Eastern Washington University Athletics Review President’s Recommendations Dr. David May, Interim President May 21, 2021 Contents INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 2 HISTORY ................................................................................................................................... 3 PEER INSTITUTIONS ............................................................................................................... 4 ADVERTISING EFFECTS AND STUDENT RECRUITMENT, RETENTION, AND GRADUATION .................................................................................................................................................. 6 STRATEGIC PLAN, MISSION, AND VISION ............................................................................12 COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND ECONOMIC IMPACT .......................................................16 FUNDRAISING, PHILANTHROPY, AND THE COMPREHENSIVE CAMPAIGN .......................18 RECOMMENDATION ...............................................................................................................19 NEXT STEPS ...........................................................................................................................21 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................22 APPENDIXES ...........................................................................................................................26 1 Introduction At a regular meeting of the Eastern Washington University Board of Trustees (Board) held in the spring of 2020, the Board requested that Eastern Washington University (EWU) engage in the process to hire an outside consulting group to review the current state of the athletics programs and department at EWU. This request was prompted in part by a report that had been produced locally by an ad hoc committee of the Faculty Organization (Syphers, Bunting, Dean, & Flinn 2020). The further instruction from the Board was that following the completion of the consultancy, the president of the university should provide a recommendation to the Board for the best future state of the athletic programs at Eastern Washington University. This charge was made to the president at the time and this recommendation is the completion of that charge. In response to the requests from the Board, the university engaged in the required process to seek bids from vendors interested in being the consultants for the review. A committee was created to review the proposals received. The committee was composed of representatives from administration and faculty. A list of the members of that committee can be found in Appendix A. At the end of the review, the recommendation was made by the committee to engage The PICTOR Group as the consultants. The university agreed and The PICTOR Group began its work in July, 2020. From that date through February, 2021 The PICTOR Group conducted a review of the athletics programs and department at EWU. This review included a comprehensive examination and evaluation of the university, Big Sky Conference, and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) documentation related to EWU’s athletic programs. A list of those documents can be found in The PICTOR Group report (2021), Appendix B. The consultant interviewed more than sixty individuals in both in-person and telephone/Zoom interviews and that list can be found in Appendix 4 of The PICTOR Group report. The PICTOR Group sent out more than 14,000 survey instruments and used the interviews and survey responses (found in Appendix 5 of the report) to develop a Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats (SWOT) analysis of Eastern athletics. The response rates to the surveys were lower than hoped for across several groups. In the case of the student survey, the rate is in alignment with the response rates for other surveys sent to students about other significant issues in the past year. The student response rate to The PICTOR Group questionnaire was 14.6% for undergraduate students and 12.5% for graduate students. For recent institutional surveys asking about COVID and online instruction, the Spring 2020 survey of all students had a response rate of 1,038 students or 10.4%. The Fall 2020 survey had a response rate of 2,322 students or 18.5%. Representatives from The PICTOR Group also met with six NCAA conference commissioners in various divisions and conferences and also with staff of the NCAA. The work of The PICTOR Group culminated in a report that was presented to the Board at its regular meeting held February 26, 2021 (The PICTOR Group 2021). Of note is that the report does not contain a specific recommendation on what the future state of the organization should be. This is not an omission on the part of The PICTOR Group but rather an intentional decision made between The PICTOR Group and Interim President May. The future of athletics at Eastern Washington University is a decision that must be 2 discussed and ultimately made by the Board after this recommendation by the university administration. In addition to the presentation to the Board by The PICTOR Group and the report itself, representatives of The PICTOR Group met with Interim President May to discuss the process and the report, and to answer any questions and discuss options. This included discussion of the options presented to the Board and the additional possibilities of EWU deciding to move to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) level of athletic competition or the elimination of all sports at EWU. This recommendation is in response to the charge from the Board that the president provide, after the consultant’s report had been received, a recommendation from the interim president that provides a pathway forward for athletics at Eastern. Any possible future of athletics at Eastern Washington University must be mission driven and tie the mission of athletics on our campus, in our community, and more broadly into the mission and vision that EWU has articulated for itself. To be successful into the future, EWU must maintain relevance to our students and to our region by remaining committed to our Mission, Vision, and Strategic Plan. By clearly aligning the future state of athletics at EWU to the mission and vision of EWU, as well as the strategic plan that the university has created, the questions of athletics at EWU may be able to be put to rest well into the future, providing some important institutional stability. History EWU has a long history with athletics and also with internal and external reviews of athletics. It was one such review undertaken in 1977 that made the recommendation that EWU, as it grew as a university, move to the NCAA from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, an association that markets itself as “The experts in the business of small college athletics.” EWU joined the NCAA Division I-AA in 1987 and joined the Big Sky Conference that same year, a decision that had the effect of increasing the prominence of EWU in general and the athletics programs in particular. EWU has been a member of the NCAA and in Division I-AA since that time and currently sponsors fourteen sports, the minimum number required for NCAA Division I membership and sponsors a football program, a requirement of membership in the Big Sky Conference. Since those decisions and the moves to the NCAA and to the Big Sky Conference were made, there have been additional reviews of athletics. Some have been undertaken internally and some have been done by external reviewers. The ad hoc faculty report cites the 2002 Fischer Report and its call to reduce the fiscal drag from athletics in 2002. The PICTOR Group (2021), quoting the 1997 McFarland and Alton P.S report, notes that the numerous studies undertaken consistently bring up the obvious issues and possibilities in athletics without any significant progress or momentum resulting. As with many universities and colleges around the country, athletics at EWU has been a source of some ongoing friction within the campus community and its value, often framed strictly in budgetary terms, has been repeatedly questioned, particularly by members of the faculty. The recent past has seen continued tumult around the question of athletics. That furor was in part the result of planned budget reductions in Academic Affairs in the 2019 and 2020 fiscal 3 years and the belief that the reductions planned in Academic Affairs were necessitated and directly tied to changes in scholarship funding for students participating in intercollegiate athletics. The concerns about athletics and athletics funding have been accentuated by declining state-support enrollments over the past several years, by concerns over the level of state support for the university, and the long-term effects on the university brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. This ongoing discussion and uncertainty has created considerable coverage in local and some national media outlets, most recently in an article in the local newspaper that provided a reasonably comprehensive review of the current situation and some of the broader context (Mason 2021). This history, as noted above, culminated in the request from the Board to engage a consulting group. That request resulted in the hiring of The PICTOR Group. That group prepared and presented its report to the Board in February of 2021. Based on the charge from the Board