Director of athletics Bill Cleary '56, an Olympic gold medalist and strong backer of amateur athletics.Photograph by Laura Lewis

Coaching in the '90s

The 1960s were such a quaint, academically focused era--imagine the president of a university earning more than the head basketball coach! Today, with endorsement contracts and performance bonuses, big-school basketball coaches can rake in $2 million annually. Ivy League coaches do not earn more than their institutional presidents, although the highest-paid Ivy athletic director may now make more than the lowest-paid Ivy president. So far, at least, athletics have not become profit centers at Ivy League colleges. In this, they are unlike most of America's larger universities.

The median compensation for a men's basketball coach at an American university is now $290,000, according to a survey of 87 institutions recently reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Football coaches came in at $268,000, and athletic directors at $158,000. For comparison, a current survey by the College and University Personnel Association (CUPA) cited a median salary of $115,000 for deans of arts and sciences at doctorate-granting institutions; last year CUPA pegged an average full professor at a public institution at $61,000.

Not that coaching has become a road to riches. The medians for coaches in sports like soccer, swimming, volleyball, tennis, and track were much lower--in the $40,000 to $50,000 range--with women's coaches generally receiving lower salaries than men's. In fact, many coaches must supplement their salaries with other income, such as clinics and summer camps for junior athletes. "Coaching the non-revenue sports is like being a teacher--you do it because you love the activity," says Fish.

Three decades ago, coaching was often the moonlighting job. When Bill Cleary headed Harvard's ice hockey teams, his day job was running an insurance company with his brother, Bob Cleary '58. Barnaby sold and installed tennis courts, which in strong years netted him more than his check from Harvard. Today, the part-time coach has become another extinct species, and the coach who straddles two sports is fast disappearing. Tim Wheaton arrived at Harvard as assistant coach for women's soccer and men's lacrosse, working under Bob Scalise, M.B.A. '89 (now associate dean for administration at Harvard Business School), who headed both programs. Today Wheaton oversees women's soccer while Scott Anderson is head coach of men's lacrosse. In 1976 Fish succeeded Barnaby as head coach of tennis and squash, but in 1989 the squash program acquired a full-time head coach, and Fish devoted himself to men's tennis. One reason for the job mitosis, of course, is that both racquet sports have added women's programs. Then, in addition to the gigantic undertaking of recruiting, today's coaches spend hours filling out forms and writing reports to comply with the increasingly complex and professionalized NCAA regulations.

It adds up. Even in a small sport like diving, coach Keith Miller will begin his day, three times a week, with team practice at 6:30 a.m. and often still be in his Blodgett Pool office at 8:00 p.m. Then he travels to meets on weekends. Miller estimates that his work weeks run 60 to 70 hours. Squash coach Bill Doyle's job takes 10 to 12 hours a day, not including travel. He is on court for six or seven hours a day, but he is also on the phone with players at night. "The role of the coach means you are talking about everything--social and academic issues, as well as athletic ones," Doyle says. "Who is having trouble with a teaching fellow or roommate? Whose family is going through a divorce? These things affect play on the court. I spend an hour at night and an hour in the morning responding to e-mail from kids. I may write recruiting letters on Sunday morning. On trips, you leave Friday at noon, and get back Sunday night. If someone says coaching is a 40-hour week, I'd like to know how they do it."

A Smorgasbord of Sports

In the first half of this century, baseball was our leading professional sport, but in colleges, football was king. American youths--predominantly male American youths--concentrated on three team sports that the rest of the world had little use for: baseball, basketball, and football. Now, transportation and communications advances have brought global culture into every American community--including the planet's favorite sports. At the same time, the enhanced role of women in competitive sports has changed the face of college athletics. Today, American boys and girls play a much wider variety of sports, including worldwide favorites like tennis, swimming, volleyball, and soccer.

