar figure associated with it,’ ” said Rooks, CMU’s former athletic director who moved to the CMU Foundation office on Aug. 1 as the senior director of athletic giving.

None of the 26 NCAA sports at Colorado Mesa are fully funded in athletic scholarships. By the time CMU turns 100, in 2025, Rooks wants to be able to deliver that message. It’s one that will be welcome by coaches and athletes.

“Money talks in everything you do,” first-year football coach Miles Kochevar said of what being fully funded would mean to his program. “Just being able to take care of your student-athletes, being able to relieve some of the stress of them having to get jobs during the season, in the offseason.”

Football wouldn’t be the only team to benefit from having a full complement of scholarships.

Miles Kochevar

Colorado Mesa coach Miles Kochevar is very familiar with the opposing team in today’s homecoming game — he was the defensive coordinator for CSU-Pueblo last season. Kochevar knows that beating the ThunderWolves would be a springboard for the Mavericks.

“We could be a perennial national championship contender,” swimming and diving coach Mickey Wender said.

Wender’s swim teams are funded at about 66% and dominate in the RMAC. Both finished in the top 10 in the nation last season.

When that day comes that Bryan is able to come into our office and say, ‘Travis, in this coming year, you’re going to have that full equivalency,’ I might cry a little bit,” said women’s wrestling coach Travis Mercado, whose fledgling program won’t become an NCAA championship sport until the 2023-24 school year. Women’s wrestling is at the low end of the scale in scholarship funding. Only five years in existence, though, CMU is already one of the top five teams in the nation.

To get to the point where every team can award the NCAA limit of scholarships, it means raising an additional $2 million per year. That would augment the budget for scholarships now and build an endowment. Scholarships could be awarded from the interest, so the yearly task of raising money won’t be as daunting.

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The Colorado Mesa University band plays during the Maverick's game on Sept. 17.

$2 MILLION A YEAR GOAL

The immediate goal is $2 million a year, said Robin Brown, the university’s vice president of development and the CEO of the CMU Foundation. The long-term goal is building an athletic endowment fund of $40 million.

To get the ball rolling, CMU has set aside money to match new donations to the drive.

“So long as it’s going toward scholarships, endowments, then we’ve got matching dollars available, so that intrigues a lot of donors,” Rooks said. “You can give 100% return on Day 1, that intrigues a lot of people. There’s been no one who’s shied away through the conversations we’ve had, and people are waiting for me to get information in front of them so we can start the process.”

“When we tell people we can match dollar for dollar as long as it’s for an athletic scholarship and will be endowed, they up the amount they want to give to us,” Brown added. “Ultimately, we want it to all be endowed so we don’t have to fund-raise every year.”

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Bryan Rooks, formerly the athletic director at Colorado Mesa, is now the senior director of athletic giving, working with the CMU Foundation to raise enough money over the next three years to fully fund athletic scholarships.

They’re in the process of building a website page to explain the project, with ways to contribute, and will have literature to send to potential donors, Rooks said. Donations can be earmarked for a specific program or for the general endowment.

“It’s not build a plan for football, build a plan for basketball, it’s actually listening to individual donors, and what their wishes and wants are,” Rooks said. “Hopefully, we can get one of them done and then use a waterfall of institutional dollars that are already on the table, plus fundraised dollars to help meet the needs and slowly, you know, attack a $40 million endowment so we can have that 4 million a year.

The university has a bit more than $2.7 million earmarked for tuition scholarships in this year’s athletic department budget, according to documents provided by CMU through a Colorado Open Records Act request. The 22 budgeted programs (cross country and indoor/outdoor track and field have combined budgets for the men’s and women’s programs) also have various levels of waivers for meal plans, dorm rooms and books, bringing the university’s allocation to $3,398.073.

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Colorado Mesa University fans at Stocker Stadium during the Mavericks game on Sept. 7.

Money generated from individual program endowments and other fundraising totals $332,659, so $3,730,735 of the total athletic department budget of $11,750,177 goes to scholarships.

“Most of the dollars that have been raised have been used as pass-through, we need them today,” Rooks said. “I’ve listened for 20 years coaches saying, man, I wish somebody would have started something. … Doing something today is going to help solve problems 20, 30 years down the road. Instead of having somebody 10 years from now say, I wish Bryan Rooks would have … That’s the initiative, get these into an endowed account where we can not have to fundraise those same dollars year after year after year. The initiative is to fully fund the athletic scholarship side with endowed dollars. It’s a huge number.”

Baseball coach Chris Hanks started a baseball endowment years ago. In 2000, he gathered people affiliated with baseball in the community to devise a campaign. At that time, Hanks said, he had the budget for 3.4 scholarships. The campaign sends letters to baseball alumni every three to five years asking for donations.

It’s taken more than 20 years, but with the money provided by the university, the three memorial endowments (Bus Bergman, Tony Lopez and Ryan Teixeira 17 Strong) and other fundraising, baseball is fully funded in scholarships. Hanks said he keeps “money on the table” to make sure he stays on budget and under the NCAA limit of nine equivalencies allowed.

