This Week In College Viability (TWICV) Special episode: Steve Dittmore from Glory Days Substack

Gary Stocker (00:01.365)
It's Gary Stocker with College Viability back for a special episode of this week in College Viability. My guest today is Dr. Steve Dittmar. He is a Dean and Professor of the Silberfield College of Education and Human Services at the University of North Florida.

Gary Stocker (00:23.747)
How flat is it?

Gary Stocker (00:28.131)
start a little lower than I like the first time. Welcome back to another special episode of This Week in College Viability, where we bring in special guests to talk about different topics in higher education. My guest today is Steve Dettmore. He is a dean and professor in the Silverfield College of Education and Human Services at the University of North Florida. He is an author of the book Jim Gilliam. I remember that name, Steve, the forgotten Dodger.

And he caught my attention with a website he has on Substack called Glory Days. Steve Dittmore, it is rainy and sunny in Florida. Thanks for making time for the show.

Steve Dittmore (01:05.602)
Thank you, Gary. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today.

Gary Stocker (01:09.229)
So as listeners will know, I focus on the higher education industry and on its finances and financial challenges. And Steve, your expertise, your focus, your writing focuses on college sports. And college sports has its own set of challenges, doesn't it?

Steve Dittmore (01:25.279)
It absolutely does across all levels of intercalated athletics.

Gary Stocker (01:29.845)
And Steve, we first connected when you posted a LinkedIn story about the Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Elon University also in North Carolina, their merger. And for those that don't know, they announced a merger earlier this year, earlier this month, excuse me. Talk about the disparities. You noted there were disparities in the two athletic programs there. Talk about those disparities from Queens and Elon.

Steve Dittmore (01:54.19)
Yeah, so think one of the things that has really caught my attention over the last several years is the relationship between a university's undergraduate enrollment and the percent of that student body that function as student athletes. And in this instance, Queen's University of Charlotte is had one of the higher percentages across division one of their student body also being athletes. And Elon University doesn't. Elon's more much more in line with

the norms of division one. so, Queens University is one of those that a few years ago was a division two school. It jumped into division one. I don't know anyone at Queens University. not, I don't have any inside knowledge there, but just the nature of adding sports and adding roster spots as a way to bring students to campus and as a way to generate tuition revenue. What I've

tried to look at is at what point in time does that become problematic for the campus, either with respect to expenses, respect to campus culture for the other undergraduates that are not athletes. And so, Queens University, they don't have the highest percentage in Division I. That honor goes to Presbyterian College, a small school of less than 900, according to 2023, 2024 data. Less than 900 of

total undergraduates and about 50 % of those function as student-athletes.

Gary Stocker (03:25.059)
Goodness, goodness. So of course, Steve, my focus is on the financial health and viability of colleges. And you personally experienced a private college in financial distress. What were some of those financial distress signs you witnessed while you were at that college?

Steve Dittmore (03:44.014)
Yeah, I mean, so I don't know, I wish I would have witnessed them in advance. So I think that's one of the things that happens. And in reflecting upon that a little bit, I mean, this the university that I was at for two years, Baldwin Wallace University in Cleveland, Ohio, announced a very public budget deficit in 20 late 2023, early 2024, that time period.

Gary Stocker (03:48.235)
Hahaha!

Steve Dittmore (04:10.19)
And, you know, I think in reflecting back on that, what could we have seen and what could have been anticipated was just, and I think a lot of schools experience this, Gary, and you probably have better data than I do, but you took CARES money, the university takes CARES money from the government during the COVID period of time and invests it in new programs, new faculty, new things that are going to attract students. And I don't

I don't know this for a hundred percent certainty, but that's one of the common signs is if you're adding expenses and the enrollment is staying flat, which means your revenues are staying flat, that's something that universities should be concerned about in my mind. And so I think one of the things that you see as universities wrestle with that now, I've noticed a relationship between them trying to add sports as a way to increase enrollment.

Gary Stocker (05:00.611)
Yeah. Yep.