Football has been dethroned as king. When you can choose from 27 football games on cable TV of a Saturday afternoon, going to Harvard Stadium may become less attractive. Average attendance there has decreased from 21,700 in 1966 to 12,300 in 1996; the Ivy League has shown a drop from 19,900 to 9,400 over roughly the same period. "There's been a real change in our student bodies since the 1970s," says Jeff Orleans of the Ivy League. "The colleges started admitting more diverse student populations who seem to be less interested in football--fewer children of Eastern alumni, for example. But if you look at college football attendance around the country, excepting Division I-A [e.g., Notre Dame], our conference has done as well as any."

"Twenty years ago, there were 100-man freshman [football] teams in the Ivy League," says Tim Murphy. They were abolished after the 1992 season, over the opposition of Harvard and Yale, to reduce the number of football recruits per freshman class, in part to open up more space for matriculants with a wider array of talents and passions.

"Women's soccer has grown exponentially since I started," says Wheaton. "Fourteen years ago, there were fewer than 40 Division I programs, and few had athletic scholarships. Now there are more than 200 programs, and most have scholarships. It's the fastest-growing sport in the country. There is a feeling that soccer is more egalitarian and less brutal than football. It's popular in communities that colleges want to recruit students from--so it's one of the first choices that ADs [athletic directors] have made when adding a women's sport."

The explosion of women's soccer is just one example of the countless ways college sports have changed since 1972 and the enactment of the federal law called Title IX that requires gender equity in sports programs. The rise of women's sports has touched every part of the playing field. Sports like soccer that women play enthusiastically, well, and in large numbers have seen their stock rise in both women's and men's programs. A spectator who comes to see a daughter or friend play soccer for Harvard might begin to take an interest in the men's side as well. Women's athletics have helped diversify the mix of college sports and democratized it for both male and female athletes.

The law measures Title IX compliance in one of three ways: proportionality of women athletes to the student body, consistent growth in women's programs, or meeting student interest. Most Ivy schools added women's sports in the 1970s or early 1980s. "We've been able to do all the expansion in the women's programs without making any reductions in the men's programs or eliminating any JV teams," says Harry Lewis. "We should be proud of that. Many people come here who are good athletes, but not quite at the varsity level, so JV sports matter. We had a women's JV ice hockey team, the only one in the league." (Most major sports universities have no junior-varsity teams.)

This choice to add women's sports without cutting men's programs reflects Harvard's fundamental sports philosophy: encourage broad participation. There are more varsity sports and more intercollegiate athletes at Harvard than at any other Division I school--nearly as many as at Michigan and Ohio State combined, for example. (At those schools, about 2 percent of the student body participates in intercollegiate sports; at Harvard the figure is close to 20 percent.) Including participants in the 58 varsity and JV teams, the 27 intramural sports leagues, the 32 club sports (which include badminton, cricket, rugby, croquet, in-line skating, and 11 different martial arts) and the 18 recreational sports activities offered, an estimated 80 percent of Harvard undergraduates do some type of athletics. "First and foremost, our athletic program is run for the benefit of the students, not the University," says Lewis. "Encouraging broad participation does create problems--it strains resources, and it does not get you visibility on the sports pages." He adds, with a note of irony, "All it does is help people, who get personal benefit from it."

Some colleges have moved to comply with Title IX by cutting two men's programs and adding one women's sport. Harvard has men's and women's teams for every varsity sport except three: women's-only field hockey, and men's-only football and wrestling. Although few colleges are willing to eliminate or cut their football programs, wrestling has taken a real hit. According to Harvard wrestling coach Jay Weiss, college wrestling programs in Divisions I, II, and III have shrunk from 400 teams and 9,000 wrestlers in 1972 to 250 teams and 6,300 wrestlers in 1996--while high school wrestling has grown by 2,000 teams (to 8,500 nationally) since 1970. Yale, Dartmouth, and Princeton dropped wrestling; Princeton has reinstated it, with alumni footing the bill.

