As UHart struggles with financial concerns, downgrading athletics is an option under scrutiny

As the University of Hartford contemplates a move from Division I to Division III in athletics, it is clear there are deeper, more wide-ranging financial concerns in play.

“The University has been engaged in conversations at the board level regarding providing an exceptional academic and campus experience for all students,” read a statement released by the school late Thursday, “of which our intercollegiate athletics is an integral part. A nationally recognized firm was engaged and our leadership will review the report. There is a lot of incredibly positive momentum at UHart, and it is both common and appropriate that our leadership would review and manage the fiscal realities of all our offerings.

“It is completely false that a decision has been made.”

The nationally recognized firm, CarrSports, led by former UConn athletic director Jeff Hathaway as managing partner, was commissioned last winter and submitted a report concluding UHart is losing $13 million per year on its athletic programs and should consider moving from Division I to Division III.

However, the university has been working to adjust its budget across the board. Michael Gargano, from Hartford, is a longtime college executive, former provost and senior vice president of the Connecticut State College and University system, and he was part of UHart’s management team when the decision was made to move to Division I in 1984. He is now CEO of the Education Think Tank and believes a move to Division III would be the right play for UHart in the current landscape.

“COVID has caused some financial stress at the University of Hartford,” Gargano said. “The federal stimulus dollars will mitigate some of it, but not enough. Because they are a tuition-dependent university, the more they have to discount tuition to recruit and enroll students, the less revenue they have to distribute to the academic community and non-academic enterprise, in this case intercollegiate athletics. They are going to look at many different ways where they can find savings.”

Last April, UHart began making cuts in response to revenue lost and unbudgeted expenses, such as refunding housing costs to students, due to the pandemic. In an email to employees at that time, reported by the Hartford Business Journal, UHart President Gregory Woodward said he expected a multimillion dollar deficit before the pandemic, with an additional $10 million added. Furloughs and pay cuts were initiated then, and Woodward warned that “millions in permanent reductions” were planned.

It was in that context that the CarrSports study of athletics was commissioned last winter. The report was given to the UHart’s Board of Trustees, and its conclusions became known three weeks after the men’s basketball program won the America East conference and played in the NCAA Tournament, bringing vast attention but, Woodward told WTNH-TV, no appreciable revenue to the school.

Gov. Ned Lamont, speaking at an event in Barkhamsted on Friday, was surprised to hear the news.

“You just made it to the NCAA,” Lamont said. “You made it to March Madness. Let’s go. I think that was a shot in the arm for the kids — a shot in the arm for the University of Hartford. I was so proud to see them there for the first time in 35 years.”

Athletic department officials have remained silent since news of the report came out. Men’s basketball coach John Gallagher has declined to comment.

The original intent when UHart moved from Division II to Division I was to build the university’s brand and increase enrollment. Former UConn President Susan Herbst often refers to athletics as the “front porch” of a university.

Walter Harrison, UHart’s president from 1998 to 2017, still sees benefits of Division I athletics.

“For me, the real reason to be Division I is because it fits the mission of the university,” Harrison said. “To recruit and train excellent students and prepare them for the world after college. Division I athletics does that. There are other benefits. One of them is you are in a group of excellent universities. If you look around Connecticut, what are the private institutions that are in Division I? Of course, UConn, of course, Yale. UConn plays a much high level, and the Ivy League has carved out its own niche. But the other privates, you have Sacred Heart, Quinnipiac, Fairfield and us. Those are the institutions I believe the University of Hartford wants to be compared to, and in our conference, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, UMass-Lowell, Binghamton and Stony Brook, we fit there. We’re playing schools like us.”

The effect of playing Division I athletics on enrollment is hard to quantify, Harrison said, but he believes it helps. “I can’t tell you how many parents told me, when we were having success in women’s basketball, ‘I only heard about the university because of [former coach] Jen Rizzotti,’” he said.

Gargano, however, said that the first March Madness appearance for men’s basketball should not overshadow the long term realities.

“To truly get the benefit of Division I athletics, the teams have to win and have to win consistently,” he said. “To make a big deal because one time in 35 years the men’s basketball team gets to the NCAA, that’s not a big accomplishment. So you can see why people would say, ‘Why do we do this when we can’t compete?’ While people can fault the effort to even think about going Division III, in my mind it’s the right thing to do.”

UHart’s undergraduate enrollment data shows a slight decline in enrollment for each fall semester since 2016. From fall 2019 to fall 2020, UHart saw a drop of about 275 undergrads. UHart’s graduate student enrollment, which had been on the rise since 2017, saw a decrease of only about 10 students between fall 2019 and fall 2020. All schools have faced financial problems of some degree during the pandemic.

“While enrollment has dipped in some instances, as some students opted to take the year or a semester off, in other instances it has gone up,” said Jennifer Widness, president of the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges. “As a sector, we only faced a modest enrollment decline of 1.4 percent this year. Certainly, institutions have faced unbudgeted expenses around refunds for room and board last spring and reopening costs related to testing and other public health measures that were required to reopen, but with the combination of budget cuts earlier in the fiscal year and state and federal assistance, we are well-positioned for the future.”

In 2019, Woodward said there was a “huge amount of competition for students.” At the time, the school had announced a $90 million initiative to expand facilities and programs at the College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions, and the College of Engineering, Technology and Architecture.

It also aimed to add a new student recreation center. Woodward said that as a Division I school, they invested heavily in athletic facilities but wanted to build a better center accessible to non-athlete students.

“Private universities across the nation are walking a fine line between success and failure,” said Woodward at the time. “We’re good now, and we want to stay that way. ... Some people think private schools are pocketing money, but we’re a nonprofit. We’re a young school. We don’t have a huge endowment in the same way schools like Yale do.”

Hartford was spending roughly $13 million per year in athletics during Harrison’s later years, and bringing in about $2 million. Expenses, sources familiar with UHart athletics said, have risen to about $15 million, in part because of an increase in “combo aid,” which combines a partial athletic scholarship with a partial academic scholarship, and increases in tuition, giving scholarships a higher cost against the budget. A move to Division III, with many athletic expenditures remaining nearly the same and financial aid packages replacing scholarships, would save a portion of that $15 million expenditure. A similar portion, Harrison and others suggest, could be saved by economizing or downsizing as a Division I program.

But while Division I status requires a school to offer 16 varsity sports, Division III requires 10, so a move could make for greater savings through elimination of several sports altogether and adjusted salaries for coaches, but it could also mean reduced enrollment.

“They’re better off being at Division III,” Gargano said. “Let it fit better into President Woodward’s vision for the university and how athletics contributes to that sort of mission.”

Christopher Keating contributed to this story.

Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com; Amanda Blanco can be reached at ablanco@courant.com; Lori Riley can be reached at lriley@courant.com.