Gary Stocker (05:04.919)
And I guess when we first chatted, when we first chatted, you shared kind of a different thought process than we are right now. You shared that the U.S. has an education-based model for training Olympic athletes. And your point was that colleges subsidize Olympic athletes. As you have also shared, other nations have what they call dedicated Olympic sports organizations. In our country, how reasonable?

How reasonable, Steve, is it that dedicated sports organizations end up replacing, in most sports, maybe not all, end up replacing the education-based model?

Steve Dittmore (05:46.84)
I think that's a really interesting question. I think the only way that it happens is with intervention by the federal government. So the government got into the business of overseeing amateur sports in the 1970s under President Ford, created the Presidential Commission on Olympic Sports, which begets what is now the Ted Stevens Olympic and Paralympic Amateur Sports Act in honor of the late senator from Alaska that championed that.

That effectively gave the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and as it's now known, it was the USOC at the time, gave the USOC at that time the ability to oversee governing bodies and develop Olympic caliber athletes. For the most part, those national governing bodies that oversee sports have abdicated that responsibility to colleges and universities. And I'm thinking now of sports like a field hockey or a rowing or...

diving or those types of sports where athletes traditionally progress through the high school pipeline into college. They participate in college and they go on to qualify for the Olympic team. And that becomes the de facto Olympic training. I think without further federal involvement here, I don't think that the powers and be across the sports landscape decide to do this.

I think it's also important to kind of step, take a step back here and and look at the landscape of college athletics. You have the division one levels and you have those power four conferences that we watch on Saturday afternoons and evenings with football, and those are really a minority. There's maybe 65 ish schools in those power four conferences. There are more than 400 schools in NCAA Division three that offer no athletic scholarships whatsoever.

hundreds more in NAIA and Division II. So when we think about athletes and we think about athletes becoming Olympians, we think often about these major intercollegiate athletic programs. Or maybe you think about the Ivy League or the Stanfords of the world that sponsor water polos or fencing or some of these other Olympic related sports that that's where athletes come from for Olympic teams.

Steve Dittmore (08:06.666)
My interest really has been about looking at these smaller colleges, but there's a trickle down effect that is now occurring as it relates to those big schools and with related to the house settlement, which has put some roster caps on certain sports, which means that a division one school cannot have more than a certain number of individuals on their roster. Whereas previously, and maybe you'd go back to a Queens or somebody like that we were talking about earlier, they could add

more walk-ons and others to be on their roster. And those athletes or those students are probably paying much more than, know, they're certainly paying some tuition to the university. you know, what's also interesting about this is you look at a couple of sports that have really exploded that are in the Olympic movement, that have exploded at the Division III and smaller school level. And I'll give you two examples. Women's wrestling.

Gary Stocker (08:47.543)
Yeah.

Steve Dittmore (09:06.248)
and men's volleyball. Those are two sports that have exploded as division three types of sports. Women's wrestling has added over 50 new women's wrestling programs at the division three level. There's really only one or two, there's a handful of division one, but really Iowa, the University of Iowa is the only power four school to sponsor women's wrestling and they dominate women's wrestling as they should. Iowa is a wrestling hotbed. They are

create facilities, they can sell out Carver Hawkeye Arena for events and things like that. And if you're the best women's wrestler at the high school level, yeah, naturally you want to go to the best college program. So I wonder about what is the long term effect of this if the schools that are adding these sports are division three schools, do we need as a nation to shift our thought process to say,

Well, if you're an Olympic caliber athlete, you're not necessarily going to go to Stanford, Harvard or Iowa. Maybe you're going to go to North Central College in the greater Chicago area, or you're going to go to, you know, a school in Ohio or Pennsylvania that sponsors division three women's wrestling. But we don't think of North Central as being a place that would birth Olympians. We think about the major schools that would do that. So it's a, it's a complicated and nuanced.

Gary Stocker (10:27.043)
Yeah.

