Athletics for all, Money for None

Over the past month, Harvard’s Department of Athletics has launched on offensive against Junior Varsity (JV) athletic teams of all ilks. Told that their “commitment level[s]…[fall] below the standard that the Department expects of JV programs,” according to Assistant Director of Athletics Nathan Fry, the JV teams have been encouraged to downgrade themselves to club programs.

Despite the Department’s assertion that it is merely responding to a decline in dedication among JV athletes, two reasons lead us to believe that more mercenary motivations are involved, at least in part. First, though there has certainly been a decline in participation in some JV sports, many are in fact thriving. The JV women’s soccer team, for example, almost always has more players than it can reasonably give playing time to—except in cases when players are pulled out of JV games to fill out Varsity practices. The JV women’s volleyball team and JV men’s soccer team have similarly full rosters. The fact that the Department sprung its offensive on all JV teams, not just the ones with the lowest participation levels, is suspicious, to say the least.

Secondly, there is an enormous differential between the funding that JV and club sports receive from the Department of Athletics. Transitioning JV sports to club status would save the Department a significant chunk of change. Typically the Department budgets $10,000-15,000 per year for the 29 existing club teams, which works out to about $400 per sport. According to Fry, each JV team typically receives about $1500 per year, or more than three times as much.

Though Fry claims that, should a JV team decide to make the switch to club, at least a portion of the extra money that they received as a JV team would be funneled to them, some JV teams were lead to believe otherwise in meetings they had with Department of Athletics representatives. In these meetings, JV athletes were told that they would have to do significant fundraising to make up the shortfall in funding.

Finally, the Department of Athletics has pointed, in defense of their move, to the decline of JV teams nationally and a supposed difficulty in scheduling opponents for Harvard’s existing JV teams (currently, most JV teams are lucky to have four or five games on their schedule). In fact, viable JV programs exist at all of the New England Small College Athletic Conference schools, whose size and financial resources pale in comparison to Harvard’s.

Though with the last year’s opening of the Harvard Varsity Club’s resources to club sports it has become easier for them to fundraise among alumni, JV programs remain the only place where non-Varsity athletes can continue to compete at a high-level regardless without having to worry about their finances. That alone makes the ones with at least a modicum of participation worth protecting, even at a slight burden to the Athletics Department. The non-financial requirements of club athletes—finding their own coaches, scheduling their own games, and arranging for facility access, for example—become incredibly, and often prohibitively, demanding.

While there are good reasons for a JV team to switch to club status, such as more flexibility in scheduling games and practices and not having to deal with NCAA bureaucracy, the Department of Athletics should not pressure teams with committed members into reducing themselves to club status.