Shelbie Harris
Staff Writer
The Idaho State University Athletics Department will utilize reserve funds approved by the State Board of Education (SBOE) last August to purchase new video and broadcast equipment in order to adhere to updated Big Sky Conference technical standards.
SBOE approved ISU athletics to appropriate $250,000 of reserve funds into both recruiting and infrastructure per year for the next three years.
“Roughly $175,000 to increase recruiting and $75,000 for infrastructure was approved in August,” said Athletic Director Jeff Tingey. “July and August are heavy recruiting months for a lot of sports so we missed out on anyone who competes in the fall [for] soccer, volleyball, football and men’s and women’s basketball.”
Although ISU was unable to appropriate some of these funds into the recruitment advances for fall semester sports, Tingey said there are some demands that need to be met with regards to filming and instant replay of collegiate games for multiple sports including football, basketball, soccer, volleyball, and softball. He said some funds can be moved to the infrastructure side of things.
This allocation of funding has never been done at ISU before.
However, due to the changing landscape of athletics and with the need to improve some programs at ISU, the proposal to invest in certain areas of ISU Athletics was brought to the SBOE.
“[We needed] to create new standards, and to raise the bar so to speak for some of our programs,” said Tingey.
This allocation of funds will help ISU recruit a different type of student athlete and will help with the infrastructure in order to keep certain athletes.
Tingey said ISU Athletics promised student athletes in football, basketball, volleyball, soccer and all sports in general would finish in the middle-to-upper portion of the Big Sky Conference.
“Additional funding was requested to support the athletic departments recruiting efforts,” said Jim Kramer, Assistant Athletic Director for Financial Services. “[Tingey] felt there was a greater need in the area of building up a team, and felt strongly enough that he put together the proposal to the State Board for additional support in recruiting and for infrastructure.”
Some of the funding has already been spent on the softball field’s maintenance, including things like storage and general upkeep.
Additionally, some of the funding will be used at Reed Gym for video equipment as well as the athletic training and strength and conditioning rooms.
“These improvements will be used to help improve the quality of our student athletes’ facilities and to improve our teams or athletic trainers abilities to keep our student athletes healthy,” said Tingey.
Recruitment is more than simply sending coaches into prospects living rooms and attempting to persuade them to the campus of ISU.
Recruitment involves showing prospects the facilities such as the weight room, athletic training room or a new softball field that is well taken care of, and proving to the students that ISU is a good fit for them.
Tingey said the state of Idaho is different than any other state regarding schools in the Big Sky Conference in that ISU has a financial cap placed by the SBOE that limits the institution on the amount of funding that can be provided to athletic teams.
“When you look at institutional funding we are at the bottom of all of the other schools, and therefore, our budgets are at the bottom,” Tingey said. “In our proposal to the State Board, I wasn’t saying that we needed to have more funding but more so an infusion of money that can be used for recruiting and infrastructure will help us. We’ve learned to adapt with smaller budgets and that’s fine, we will continue to raise self-generated funds to help us get to that point.”