Steve Dittmore (10:32.046)
structure I think that right now is there are lot of different forces that are being put on at this moment.

Gary Stocker (10:41.123)
You mentioned a moment ago the number of the percentage of athletes at some of the colleges we talking about, Queens and Elon, and you suggested in your sub-stack site that a college with a student athlete rate of 44 % or higher is financially risky. What's the story, Steve, behind that 44 % number?

Steve Dittmore (11:02.926)
Yeah, so I mean, this is a course where correlation doesn't always equal causation, right? So I think that's the first thing that we got to caution. But as I was looking at the landscape of the colleges that were closing a couple of years ago, and this is schools like Finlandia and Cabrini and Casanovia College in New York and some of these other smaller Division III schools that were either closing or merging,

Gary Stocker (11:06.466)
You

Good point.

Steve Dittmore (11:33.57)
Birmingham Southern College is another good example of this down in Alabama.

Steve Dittmore (11:48.91)
Birmingham Southern College in Alabama is another example of one of those that might be a good case study on this where their student body had increased over 60 % and they just couldn't continue to pay the cost of athletics, pay the cost of the faculty, pay the cost of the operations of the institution.

based on the amount of revenue that they were bringing in. And so the common denominator, the line in the sand perhaps would be that 44%. That's where I was looking at numbers. And where I'm getting my data from is the US Department of Education through the Office of Post-Secondary Education requires that every athletic, college athletic program that has sports for both genders report as part of Title IX

variety of pieces of data. And one of those, or a couple of those fields that I look at are the total undergraduate student enrollment, undergraduate full-time student enrollment that they report on that document, and the number of unduplicated athletes. And why is unduplicated athletes important? Because, you know, someone that's on cross country might also be running track, and we don't want that same individual to count twice. So unduplicated kind of corrects for that.

So that's the only place that those pieces of data, all support revenues, expenses, and a variety of other things. So you can look at those things. It might not always align with iPads, but you go with what the data tells you and the schools are required to report this. And so I've been looking and been tracking for the last few years, kind of the trends around those. There are not many division one schools that have 44%. I mentioned Presbyterian earlier.

Queens was up there pretty high, but they're still not anywhere close to that threshold. There are 66, based on 2023, 2024 data, there are 66 Division III schools that have greater than 44 % of their student body are athletes, and as high as getting into the 70s. And I did a case study on a school in Michigan, an NAIA school, Concordia of Michigan, which was based in Ann Arbor, that was all in on athletics. They were over 80%.

Steve Dittmore (14:10.242)
And then they decided, you know what, we're just not in athletics anymore. And they dropped all of their sports. So I don't know, again, correlation doesn't always equal causation, but there has to be something at some point in time that becomes a tipping point for these universities where they have that high of a percentage of their student body as athletes.

Gary Stocker (14:32.321)
Yeah, indeed. And those are topics, maybe Steve, we can do this again someday, that fascinate me and I love to kind of pursue those maybe some other time down the road. Your Substack site, intriguing in so many ways. Talk about glory days and the history behind that.

Steve Dittmore (14:46.638)
So I mean, it's a nod a little bit to my favorite musician of all time, Bruce Springsteen. So I pulled it from that. I'm a huge Springsteen fan. But I also thought because it related to sports and it kind of had that. It originally started as something where I would just write about interesting topics. And then I developed a little bit of a following among academic counselors, among enrollment professionals, even some small college athletic.

administrators that began reading the things that I would write and I would try to explain what is going on in decisions around adding sports, dropping sports, what the trends are, what the data shows from the enrollment percentages. I wrote one recently about how one of the interesting things to me is how the NCAA counts sports.

At the NCAA division one level, a university is required to carry 14 sports. And that can be broken up by their seven and seven men and women or six men, eight women, but a minimum of 14 sports. And so you start to see that an athlete can count on three of those because the NCAA considers indoor and outdoor track to be separate sports because they have separate championships in that.

