By Emily Reed

The college’s funding for the athletic department faced an 80% budget cut 3 years ago, and the athletic department has been struggling ever since. The scholarships allotted for each athletic team have been cut drastically since the year 2018.

 Each team is allowed to give scholarship for one full price of tuition, which is divided equally between each recruiting class. Whereas, until the year 2018 each team was given five full prices of tuition to divide between each recruiting class. The college does not permit scholarship above tuition price via the athletic department, meaning that full rides via athletics are not available.

To increase funding in the Athletic Department, Nancy Wheeler (Assistant Athletic Director) brings up the idea that teams should be allowed to fundraise for scholarship. Other colleges in the Mountain East Conference are able to fundraise for scholarship, but this has not yet been approved for West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Nancy Wheeler also mentions that athletic scholarship awards are not able to change after the student’s acceptance. Thus meaning, that a student’s scholarship award cannot be raised nor lowered depending on their performance and contribution to the team. Even if the money is available to be added to a current athlete’s athletic award package, it will not be approved through the college.

As of right now, all funding for the athletic department is taken care of through the Funding Administration and Budget Committee. Coaches are not allowed to alter the price of scholarship they are allotted. The allotted amount of scholarship remains one full price of tuition per recruiting class. Which equals out to roughly $40,000 but can differ depending on the size of the sports team.

The need for more funding remains a necessity. An increase in funding would allow more scholarship rewards to be given to students, allow student-athletes to receive gear rather than purchase it, and keep student-athletes from having to pay travel costs for out of conference competition. The increase in funding would void these problems as well as bring in more students to the college.

Picture by Emily Reed