In general, the Harvard--and Ivy--outlook values participation over spectatorship. While the average Division I school offers 17.8 varsity sports, the Ivy average nearly doubles that at 34. Every student's athleticism matters, not only that of a few superstars performing in a stadium before 100,000 live spectators and millions more watching from their couches at home. Several years ago, Cleary asked his colleague, senior associate director of athletics Fran Toland, "How can Darrell Royal be both head football coach and athletic director at Texas?"--to Cleary, the two jobs seemed like more than one man could do. But Cleary had been too steeped in the Harvard ethos. "It's easy, Bill," Toland replied. "Texas has only a few varsity sports."

The Logo in Left Field

At Cornell's Lynah Rink, advertisements appear on the dasher boards.Photograph by Tim McKinney Lewis

In a memorable scene from the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, a pro football star and his sports agent repeatedly bellow, "show me the money!" together at the tops of their lungs. That is professional sports, but today, even in colleges, that motto might be more appropriate than Knute Rockne's "Win one for the Gipper!" Recruiting and travel are expensive, as are longer seasons. More full-time coaches and the expansion of women's sports add whole new sectors to the budget. NCAA rules compliance runs up many expenses, particularly for personnel. Furthermore, "our facilities are under tremendous pressure," says Lewis. Harvard is currently building a new tennis and racquet center (see John Harvard's Journal), which will include a weight room, and a priority of the current capital campaign is building an artificial-turf field. Quite understandably, athletic directors, coaches, and even college athletes are out there today bellowing, Show me the money.

Where the money comes from will influence how college sports evolve in the future. Ivy League colleges fund their athletic departments primarily out of general revenues, just as they do their chemistry departments. Athletics at some universities, like Penn and Cornell, may be under a greater obligation to produce revenue than elsewhere, but nowhere are sports actually expected to be money makers.

In 1995, the NCAA signed a seven-year, $1.7-billion contract with CBS for its annual basketball tournament. Clearly, college sports have become, as fencing coach Zivkovic puts it, "an unofficial professional business." Schools with nationally televised football and basketball teams net large sums from these programs that can subsidize other sports and create visibility for the university. It is no accident that men's basketball and football coaches generally have the highest salaries; many are essentially managing a business within the university.

"The two sports where you have the most [compliance] problems are football and basketball--the real money sports," says Cleary. "Money ruins college athletics, and college athletics is big money--you're crazy if you think differently. The only way you could cure this would be to have minor leagues in football and basketball. Baseball players can go straight to minor leagues and the pros. In ice hockey there are the junior leagues. But football and basketball players have no other economic avenue to professional sports. I'm not sure a lot of these kids really want to be in college. But the NBA and NFL owners will never do this, since they're getting a free ride: the colleges are their minor leagues. "

Wheaties and Nike do not yet bid for endorsements from Ivy League lacrosse stars, but commercial sponsorship now appears in a way that was absent 10 or 15 years ago. Go to Lynah Rink at Cornell and you will see the ice hockey team skate by advertisements lining the boards around the ice, just as you will at Brown or Dartmouth. Go to a basketball game at Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, or Columbia, and commercial signs beckon for your attention. In Ithaca you will hear the public-address announcer plug "US Airways--the official airline of Cornell athletics." Scoreboards around the league will remind you to buy Coke or Pepsi--understandably, since those soft-drink companies bought the scoreboards.

"Marketing is the key word," says men's basketball coach Frank Sullivan. "That means corporate sponsorship, and more selling of 'the product,' the game, the league." Penn, one of the league's men's basketball powers, has accented that sport and pushed to generate bigger gate receipts at the Palestra. "In Division I basketball, you hear talk about 'putting people in the seats'--as if they had to be placed there," says Sullivan. "Here in Boston, at BU, BC, and Northeastern, one will see promotional events to add to the spectator experience, to lure people back in. It becomes an element of the game."

