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Far from sound
dthompson@journalnet.com
When the sun crept over the mountains, the Idaho State football players were already on a bus bound for Salt Lake City. It was the end of October, Halloween. They were to play Cal Poly about 36 hours later, the next 12 of which they would spend on buses or commercial flights. The previous time Idaho State made this trip, in 2005, it chartered a plane. But with prices nearly double what they were then and with Idaho State's athletic budget weathering turbulence right in line with the nation's economy, the Bengals had to scale back expenses whereever they could.
Flying commercially is one way in which they did their part this year. Idaho State lost that game 49-10 this season, after which it reversed its travel itinerary. The team drove back from San Luis Obispo, Calif., to Oakland that night, slept at a hotel, got to the airport midday Sunday and flew back to Salt Lake City.
Then the team loaded onto a bus and got back to Pocatello around dinner time, nearly 24 hours after losing to Cal Poly. A day's preparation for the next game, at home against rival Weber State, was effectively lost in transit, and the Bengals lost to the Wildcats 52-27 six days later. That wasn't an unusual travel schedule for the Bengals, who flew commercially to four games this season -- all of which required a two- or three-hour bus ride to either Salt Lake City or Boise first.
"Today, I feel like I'm dragging, but that's from the travel, not from the other situation," said Idaho State football coach John Zamberlin, two days after the team's 36-13 loss at Portland State on Oct. 15. "The travel has been tough. It's been tough to say the least, and that's been a hard thing to deal with." But the football team will need to get used to those sorts of trips. Charters probably won't be coming back any time soon. Neither will most of the six positions in the athletic department that have gone dark in the past year, when Idaho State was climbing out of its six-figure budget deficit it had created with one expensive swoon.
Wherever cuts can be made, in any department, Idaho State is trying to make them. "There are fewer people, and they're doing more work," said interim athletic director Jeff Tingey. "That's difficult. It's difficult for the coaches. They have to do more with less."
All of them, Tingey said, are on board. Everyone in the department wants to help restore the athletic department's fund balance to the levels of five years ago. But they also admit that achieving such a goal will require sacrifices. That the national economy is struggling hasn't helped matters.
The spending realignment that the entire university is experiencing now is much like what the country as a whole is enduring, explained James Fletcher, Idaho State's vice president for finance and administration. "The useful analogy is we're going through a bubble," Fletcher said. "(The athletic department) is having the same kind of problems because they were chasing an unrealistic revenue."
During the fiscal year 2006-07, Idaho State was expecting big returns from corporate sponsorship and ticket sales -- especially from its football program. That season, in 2006, the Bengals were predicted to finish in the top three of the nine-team Big Sky Conference. Attendance dwindled, however, as the losses mounted. Idaho State drew an announced crowd of 10,016 people for its conference-opening loss to Northern Arizona, but in the season finale, that count was 6,744.
Coach Larry Lewis was fired after that 2-9 season, and Idaho State was forced to buy out two years of his contract. Ultimately, the university paid him a year's salary, about $100,000. The athletic department recorded a net loss of $798,977 that year, dropping its reserve fund into a $137,734 deficit. In 2003, that fund contained more than $700,000. In an effort to replenish that reserve cache, the department cut actual expenses by $735,633 and increased revenues by $427,891. That netted a surplus of $364,547 during the 2007-08 fiscal year, and now Idaho State's athletic reserve fund is back on the positive side, according to figures provided by finance officer Jim Kramer. But that doesn't mean the work is done. The national economic decline means revenue sources are more difficult to find, and sponsors aren't as willing to spend as they once were, Tingey said. "Our budgets aren't where we want them to be," Tingey said. "We'll need to fundraise to get them back up, and we need to perform better so we sell more tickets. It's a chain of events." They most certainly are related. Boosters are more apt to give money to winning programs, which the fall season didn't provide. Combined, the three team sports that face other teams head-to-head finished 14-43-4. Ten of those wins came from the volleyball team. But then there's the catch: How does a department build up struggling programs with less money? "We're probably feeling the effects of that a little right now," Tingey said. "We don't have the same abilities we had in the past, and part of that is our own fault." Tingey offered an analogy he'd been told recently. "If you take a restaurant as an example, and a restaurant is tight on money and they decide to take away a couple peas from their salad," he said. "And then they take away a little bit and take away a little bit, and eventually people stop going to the restaurant because the food quality has gone so low. We don't want that to happen." The concern then becomes, what can be spared? By Dan Thompson
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