According to an article in today's issue of the Miami Student, the RedHawks athletic directors have begun to consider the possibility of adding corporate sponsorship in order to help combat budget concerns. The article says that the school has made 10% reductions to administrative and athletic spending in each of the last two years. However, those cuts were made in advance of recommendations made by the university's Strategic Priorities Task Force, which is calling for a reduction of $1.4 million over the next five years.
Deputy Athletic Director Jason Lener says in the article that the focus thus far has been on creating attractive ticket packages in order to stimulate attendance at Miami sporting events. Being a smaller D-I school, the RedHawks don't have quite the draw power that other schools have, a problem compounded by the university's somewhat "out there" location.
Lener is quoted saying that the university has begun discussions about seeking corporate-branding for its sporting venues:
"We're also looking at naming opportunities and selling naming rights to some of our facilities. This is actually a new initiative for us. The Board of Trustees has actually just approved giving us the opportunity to go out and sell naming rights for our venues," Lener said. "We're still in the infancy stages of this plan, but if you look at different venues around the nation you can go to you see names like ‘Pepsi Arena' or ‘America Airlines Field', and this will be something along those lines."
He did add that the current names on the venues might remain in one form or another.
"The intent is not to take away from the names of any of our current buildings," Lener said. "What we will have to do is look at all of the options, take them back to the board and see what we are comfortable with."
So what do you all make of this? Obviously everyone is hurting in this down economy and even institutions like Miami need to find ways to save some money somewhere. I know the first thing that comes to my mind is how this will affect the Miami ice hockey team that is looking to move to a brand-new conference in two years, one that will require them to do a lot more travelling in order to play its new further-away conference opponents. Will we be looking at the P&G Goggin Ice Center?
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