From: Simona Isakova                                                                      Sent: Wednesday, February 22 2023 10:30 AM Eastern Standard Time    To: Dr. Vincent Boudreau                                                            Subject: Increase Athletic Funding

As someone who is currently on the CCNY women’s fencing team, I want to let you know how severely underfunded and understaffed our athletic department is.

Since all CUNY athletics teams are in Division 3, all athletes participating on a team are doing so of their own volition with no expectations of possible returns or reimbursements for all the time and energy they put into their team. Every single day, we practice for multiple hours a day, sacrificing our weekdays for practice and weekends for competitions. From personal experience, this college does not give us money for any of our competitions and almost always only provides a single van for an entire team to scrunch ourselves for an hour or more ride. We barely have enough room for ourselves, let alone our heavy equipment, so our team must use their personal vehicles to transport all of our equipment for a several-hour ride with no reimbursement for gas or fuel. Before our competitions, we often go to a supermarket and shop for food and supplies right before our 10-hour competitions, in which our coach has to spend his own earnings to make sure we are healthy and fed.

All these issues make staying on a team exceedingly difficult, especially since our college does not support or help us at all. We are the only college in our division that makes our athletes share old and used equipment without allowing us to keep any of it. As a result, many athletes have dropped out of their sports teams because it is simply not worth it for us. An example of this is the girls’ track team, which doesn’t even have enough members to participate in this season’s races. My coach has informed me that if the track team doesn’t meet its quota of members for this season, it will be disbanded completely, which will result in the entire athletic department being dissolved. This means that all coaches and trainers will lose their jobs, and there will no longer be any sports teams or events at CCNY, ever. To address this issue, my coach has asked me and my teammates to join the track team, which I have reluctantly accepted because I want to remain on the fencing team. This is completely unfair because I am required to join a team I don’t want to participate in, only so I could save my coaches’ and trainers’ jobs because this college is too underfunded to recruit its students into a team.

Overall, increasing athletic funding will ultimately improve student life and even boost academic performance. According to Katie Schultz, being on an athletics team “increases math and science grades”, so ultimately, increasing athletic funding is a good investment for improving the academic standards at CCNY. In the long run, increasing athletic funding is necessary in order to continue this college’s long and prestigious athletic history. Without sufficient funding, we will no longer have an athletics department, and many aspiring athletes will no longer be able to join and participate on a sports team.

If you are reading this, I am asking—no, begging—you to consider my proposal. I promise you that this investment will improve this college’s standings and will definitely incentivize students to participate on a sports team.

Reference

Schultz, K. (2016). Do High School Athletes Get Better Grades During the Off-Season? Journal of Sports Economics, 18(2), 182–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527002514566279