After not offering intercollegiate sports for well over a decade, Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has launched an e-sports program this school year and will start both women’s volleyball and men’s basketball in 2025-26 school.
In contrast, Mountain Gateway Community College in Clifton Forge, Virginia, has offered men’s basketball for the past five years and a few other sports periodically as interest has dictated, but the school discontinued everything besides e-sports at the end of last school year.
This article is an excerpt from the current issue of the Community College Journal, the bimonthly magazine of the American Association of Community Colleges.
Lacking the big budgets and major revenue potential of many four-year universities, community colleges have a significantly more complex calculus when deciding whether to offer intercollegiate athletics, and to what extent. They need to account for startup and ongoing operating costs, and how they will find the funding for both, which often means tapping into college foundations and/or the surrounding community.
Building a model program
“The model is completely different,” says Christopher Parker, president and CEO of the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA), the community college equivalent to the NCAA. “Most two-year programs, when they build their model, they’re looking at how to fill seats and generate revenue from enrollment. At a four-year school, they’re spending millions—sometimes hundreds of millions—to generate brand licensing that puts money back into the program. At a two-year school, engagement is built on ROI of enrollment and marketability.”
The model for community colleges depends somewhat on which part of the country they’re located in, and what types of revenue streams are allowed to be spent on athletics, Parker says, adding that some programs do turn a profit, while many remain revenue-neutral—and some lose money, yet still justify the program based on marketability calculations.
“A lot of states have different funding models,” he says.
“There are schools that can spend state dollars. They are tied directly to enrollment. They’re not necessarily spending their own dollars. With others, it’s completely revenue generation by the colleges themselves, using auxiliary and third-party funds.”
Colleges have a wide range of facilities models, as well, Parker says. Some own facilities right on their campuses, particularly common in states like Mississippi and Florida, while others, in states such as Texas and Virginia, partner with cities, counties and local organizations, especially for sports like softball and baseball where building a field on campus might not be as feasible.
“Travel is probably your biggest expense,” he says. “You can choose to travel however you’d like, whether vans, or buses, or flying—you name it. With personnel, you have coaches who are on a stipend, on up to full-time employees. It’s all over the board, unlike the NCAA. It can be $2,000 [stipends], while others are full-time with state benefits.”
Startup costs are typically fundraised, Parker says, after the school determines a budget and then figures out what types of money they’re allowed to spend for which purposes. “Often times, they’ve already had somebody in their community who has come to them and wants to fundraise for athletics,” he says, adding that when making the ask, colleges need to communicate what sorts of return on investment they anticipate.
For rural colleges, that ROI often revolves around boosting enrollment, while “in more populous areas, it’s about brand management, with student athletes being walking billboards,” Parker says. “They brand the college and help create a sense of community.”
Once a program is running, community colleges look to fundraise mostly for ongoing operations as well as for student-athlete scholarships. “Both of those aspects are readily [supported],” he says. “It often starts with the community. A lot of schools we see starting athletics that haven’t had them for years, it comes from the community wanting a sense of pride or a sense of community. They often have no colleges other than a two-year school—or they have a big university and want to support other individuals in other ways. Both can be successful.”
Getting underway at Forsyth Tech
The spark for starting up the athletics program at Forsyth Tech, which “had not had sports for a very long time, well over a decade and maybe two,” came from student advocacy, says Janet Spriggs, who has been president of the school since January 2019.
“They felt like it would give them more of a college environment,” she says. “It was organic conversations that students had with me and other leaders. It wasn’t a movement or an effort, or anything organized. It was just informal, ‘Hey, what about athletics? Is that something we could think about doing?’ That led us to investigate, ‘What would that look like?’”
About 20 of the 58 community colleges in North Carolina have some type of athletic program, most often e-sports but many with basketball and some with other physical sports, Spriggs says. “We as an institution worked hard on a strategic plan that says we are doing our part to remove the stigma of community college, to make sure we are not just seen as a last resort for students in our communities,” she says. “But that we provide excellent academic and non-academic experiences, so we become a first choice.”
As Forsyth Tech went through the process of deciding to launch its teams, the college’s leadership also embraced the notion of athletics as a way to provide valuable lessons for students. “Through athletics, you learn teamwork, you learn leadership skills, you learn sportsmanship,” Spriggs says.
Located down the road from both Wake Forest University and Winston-Salem State, in the heart of Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) country, Forsyth is part of a community that embraces college sports and has not only internal but also external constituencies excited about the program, Spriggs says. Personnel at Wake Forest have been “tremendous” in helping the newly hired athletic director get the program underway, she says.
Determining a budget
Forsyth Tech determined a base budget for the program and has thought about how to expand if the first programs prove to be sustainable, keeping in mind that the school cannot use state dollars to fund athletics, Spriggs says. “We obviously didn’t want to go into this and think that we were going to have unlimited resources,” she says. “You can use county funds if the county so chooses to allocate money, but we decided we did not want to ask our county for funding. … We are looking toward our foundation. They have allocated for scholarships for our athletes. They had capital money restricted for capital improvements.”
Among the assets Forsyth Tech has at its disposal is a gymnasium on its west campus that will serve as the facility for both volleyball and basketball, although since it’s primarily been used for intramurals and physical education classes in the past, the facility needed approximately $920,000 worth of upgrades that the foundation money was able to cover, Spriggs says.
The main funding source the school has tapped for ongoing operations—budgeted at just over $220,000 for equipment, uniforms, coach stipends, officials, recruiting expenses and NJCAA membership fees—are student activity fees, which are permitted to be used for athletics, Spriggs says. The college has covered startup and occasional, cyclical expenses in creative ways: some funds for uniforms were raised by faculty, staff and students manning concession stands at Wake Forest games, while Forsyth Tech obtained “barely used” equipment from another two-year college in the state that was discontinuing its athletics programs, she says.
Another $50,000 from the foundation will go toward scholarships, starting next school year, while donors have at least preliminarily committed to others, Spriggs says. “We’ve had a lot of conversations: ‘Yes, we want to be part of it,’” she says.
Sponsorships on uniforms and billboards around the court will provide some nice-to-haves, Spriggs says. “You can get everything sponsored; I have learned that,” she says.