There is one place in the Ivies where it is not an element of the game, and that is Harvard. "Now, all the buzzwords are about sponsorship," says Cleary. "I think it takes away from the whole spirit of athletics. Everywhere you see the Nike 'swoosh'--in my opinion, that means, 'i own you.'" Cleary wryly asserts that, as athletic director, one of his goals is "to make sure we don't have a new car in the middle of the football stadium at half-time." Yet he acknowledges, "Some schools have to do it."

And even Harvard has created a new position, "assistant director of athletics for marketing." According to the job description, this person will plan and implement "a comprehensive program of marketing activities to increase awareness/enhance the image of Harvard's 41 varsity teams and the Department of Athletics." Patricia Henry, senior associate director of athletics, says that the top priority is "to help generate interest--both internal and external--to get more people to our contests." (Indeed, excepting ice hockey, attendance at Harvard sports events does seem modest. A few hundred--or only a few dozen--may view a Crimson soccer match, as compared with thousands at Yale or Princeton.) The marketing person will also work with teams and coaches on promoting their sports, on outreach efforts for the wider community, and, as a fourth priority, on generating corporate interest, which currently expresses itself mainly in game-program advertisements.

Thus far, the Crimson's clock-scoreboards--items that carry a $50,000 to $70,000 price tag--do not advertise Coke or Pepsi, since Harvard paid for them. Or consider uniforms: regardless of their size, they are no small matter. Sports apparel has evolved into a type of sandwich board, with vendors like Nike and Adidas eager to dress high-profile college teams in their clothing in exchange for promotional considerations. But Harvard adheres to another quaint idea: on the field, the athletes represent their school, not a corporate sponsor.

The policy does not exclude all forms of support, but the University offers no quid pro quo. When Steve Locker arrived at Harvard, he spoke with Adidas about clothing. "It would have cost $2,000 to buy Adidas uniforms, but they would have given us half the items for free, though there would have been the expense of switching over," he says. "But Harvard would do nothing for Adidas--no promotion, no advertising, nothing in the game programs or on the field." Eventually the Lotto apparel company asked Locker who was sponsoring the men's soccer team. "We have nothing to offer a sponsor," he replied. "You can give us everything for free, and in return, we'll wear it." Lotto donated the apparel, and has never asked for anything in return.

Recently, the Ivy presidents rejected a proposal to have Ivy football on cable television. Within the league, Harvard is probably the most conservative member, partly due to its historic institutional culture, partly to deeper pockets. "If we are to maintain broad-based programs, there's a price to pay," says Cornell's athletic director, Charles Moore. "The Ivies have to be more aggressive in how they market; we each have a franchise. I'm not talking about selling cigarettes and beer, but we can be more aggressive in corporate sponsorship. There is modest signage at [Cornell's football stadium] Schoellkopf Field--done in a tasteful manner--and if I have my way, there'll be more. I don't see it as commercialism, I see it as support for the programs." At Harvard, Lewis says, "We would approach commercial endorsements cautiously. You have to recognize that sponsors want to get something back. They will pay more to sponsor winning teams than losing teams. When commercial motives come into running your athletic program, you've got to keep your principles in mind, not reshape the program to fit the sponsor's priorities."

Philosophy between the Sidelines

This spring, in its issue on "America's Top 50 Jock Schools," Sports Illustrated ranked Princeton number 10, based on its competitive success in the Ivy League and beyond (Harvard came in at number 34, on the strength of its 41 varsity sports). Last year, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, in a thoughtful article on Princeton sports, stated that "Princeton has dominated that [Ivy League] world for two decades, finishing atop the league's overall standings for nine straight years, and 17 of the last 20."

The Ivy League actually has no "overall standings," keeping records only of individual sports; Princeton places itself atop the league with data that it alone compiles. Nonetheless, the Tiger results are impressive: 11 conference titles in 1995-96, the most by one school in league history, and a slew of recent national championships in sports such as heavyweight crew, men's lacrosse, and field hockey. Yes, there are many jocks on campus: the varsity and JV teams for Princeton's 38 intercollegiate sports account for nearly one quarter of the undergraduate enrollment.