And then if that same athlete also runs cross country, now you've got a fall, a winter, and a spring sport. So universities can really focus on using that to their competitive advantage by saying, well, we've got 14 sports, but really they're only paying one or two head coaches maybe to oversee some of that. And even more to the point, like I noted that the University of Virginia, swimming and diving is considered one sport by the NCAA. The University of Virginia has decided to

Gary Stocker (16:30.55)
Interesting.

Steve Dittmore (16:42.754)
discontinue its diving program. Well, it has a champion women's swimming team. They don't need the divers to help them win the championship, but it saves on costs because we don't have to have a special diving coach for that. We can just focus, you know, specifically on the swimming component of that.

Gary Stocker (17:04.809)
One of the many interesting thoughts that came out of our first discussion, Steve, was about a scenario where the Power Four football leaves the NCAA. Share your speculation, informed speculation, on what can happen to non-Power Four sports and Olympic sports for these non-Power Four conferences.

Steve Dittmore (17:29.272)
Well, I mean, this is obviously way out there. I mean, in theory, getting back to something we talked about earlier, in theory, if football just left, if the Power Four just leaves the NCAA or football just pulls out or whatever the different scenarios are, the rest of Division I could look very different. And you could see, in theory, national governing bodies start to oversee

college competition. let's take a sport like I'm very familiar with the sport of lacrosse. Let's just say that USA lacrosse now manages the NCAA tournaments and they oversee everything about lacrosse, the officials, the eligibility, all of those things. That gets us closer to that model that some other countries have where you've got, you know, a development system like that, that is independent of the education system.

Gary Stocker (18:23.683)
All right, bye.

Steve Dittmore (18:28.108)
And maybe it's a case then where if Johns Hopkins and Maryland are still going to sponsor Division I's lacrosse, they just license their logo and their marks to whatever organization is running this. So that's one way out there type of scenario of what could happen. We could see more sport-specific conferences. Another thing that I've written about is what is the competitive advantage

Gary Stocker (18:51.863)
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Dittmore (18:55.022)
to having a sports specific conference. I think there's a lot of cost savings and efficiencies that could be created by doing that. It doesn't make sense for the women's volleyball team from UCLA to go travel to Rutgers to play a conference game simply because that's what football wants. mean, football drove the big 10 to add UCLA, USC, Oregon, et cetera. But that doesn't help the, I mean, the softball teams, the volleyball teams, the non-revenue sports like that.

Having them travel all the way across the country to play a conference game just doesn't seem to make sense. So that kind of new way of conceiving college athletics at the Division I level, I think makes some sense. Does that trickle down then into Division II and Division III where there's less financial risks? I don't know, but it would be.

it would be interesting to see what alternative models might look like because right now the NCAA just oversees everything. The one thing of course the NCAA doesn't oversee is the college football playoff system. That's an independent thing, which is why the NCAA football champion in division one is really the champion of the football championships of division FCS.

Gary Stocker (20:10.803)
And as I ponder life on occasion to stay with this question, I wonder if maybe the new sport, new sport, excuse me.

Gary Stocker (20:21.283)
If the sport of pickleball could be that kind of model. instead of having the long travel for conference to play pickleball, pickleball conferences become regional across what are traditional NCAA 1, 2, 3, NAIA schools. You get the competitive aspect. the big schools be better than the small schools? Possible. But that might be a way to look at that model and say, hey, let's test it with something that's not an NCAA sport, pickleball, but very well could be at some point.

So next question, and take a deep breath, because I've got a long wind up for this one, Steve. And my fascination with all of the NIL and the House settlement changes is their down the road impact on youth sports. And as you know, because I share this with you, I have been involved in youth sports for decades as a coach, as a basketball referee, as a baseball umpire. And I watched many parents.

Steve Dittmore (20:54.796)
Okay.

Gary Stocker (21:18.207)
invest considerable sums in youth sports teams and the teaching training that goes with it. In almost all cases, my perception was that this was an investment that would be returned by these parents with a college scholarship. All right. And as you and I also know, that scenario is successful for not very many, for only a very small percentage of student athletes at whatever age they're at.

