In 1998, the University of Virginia undertook a major self-evaluation with the ultimate goal of establishing new goals and priorities for all areas of University life. The commission responsible for completing this task, the Virginia 2020 Strategic Planning Task Force, analyzed all areas of the school and released its report on athletics in March 2001. The report was especially timely for the athletic department as then-director Terry Holland was on his way out the door, retiring from the post later that summer.
The task force paid special attention to four areas of Cavalier athletics: Programs and facilities, academic and student life, compliance and finances and fundraising. The members of the task force, comprised predominantly of University administrators, faculty and alumni, entered the process with the understanding that it is "difficult to discover and maintain the proper balance between the aims of higher education and the goals of intercollegiate athletics."
The commission identified two "areas of particular concern" -- department finances and the academic performance of student athletes. General reaction to the report forecast resided more in response to possible doomsday scenarios up to and including the necessity of tiering the importance of sports based on available financial resources.
After conducting an exhaustive search, in August 2001 the University chose to promote from within, and as the new athletic director, Craig Littlepage, was given the unenviable task of responding to all of the concerns presented by the Virginia 2020 Task Force. His first major victory was a recommendation by the University's Board of Visitors to consider school athletics to be a valuable commodity instead of a financial liability.
Littlepage went in the opposite direction of the Virginia 2020 report, which feared future budget deficits and possible cutbacks in sports. Instead, Virginia's new athletic director has undertaken an energetic and optimistic vision of the sports program at U. Va.
The centerpiece of Littlepage's agenda for Virginia sports is the ambitious 10-year plan he unveiled in the spring of 2002. In the next decade, he hoped to achieve these six goals:
1)Graduate 100 percent of student athletes
2)Win 70 ACC and 12 national championships
3)Fully endow all scholarships and fund all athletic department expenses
4)Build the highest quality facilities
5)Recruit the best student athletes nationwide
6)Comply fully with Title IX
Now one-fifth of the way into the bold plan for the department, it is time to evaluate Virginia's progress toward meeting those goals.
Academic Goals
In January 2004, Littlepage reported to the Faculty Senate that the University graduates 82 percent of its student athletes within six years and with an average GPA of 2.81 (numbers through 2002-03 school year). That graduation rate is up from 78 percent for the class that entered in the fall of 1993. In contrast, the national rate for Division I-A student athletes is only 63 percent. The average for the entire University population is 91.7 percent (figure accurate for the same six-year period as student athletes and accurate as of the entering class of 1996).
Littlepage cautioned that graduation rates, as they are typically computed, can portray skewed results because of the way they are computed. For instance, the case of a student athlete who transfers away from the University for a non-academic reason to a new school -- where he or she then successfully graduates -- is still recorded negatively against the University. Additionally, graduation rates only take scholarship athletes into account, thus leaving a large percentage of student athletes out of the statistics.
But Littlepage's goal of an absolute graduation mandate for all student athletes would remove the need for such considerations.
"We strive to graduate 100 percent of the kids that complete our eligibility with us," Littlepage said. "It is a very lofty goal, but it should be fundamental to everything that we do when we recruit prospective students."
The athletic department and its academic affairs office continue to integrate student athletes into the rest of the student body in terms of limiting missed class time and, with the aid of College Dean Edward Ayers, establishing a new advising system for student athletes.
Athletic Goals
Perhaps the most striking features of Littlepage's plan are the explicit goals for athletic achievement. Instead of merely stating a desire to improve Virginia's success in ACC or NCAA competition, Littlepage ordained a stated target of 70 conference championships and 12 national titles for his athletic department over a 10-year period.
"Most competitive people work better in an environment where they have something finite for which they are shooting," he said. "Once you put something down, it becomes real and becomes something you hold yourself accountable to accomplish."
The exact numbers were not derived from any sort of formula, but rather from a collaboration of senior athletic administrators pouring over historical data from Virginia and peer institutions.
"We looked around the country at other top-performing institutions and looked at our own history," Littlepage said. "There wasn't anything particularly magical about [the numbers] other than we felt as though it was reasonable. We felt that these were goals that would stretch us but were not unrealistic."
Though there was some initial skepticism at the Cavaliers' capacity to reach such challenging goals, some of the early doubt has been removed thanks to Virginia's recent success. This year's national championship for the women's lacrosse team and school-record six ACC titles have instilled a confidence that the numbers 12 and 70 aren't so far out of reach.
"I've always thought that it's really hard to do these quantitative analyses of athletic achievement since wins and losses can be so fickle," men's lacrosse coach Dom Starsia said. "For Craig to put that out there, you stick your neck out there a little bit. But I think as we've gotten a little further along in this, now people think that these goals -- not that they're going to be easy -- but that they're attainable."
Starsia certainly understands how fleeting success can be. In 2003, Virginia men's lacrosse won the ACC and national championships. In 2004, his team went 5-8 and missed the NCAA tournament for the first time in his 12 years in Charlottesville.
The Cavaliers have now garnered 10 ACC titles and two national titles in the first two years of the decade-long plan. They will need to average 7.5 conference and 1.25 national championships per year for the next eight to accomplish their goal.
