In his later years, John Wood appreciated to muse about one oddity of his first 12 years as UCLA’s basketball coach.
His paychecks had been all the time signed by the scholar physique president.
A kind of presidents, Rafer Johnson, additionally performed for Wood, that means that Johnson in impact may have been thought of his coach’s boss.
The association stemmed from an ethos that gave UCLA college students a big measure of management over their very own campus from the Twenties via the late Nineteen Fifties. The scholars ran the campus bookstore, the cafeteria and intercollegiate athletics, all of it managed by a company known as Related College students UCLA that was overseen by a student-majority board of administrators.
Change got here after a dispute about abandoning the Pacific Coast Convention as the results of a scandal involving funds to gamers. The College of California regents, irked by the dearth of direct authority that the chancellors at UCLA and sister college UC Berkeley had over the intercollegiate athletic packages at every campus, determined that beginning in the summertime of 1960, the athletic departments at every campus could be college departments reporting on to their respective chancellor. That transfer got here with the mandate that every athletic program was thought of an auxiliary enterprise much like campus parking and housing, with the expectation that they might be equally self-sustaining.
This resolution got here with important monetary fallout for ASUCLA. Beforehand, the income from the varsity’s athletic groups sponsored the losses of the campus bookstore and the cafeteria. The place had been the scholars going to get the cash to maintain these companies afloat now?
John Sandbrook, who later turned assistant chancellor underneath chancellor Charles Younger, advised The Instances that the choice was made to offer the bookstore — nonetheless run by ASUCLA — management over the emblem rights for UCLA T-shirts, sweatshirts and different merchandise as a part of an association that also exists 65 years later.
“These legacy decisions got made for reasons that made sense at the time,” Sandbrook mentioned, “but because of inertia never were modified.”
UCLA basketball coach John Wood, proven speaking together with his gamers in January 1974, initially had his paychecks signed by the president of the scholar authorities affiliation on campus.
(Related Press)
The legacy settlement with ASUCLA got here up Tuesday throughout a UC regents assembly when Stephen Agostini, UCLA’s chief monetary officer, mentioned the monetary challenges going through the varsity’s athletic division. Agostini mentioned this association was totally different to what he had skilled in his earlier position as affiliate vice chancellor for finances and finance on the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“When I arrived on the UCLA campus, I was a little surprised since I was accustomed to having those income streams be available either directly to athletics or collected at the [university level,]” mentioned Agostini, who lately started his second yr in his present position. “It’s a very unique situation. The inability to access those revenues means we have one less tool in the tool kit to address the spending — not just in athletics but anywhere on campus.”
Agostini mentioned he didn’t have the misplaced revenue figures instantly obtainable, but it surely’s cash that would turn out to be useful for an athletic division that has run up a $219.5-million deficit over the past six fiscal years.
A part of UCLA’s finances disaster is rooted in different legacy preparations that favor the scholars over the athletic division. Sandbrook mentioned that Younger agreed to make the athletic division a tenant of Pauley Pavilion when it was erected in 1965 since there had been no athletic division cash used to fund building prices.
Beneath this association, ASUCLA ran concessions whereas the UCLA groups paid a utilization charge to follow and play inside what some might need thought of their very own constructing, despite the fact that it was constructed as a multi-use facility to additionally home intramurals, particular occasions, live shows and graduations, amongst different actions.
“For decades,” Sandbrook mentioned, “this was kind of the makeup call to help ASUCLA.”
Younger additionally determined to offer athletics only a sliver of obligatory scholar registration charges in order that college students may attend athletic occasions at no or minimal value. Extra lately, Sandbrook identified that at different UC campuses, together with UC Davis and UC San Diego, college students have voted to evaluate themselves an intercollegiate athletic charge of a number of hundred {dollars} per yr to assist their respective athletic packages; UCLA college students haven’t voted to assist the same association.
When UCLA’s athletic division funds struggled within the early Nineteen Nineties, Younger and athletic director Pete Dalis agreed to chop a number of Olympic sports activities — males’s swimming and males’s and ladies’s gymnastics, earlier than virtually instantly reversing course to protect girls’s gymnastics underneath the specter of a gender-equity lawsuit — reasonably than transfer extra institutional assist funding into athletics.
UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond has labored to restrict bills whereas grappling with uncommon legacy college agreements designed to learn college students.
(Icon Sportswire / Icon Sportswire by way of Getty Photographs)
At the same time as their finances disaster has deepened in recent times, UCLA athletics officers have given no indication that they’re contemplating cuts to sports activities packages. To assist offset the rising deficit, the college gave the athletic division $30 million throughout the latest fiscal yr. UCLA can be anticipated to obtain $75 million in annual funds from the Large Ten beginning with the present fiscal yr, an enormous windfall in comparison with what the Bruins produced from the Pac-12.
However how sustainable are UCLA athletics underneath a enterprise mannequin that would really worsen as soon as income sharing with athletes takes maintain after the Home settlement with the NCAA turns into finalized?
In accordance with Sandbrook, Younger adhered to an off-the-cuff coverage that no UCLA coach would ever make greater than the highest-paid school member corresponding to a surgeon within the medical college. That notion could appear quaint in the present day provided that the UCLA and Cal soccer and males’s basketball coaches normally prime the annual listing of highest-paid state staff.
In his remaining yr, Wood made simply $32,500, however by then issues had been already altering.
College students not signed his checks.