Yet there is today a massive and I think growing market for youth sports. And it's not just the teams, it's the coaching, it's the training, it's the community investment in youth sports facilities, baseball fields, baseball complexes. Steve, if colleges end up cutting back on sports, we're talking non-big time sports, football, basketball, hockey. If colleges end up cutting back on those kinds of sports for financial reasons, speculate.

for the listeners, what impact that might have on the youth sports industry.

Steve Dittmore (22:22.188)
Yeah, you know, it's really interesting question. I've been thinking about it since you and I spoke previously to this. You know, and I think it's important for me to acknowledge too, as an academic in doing qualitative research, you like to talk about researcher positionality. So my positionality is I am the parent of someone who played some of those youth travel sports and parent of someone who is now a Division III lacrosse player. And, you know, we did all of those things. I like to think that we didn't

do it with the thought that our son was going to get a Division I college scholarship. We did it because it's what he wanted to do and we wanted to help create leadership and create teamwork skills and everything else that goes with sport.

That said, know all of these places that you're talking about that have big multi-field complexes and families that spend thousands of dollars to invest in everything from baseball, softball, lacrosse, ice hockey. Ice time is one of the premium commodities in the United States, community ice time and things like that. So there's a lot there that

could be impacted. So I the question will be is if division one goes, you know, if division one schools start to cut back, you know, again, 14 sports, that's the minimum the NCAA says. So until the NCAA changes that rule, I don't think you're going to see tremendous sports being cut or tremendous number of sports being cut at the division one level. They've already instituted some roster caps. So I think, again, looking at lacrosse, a sport with which I'm familiar, you've got

Now the NCAA rule is 48, based on the house settlement, 48 spots on a men's lacrosse roster. That's the roster's cap. If a school opts in, if a school doesn't opt in, they can have as many athletes as they want. But if they opt into this, then 48 is the cap. Well, it wasn't uncommon for schools to carry 60 athletes. So where do those other 12 athletes go? Do they go down to division two? Sure. Do they go to other division ones and force other division one athletes down to division two? Yeah.

Steve Dittmore (24:36.494)
Do they go down to division three? Possibly. think it just depends on what the nature of the child is and what the family wants and what kind of an experience they want. To me, division three represents a wonderful mix of athletics and academics. It's traditionally smaller campus environments, 2000 or fewer, liberal arts.

private schools, although there are, you know, the Wisconsin state system and the SUNY system are all part of division three. So you see a lot of that, but you know, it's, an interesting question of what happens to the youth sports market going forward. I don't study youth sports and that well enough to know, but I do know that cities love those travel tournaments because it puts, you know, heads in beds and it brings revenue for restaurants and gas stations and

all sorts of other entertainment. You the kids got downtime. We need to go to Topgolf or we need to go see a movie or whatever it is during that dead period. So it is something that local communities, those that have invested in these big parks, you know, it's, I'm drawing a blank on the name of the facility just north of Indianapolis, but there's a huge multi-field baseball, softball, football type of complex just north of Indianapolis that

is a major thing and you look at all the proximate developments, all restaurants and hotels that are immediately surrounding that space.

Gary Stocker (26:07.287)
Nah, Well, Steve Dimmel has been my guest. He is a professor at the University of North Florida. His sub stack site is Glory Days. I guess that's based on music. Steve, thanks for making time to chat today. I appreciate the perspective and the sports stuff fascinates me. You know, I talked about this prior to the recording. It's a big part of culture. Just as higher education is a big part of American culture and there are changes are coming. What those are, Steve, I don't think any of us can speculate.

with informed speculation on it, but it's a fascinating topic and maybe we do this again some day. So Steve, thanks again.

Steve Dittmore (26:41.944)
Thank you, Gary, I really appreciate it.

Gary Stocker (26:43.714)
And we'll be back with another special episode of This Week in College Viability coming soon.