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Furman cuts baseball, lacrosse
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ken d Offline
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Post: #21
RE: Furman cuts baseball, lacrosse
(05-18-2020 05:51 PM)sctvman Wrote:  Furman is also very highly-priced. COA is $67K a year. With so few scholarships for baseball, it was hard for them to get in-state players to pay tuition. Furman only had 10 players from SC on the baseball team out of 35.

Their attendance was also very low. In 2019 if you took out the Clemson and South Carolina games at Fluor, they averaged around 360 fans a game. Furman has had trouble getting into the Greenville fanbase for years.

They just started playing a couple of basketball games at Bon Secours this year. For the game against Wofford they got like 6,000 or so into that 15,000 seat arena.

How many people were at those Clemson and South Carolina games?
05-21-2020 05:35 PM
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georgia_tech_swagger Offline
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Post: #22
RE: Furman cuts baseball, lacrosse
05-21-2020 05:41 PM
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sctvman Offline
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Post: #23
RE: Furman cuts baseball, lacrosse
Furman has had a lot of trouble compared to the Charleston area schools getting interest. They just got a Greenville radio home back last year (WGVL), an AM signal with no FM translator at all. It is either that or WPLS, a campus station which barely reaches downtown.

CofC and the Citadel both have all their games on FM in the Charleston area. The Citadel even has a Columbia radio affiliate for football (1470 AM) and have for decades. They had a Greenville affiliate for a while too. 50kw WLFJ (which can be heard through most of SC daytime). In 2014 they had a 9 station network.

Last year’s Clemson-Furman game had 2,921 on a 46 degree night. South Carolina had 1,783. This year’s game on 3/3 had 3,397. So those are big numbers, but back in 2011-12 when college baseball was at its peak here in SC, they’d get 5,000-6,000 fans for both.

Furman though had the SoCon baseball tournament in their backyard (Greenville Fluor Field) for the last 7-8 years, and couldn’t draw much at all. They made it to the championship in 2017, and for the finals they got 1,337. Fluor seats 6,700. So they couldn’t hit 20% capacity basically playing as the home team.

Back when Charleston had the SoCon tournament, they’d routinely draw 3,000-4,000 when CofC or Citadel were playing at Riley Park. The last year Citadel won (2010) they had almost 5,000 for the finals.
05-21-2020 05:55 PM
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MercerFan Offline
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Post: #24
RE: Furman cuts baseball, lacrosse
(05-18-2020 04:27 PM)Wedge Wrote:  
(05-18-2020 03:50 PM)TrueBlueDrew Wrote:  I'm surprised Furman cut their baseball program over their Men's soccer program. According to Equity in athletics, Men's Soccer costs the school 300k annually while Baseball only cost 188k.

Are those numbers believable?

At pretty much every D-I school, baseball costs significantly more than soccer, and baseball is one of the most expensive "non-revenue" sports to operate.

South Carolina-Upstate, for example, reported annual expenses of $115,237 for baseball and $38,843 for men's soccer.

Wofford reported annual expenses of $204,017 for baseball and $77,879 for men's soccer.

Let's go high and say baseball costs $225,000 for Furman. That's peanuts in the grand scheme of Furman University. You're telling me that Furman can't foot the 225K bill for 1-2 years while the sports world resets? That's only about the cost of 3 students tuition. I don't understand this.

edit -- Do any sports make money at Furman? Maybe football and basketball with guarantee games? I guess losing some of those games would hurt and that money might have paid for baseball. Regardless, how does saving $200K a year really make a dent in the Furman budget. If 200K is the make or break point, Furman has a huge problem. I hope other SoCon schools aren't in that same position.
(This post was last modified: 05-23-2020 08:07 AM by MercerFan.)
05-23-2020 08:03 AM
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BruceMcF Offline
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Post: #25
RE: Furman cuts baseball, lacrosse
(05-18-2020 04:27 PM)Wedge Wrote:  
(05-18-2020 03:50 PM)TrueBlueDrew Wrote:  I'm surprised Furman cut their baseball program over their Men's soccer program. According to Equity in athletics, Men's Soccer costs the school 300k annually while Baseball only cost 188k.


Are those numbers believable?

At pretty much every D-I school, baseball costs significantly more than soccer, and baseball is one of the most expensive "non-revenue" sports to operate.

Question is, how much of those are operating costs, and how much of those are scholarship costs? If Furman's soccer team is one of it's highest profile sports, it might allocate substantially more of it's scholarships to soccer than to baseball ...
... and indeed, it's relative success in baseball and soccer would make that quite plausible.

But if it recruits soccer players who can handle Furman classes, just not Furman's tuition bill ... and don't have to run a "athlete friendly" major for them ... how much does adding a student to be a scholarship athlete to advertise Furman on the soccer field really cost the educational staff and facilities budget at Furman? They'll have their faculty/student ratio to protect, so it won't be zero, but it could well be substantially less than half.
05-25-2020 12:46 PM
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