ORONO, Maine — While the voice responding to questions Monday belonged to Karlton Creech, the words he uttered could have been spoken by virtually every other collegiate athletic director from around the country.
“This is no secret — and it applies to every NCAA Division I institution and not just here — that the cost of doing business is only going up,” said Creech, the University of Maine’s top sports administrator since 2014.
That economic reality only makes the UMaine athletic department’s pending receipt of a $640,038 allocation from the NCAA all the more welcome.
One-time payouts totaling $200 million to nearly 350 Division I schools around the country stem from the liquidation of an NCAA quasi-endowment valued at more than $360 million.
Under a plan approved in 2016 by the NCAA board of governors and the Division I board of directors, each NCAA Division I program will receive an allocation from the fund based on the number of athletic scholarships it provided during the 2013-14 academic year. The University of Maine’s award is based on 194.47 scholarship grants.
A working group of Division I presidents developed guidelines for use of the funds with the payouts to be dedicated to benefiting student-athletes in the following areas: academic support, life skills and career success, diversity and inclusion initiatives and health and well-being.
Examples of expenditures that will not be approved in conjunction with the allocations are coaches’ salaries, strength and conditioning equipment and capital improvements or other expenditures designed to improve athletic performance, athletic competition experiences or fan experiences.
“The unique part of this one-time distribution is that it has to be used for enhanced or new programming,” Creech said. “They’ve been very careful to craft this so that schools don’t just use this money to fill a budget gap. They’ve laid out pretty specific parameters for how the money is to be spent and by when.”
The funds will be disbursed April 19, then each school will hold its allocation in a special account while it submits a spending plan to the NCAA within three months.
That plan will be subject to approval by NCAA staff before any of the money may be spent. Schools subsequently will be subject to a random NCAA audit to ensure the money is being spent in accordance with the approved plan.
The University of New Hampshire, with its 216.16 scholarship equivalencies, will receive the largest allocation among AE schools at $711,424, followed by the University of Albany (211.30 scholarships, $695,429) and Stony Brook (195.03, $641,881).
The four non-football playing schools affiliated with America East received the smallest allocations among league members: Maryland-Baltimore County (150.66 scholarships, $495,851), Binghamton (141.44, $465,506), Vermont (139.65, 459,615) and Hartford (107.41, $353,507).
Ohio State, with its 403.98 scholarships, will receive the biggest payout of any school nationally at more than $1.3 million, while Davidson College in North Carolina will receive the smallest allocation of approximately $165,000 based on its awarding of 50.23 scholarships.
While there is a 10-year deadline for spending the payouts, Creech said the NCAA recommends the money be used within five years, by 2022.
“What we’re responsible to do is to let them know in pretty short order how we think we’re going to spend those funds over the next five years, and that’s what we’ll be doing,” he said.
“What we’re looking at right now is where our greatest need is and where we can establish new programming, knowing that this is a one-time distribution so you’ve got to be careful you don’t set yourself up for any kind of failure down the road when the money is all used.
“We haven’t made those final decisions yet,” Creech added. “But it’s a great opportunity.”