Harvard, too, has had some notable competitive success, having just completed a year when nine of its varsity teams won Ivy championships, and four reigned as national champions. The fact that this occurs without scholarships makes such accomplishments all the more impressive.

But what matters more is how students feel about their college athletic experience. "I had excellent coaching and reached the pinnacle of success in my sport--winning the NCAA championships and breaking the collegiate record. I couldn't have asked for any more," says Meredith Rainey. "I also had a more well-rounded experience going to Harvard instead of a 'track school,' where you spend all your time with other track athletes. At Harvard, athletics are what they are supposed to be: an extracurricular activity. I never felt that it was my meal ticket, or that I owed anybody anything."

Tariq Jawad '97 played on the national-championship Delco team from Philadelphia that contributed several players to Harvard's soccer team. He was one of the most highly recruited defenders in the country, and played Harvard varsity soccer for two years. But Jawad began to feel "a conflict between academics and sports. Practices would start at 2:00 p.m. and by 8:00 that night you'd be back in your room after dinner--five times a week, and at least once on weekends," he says. "I didn't want soccer to be my life. It was no longer a game, and became more of a job or duty. Plus, I was beginning to plan for the future, and I didn't see soccer as playing a part there."

Jawad's former teammate, Will Kohler, recalls with some chagrin that a midfielder he had played against in high school attended the University of Virginia and was named college soccer's national player of the year--twice. At times Kohler wonders what might have happened if he had attended a scholarship school like Virginia. "In the end, everybody's athletic experience will be heightened by winning a national championship--if you've had that experience, you know what it means," he says. "When you've been playing a sport for 10 years and you come here [to Harvard] you're not interested in players participating and having a fun time. Although winning shouldn't be everything, with winning comes a lot that we base our society on."

Yet there is more than one way to win. At the University of Washington, freshman heavyweight crew coach John Parker (no relation to Harvard's Harry Parker) decided to focus energies by limiting his program to two boats, cutting everyone else. He produced top-notch rowers who helped Washington's varsity crew win this year's national championship. In contrast, Harvard freshman lightweight coach Blocker Meitzen cuts no one through the fall season and sometimes takes out as many as eight boats in November. Though Meitzen's crews have had little competitive success over the years, his athletes have enjoyed rowing and have continued to row as upperclassmen. Consequently, men's varsity lightweight rowing coach Charlie Butt has inherited abundant raw material and consistently produced fast crews--like the current national champions.

Furthermore, there is more than one kind of winning. In 1983, Bill Cleary coached a powerhouse hockey team ranked number 2 in the United States. "That year, we had 12 seniors who were still playing JV," Cleary recalls. "I was more proud of that than being number 2. They loved the sport, and playing here, so much." Tim Murphy found coaching at Harvard so attractive that he took a 40 percent pay cut to take the job. "The Ivy League in general and Harvard in particular have this thing in perspective," he says. "The kids are just as committed as in major college football. Winning is important, but it's only part of the equation. We also want to focus on things like character and work ethic." Dave Fish asserts, "I'm not trying to lower the standard to give myself a good team. Twenty or 30 years from now, I want to say, 'Here's someone I'm proud to have coached.'"

In many ways, Harvard is antiquated in college athletics--the sports programs are not even doing everything that the NCAA allows. "In the Ivy League, we're dinosaurs, holding onto the ideals of education with athletics as a proper adjunct," says Frank Sullivan. Mens sana in corpore sano. But the wider society has shifted. "Accomplishment has been supplanted by celebrity," says Fish. "It's an indication of the values that society cherishes." Sports have become a means to something else: to make money, to become famous, to win a scholarship, to raise funds, to gain visibility for a college, to sell corporate products and services. But not here. At Harvard, as Sullivan puts it, "The game is still the thing."

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