"The answer [to whether such a goal is possible] is 'yes,'" women's rowing coach Kevin Sauer said. "Is it going to be very difficult? Yes, but we can win those national and ACC championships. I think changing the whole outlook and culture of athletics is a big part of that. Can we be successful athletically and maintain our academic standards? Yes, we can. Stanford's done it."
In fact, in addition to being a top-10 school academically, Stanford has captured 10 consecutive Sears Cup trophies, awarded annually to the university with the best all-around sports program, as measured by athletic achievement. During the same time frame, Virginia has been ranked in the top 30 all 10 years, peaking at number eight for the 1998-99 school year and averaging a finish of 20th place.
A standard of measure such as the Sears Cup is apt for Virginia. In complete rejection of the notion of tiering sports by levels of importance, Littlepage demanded that the University's athletic program "be the best across the board." Though the three major sports at the University -- football and men's and women's basketball -- account for 43.7 percent of athletic department expenses (and generate 55.3 percent of its revenues), those three sports will not likely play a major role in helping Virginia reach its championship goals.
"I understand why men's and women's basketball and football get all the attention, but those ACC championships and national championships that are such a big part of Craig's goals -- history would say that those are probably going to be attained by sports other than the big three," Starsia said.
Collectively, those three sports have won zero all-time national titles and only six ACC championships (and none since 1995).
Funding
A further and similarly ambitious aspect of Littlepage's plan was to ensure full funding of all Virginia sports. This came on the heels of the Virginia 2020 Task Force's finding that 54 percent of Division I-A schools reported a deficit in 1999 (the most current data then available). The most dire news came in the form of one projection that estimated a possible cumulative athletic budget deficit of up to $47 million over the next 10 years.
Littlepage, however, said that the athletic department is operating on an efficient business model. In fact, operating on a budget of more than $36 million, Virginia athletics had approximately $425,000 more in revenues than expenses in 2002-03 (according to the Department of Education).
In this vein, Littlepage dispelled notions that tiering sports was ever a viable option.
"I think more accurately what the past report did was represent ways that accumulating a debt could be a burden," he said. "Among other things, tiering sports was one possibility if in fact it started to evolve that we weren't meeting the bottom line."
That efficiency, combined with increased fundraising efforts by the Virginia Athletics Foundation, has enabled the University to meet Littlepage's goal of offering the NCAA's maximum number of allowable athletic scholarships for the first time in 2004-05.
In accordance with its goal of funding the expenses of all sports, the athletic department will now offer more full-time assistant coaching positions.
"A lot of the second assistant positions in Olympic sports in the past have been part-time, and they haven't had benefits," baseball coach Brian O'Connor said. "In this next year, they're all going to be full-time positions. That is one tremendous commitment."
That commitment has extended to sports facilities as well. Virginia recently completed a $5 million reconstruction of its baseball stadium and has raised $84.3 million of the $129.8 million it needs to finish construction on a new, state-of-the-art basketball arena, scheduled to open in 2006.
Title IX
Another component of the 10-year plan is to ensure compliance with Title IX -- a 1972 mandate by the Department of Education that male and female students are to be equally represented in school sports. To measure a school's compliance with Title IX, a three-pronged test is applied to the athletic department's offerings for both genders.
The first part of the test compares the proportions of male and female students in the overall school population to the proportions of male and female student athletes. According to the Web site for the Department of Education's Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, women constituted 55.5 percent of Virginia's student body in 2002-03 but only 47.6 percent of the student athlete population. The federal Office of Civil Rights generally considers a difference of up to 2 percent as non-discriminatory, but as Littlepage points out, "there are few schools that are in full, strict compliance with Title IX."
The second prong of the test examines whether an institution historically has made an effort to expand support for the underrepresented gender. This is where Virginia meets Title IX standards, as it has added both women's rowing (first year of competition: 1995-96) and women's golf (2003-04) in the last decade.
"One of the things that we have done to demonstrate our compliance with Title IX is to expand our program," Littlepage said.
This recent expansion of the women's sports program has enabled Virginia not to worry about the third prong, which simply dictates that a school must meet the athletic needs and interests of its student body.
Future
Almost three years after taking the helm of the University's athletic program, Littlepage reviewed the accomplishments of his department in that short time.
"We've fully funded our program, recruited the best student athletes nationally and made the commitment to build the kind of facilities that put us among the institutions in the country that have excellent facilities," he said. "If you go back 15 years, we were way behind, but now we're back in the race of having the type of facilities that will help us attract and develop our student athletes both in terms of their academics and their athletic skills."
This fall the expansion of the ACC will not only broaden the horizon for the stature of Virginia athletics -- by enabling increased revenues and greater attention on the national sports stage -- but also present new challenges in first reaching and then remaining among the nation's elite college sports programs.
"Baseball was so close this year," Starsia said. "By the end of the day, they don't quite win the ACC championship, and they don't win a national championship. Now Miami's in the conference, and it's going to be that much more difficult. The schools that we compete with are not going to just sit around and let us do what we want to do. It's going to continue to get tougher, and we're going to have to continue to grow."
Next on the plate for Littlepage is helping oversee the construction of the University's new basketball arena and trying to strengthen the bond between the athletic department and the rest of school community and to maintain a high degree of relevance for athletics as a central part of the University's identity.
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