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Colorado Mesa is the winningest baseball program in Division II the past five years, with a .792 winning percentage. The Mavericks have won 10 consecutive RMAC championships and played in the Division II World Series four times in Chris Hanks’ tenure, with two runner-up finishes.

The “Division II model” is one of partial scholarships, evidenced by the limits placed by the NCAA, with “full rides” few and far between. A full equivalency encompasses tuition, fees, room, board and books.

CMU now has a shortfall of about $1.2 million per year to fully fund scholarships, based on a full award of $25,000.

Putting a finite number on scholarship costs a is impossible because it fluctuates depending on residency, choice of housing, and how many credit hours are taken each semester, as well as the bill for books. A minimum of 12 credit hours per semester must be taken — and passed — to be eligible for competition. Many students will take 12 hours during their primary semester of competition and anywhere from 15-20 during the “off-season” semester, which changes how much tuition is charged, and taken out of the budget, the trickiest part of budgeting.

The Western Undergrad Exchange and Mountains and Plains programs drop tuition fees closer to in-state levels for all students in the western U.S. and the Midwest.

According to CMU figures on its website, Colorado residents pay an estimate of $20,222-$27,334 per year to attend, depending on hours taken, housing choices and book prices. Out-of-state students pay $34,923 to $42,035 per year. The WUE and M/P programs drop out-of-state costs to $25,046 to $32,168 a year.

Tuition figures posted on Colorado Mesa’s website are based on students taking 15 credit hours per semester — CMU boasts having the lowest tuition costs among colleges and universities in Colorado.

Rooks and Brown are talking to everyone about the scholarship initiative, and are also tapping a relatively new source — athletic alumni.

“People don’t always realize how young CMU is,” Brown said. “Our first four-year graduates are just turning 70. … There hasn’t been a long history of generational giving to the university. What’s exciting is now we have a deeper base of alumni and student-athletes who graduated from here that are at the age where they can begin to give back.”

When Rooks talks to those former student-athletes, part of the conversation is that although they might not have gotten a lot of scholarship help when they were at Mesa, they did receive some financial aid. Anything they can donate will allow the next generation a chance to get an education and compete.

It’s not just a matter of asking for money — Rooks wants to get alumni reconnected. Brown pointed to last season’s homecoming game, played in front of a full stadium with the Alumni Zone overflowing behind the south end zone.

“There’s a lot of alums out there who haven’t been touched, haven’t been communicated with,” Rooks said. “My pathway is not going and knocking on doors asking for dollars, it’s about getting them back in the fold of who we are, what we’re doing and getting them back on campus so they can see what’s changed since they were here 15, 20 years ago. That’s a database that’s out there.

“I told all of our major donors of athletics a month ago that it wasn’t about knocking on their door asking for money, it’s knocking on their door asking them who else in the community that would be interested or they know who has the ability to donate and give and who are those people, just building those friendships that can help this institution 20, 30 years down the road.”

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Photos by Scott Crabtree/The Daily Sentinel

Colorado Mesa University football fans cheer from the Alumni Zone in the south end of Stocker Stadium during a Mavericks game on Sept. 17. Read more about CMU’s goal to provide scholarships for all athletes on Page 1B.

Coaches will eventually shift to awarding scholarship percentages instead of, for example, paying Player A’s tuition and fees and awarding Player B a room and meal plan waiver, then having to make sure they don’t spend over the budget.

Once programs are fully funded, Player A could be awarded a 0.75 scholarship, with Player B receiving 0.5, etc. — and the number only needs to add up to the NCAA limit for that sport, regardless of credit hours, dorms and book costs.

“You don’t have to worry about the dollar figure associated with those, because there’s enough money in the bank to allow you to do that,” Rooks said. “That’s what the big boys do. They don’t play the dollar figure, they just give equivalencies out.”

It still doesn’t mean Mavericks will be on “full rides.” Men’s and women’s basketball are each allowed 10 scholarship equivalencies — CMU has 18 men and 19 women on their respective rosters this season. Baseball, with a roster of 54 last spring, is allowed nine scholarships.

“Baseball’s really, really close, it’s one we have to monitor (to stay under the limit), volleyball is really close and both basketballs are in the ballpark,” Rooks said. “We’re so far away on other sports, we have to raise millions just to solve this problem.”

Some RMAC schools have a full allotment of 36 football scholarships, with CMU in the “mid-20s,” Kochevar said. The program needs about $300,000 more per year to pay for 36 scholarships.

When he was hired, Kochevar started an endowment “Quarterback Club.” With three coaching staffs in the past four years, there hasn’t been any continuity in fundraising.

“The majority of our team and contributors right now are walk-ons,” Kochevar said. “We don’t have any full scholarship guys, so being able to get those funds up and elevate it to where we can have a more competitive roster year in and year out, that’s how we’ll be able to sustain (success).”

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