According to psychology-textbook/bar-argument-settling-website Wikipedia, frequency illusion is “the illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.” Writing about trends and news for college athletic department consumption, noticing when sports or schools are registering on my personal “frequency-illusion-o-meter” is important as there might be something worth sharing with the A.D. community.
All this to say, for both my editor and myself, NCAA beach volleyball has been popping-up a lot recently and the frequency is no illusion. Known predominately for its place in the Summer Olympics, beach volleyball is rapidly expanding to campuses across America. One of the fastest-growing NCAA sports, beach volleyball, which is currently restricted to women, is now in sixty schools. The cause for this growth is something that athletic departments should be aware of as beach volleyball might be the solution to many schools’ budgetary woes.
In Kentucky, Morehead State has discovered the advantages of offering beach volleyball to its student-athletes. Last week, president Wayne Andrews announced a restructuring of the school’s sixteen intercollegiate athletic programs. Gone for the time are men’s and women’s tennis, and in their place is track and field, (which had been on hiatus) women’s golf, and beach volleyball.
The challenge of adding a new sport and replacing one currently established (with scholarship athletes and paid coaches in place) that Morehead State is experiencing shows the appeal of beach volleyball for budget-minded athletic departments. According to the New York Times, beach volleyball is an exceptional value that also fulfills Title IX requirements for female athlete participation. Costing a fraction of women’s basketball to run due to low overhead and small scholarship numbers, beach volleyball makes greater fiscal sense than better-known but costlier alternatives. And, as an added bonus, if a university already has an indoor (or “traditional”) volleyball program, some athletes can do double-duty for the school, playing for the beach volleyball team during the indoor offseason.
Athletic department officials understand how useful it is to operate a varsity team on a relative shoestring. For perspective, at Oregon, which added beach volleyball in 2014, no 2012 women’s program cost less than $526,000 in expenses, according to the University of Oregon’s 2011-2012 intercollegiate athletic operating budget. In contrast, Georgia State University in Atlanta runs an elite program for under $500,000; the team recently qualified as one of eight schools for the NCAA beach volleyball championship.
College beach volleyball is a growth commodity athletic departments need to strongly consider when thinking about their programs. The combination of affordability, Title IX compliance, and built-in cross-participation with a traditional volleyball team illustrates why beach volleyball is on the rise, even in regions not known for palm trees and ocean breezes.
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