When surveying the college athletics landscape, what’s virtually always overlooked are those schools and student-athletes outside the power conferences and non-mainstream sports.
That’s a reality entrenched amidst the enigmas of the NCAA…
The newfound trend of VR startups venturing into elite college programs only highlights the disparity that exists, with the overall divide, seemingly, growing each season. College sports, though, purports an arms race environment, where universities are perpetually impelled to compete with one another. Only some of them, indeed, prove to be profitable, while the others vie to reach certain, elusive thresholds.
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According to CNNMoney, the 64 schools in the five major conferences amassed, collectively, $2.8 billion in revenue last year. While the vast majority of this pie comes from broadcasting rights–including ESPN doling out $7.3 billion for the first dozen years of the new college football playoffs–almost half of the total revenue is kept by these colleges. The top three universities profiteering from this system are the University of Texas, University of Michigan, and the University of Alabama, with profits of $74 million, $64.6 million, and $53.3 million, respectively, last season. The Division 1 schools outside of the top five power conferences, though, “essentially break even as a group on football,” states CNNMoney.
Yet, assessed further, there were just 20 athletic programs among the Football Bowl Subdivision that had revenue eclipse expenses in 2013, per PolitiFact Virginia. The median profit pulled by football programs was slightly north of $3 million and basketball programs’ median profit at $340,000. After accounting for subsidizing the other intercollegiate sports, the median loss reached $11.6 million. So, by and large, the athletic departments excluded of the FBS operate in the red.
Regardless of what the actual profit margin for any number of athletic programs might be, recruiting is, invariably, the area where a sizeable portion of the resources are spent–the chasm that underlines the haves and have-nots.
The SEC, in particular, can attribute its recent college football success to spending about $582,000 annually recruiting football players; that’s $150,000 more, on average, than the other public schools in the four power conferences over the last five years, according to USA TODAY. Among these conferences as a collective, USA TODAY Sports’ data reveals that they were spending, on average, $247,000 more than non-power conference schools during the 2008-09 season then $360,000 more in 2012-13. Football recruiting expenditures, on the whole, rose upwards of $8.9 million, nearly 30 percent, during this interval of time. And Tennessee’s Vice Chancellor and Athletics Director, Dave Hart, made the admission that some schools likely itemize certain costs in different categories when it comes to recruiting expenses–meaning there’s several universities that spend more than what’s reported.
Conversely, there’s prospective student-athletes whom have their parents go insofar as spending their own money for recruiting purposes.
Between private lessons, showcases events, professional highlight videos, and personal recruiters, optional expenditures abound to receive exposure, with the hopes of earning a collegiate scholarship. The cost of private lessons from coaches can quickly add up, especially if it isn’t budgeted appropriately. Showcase events vary depending on the sport, but parents have to be strategic to consider several factors, besides exposure for its face value. If the player isn’t using their team’s Hudl videos, professional highlight videos can cost anywhere between $500 to $1,500 to be done; some college coaches can identify talent by watching merely 45 seconds of video. And if electing to have personal recruiters contact these schools, fees can range from $1,500 to $5,000 or more.
For the big time college programs that have the wherewithal, though, virtual reality can prove to be another item on their recruiting expenses list, such as the University of Michigan, as Jay Harbaugh, Michigan’s Tight Ends Coach and Assistant Special Teams Coach, told Sports Illustrated: “In recruiting, a lot of times we’re stuck in ‘imagination world.’ With VR, instead of just saying, ‘Hey, this is our team meeting room; imagine what it’s like when it’s full,’ you get a chance to take things out of the fantasy realm and let kids see and feel, to some degree, what life would be like as a Wolverine.”
Do you have the Michigan Virtual Reality app? Get it free now on Apple/Google Store! https://t.co/1UbpY8kYnD #GoBlue pic.twitter.com/3iv53RyWjm
— Michigan Baseball (@umichbaseball) November 16, 2015
However, virtual reality shouldn’t just be a tool for those schools with deep pockets–potentially creating more of a disparity among universities–but as a gateway for any college or prospect to partake in, especially as VR becomes more accessible beyond the initial consumer-facing devices entering the market.
As it stands currently, the VR landscape in college sports is just developing. While major Division 1 programs with the aforementioned large recruiting and training budgets have utilized the technology best, that’s simply due to their ability to afford it. For smaller schools and sports, though, it seems like there’s very little being being done. This reality is likely, partially, because of cost, but also because many coaches or athletic directors haven’t been exposed to virtual reality.
YouVisit, a New York-based VR company, creates interactive virtual experiences that are close to real life as possible, an alternative solution to this market. Although they started in the education sector (working with upwards of 1,000 colleges and universities), YouVisit has always planned on expanding to various experiences businesses and organizations that want to share VR to their respective audiences. In the case of sports, they saw a need for teams and athletic departments to reach student-athletes in a innovative way.
YouVisit’s Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Endri Tolka, elaborates to SportTechie why virtual reality should be utilized by non-revenue-generating college sports: “With much smaller recruiting budgets, coaches for smallers schools and sports often need to be very picky about how they spend money on both their own travel, as well as the costs of bringing recruiting recruits on campus. This can limit the amount of time they spend with some student-athletes, who might otherwise be interested in hearing more about the school.”
Therefore, the marketing value for these programs, through the creation of a VR experience, is huge. Instead of targeting a couple dozen recruits, coaches can instead provide an experience that resembles an official visit to hundreds of recruits anywhere in the world. These VR experiences can range from walk-throughs of the locker rooms and training facilities, to game day action, where the recruit can virtually sense it. Moreover, a VR recruiting experience is a controlled environment, so users confidently know what’s showcased to prospective student-athletes.
“Price can be a barrier to some athletic departments; however, our college and university partners have repeatedly told us that they’ve found the technology more than pays for itself. Schools can easily reach and engage more students, which, in turn, increase yield rates and physical campus visits,” says Tolka.
Of course, a significant portion of leading VR headset manufacturers work in conjunction with smartphones; so all a user needs is a headset, which can cost some dollars to a couple hundred dollars. YouVisit mentions that their partner schools have adopted several ways to get headsets in front of general recruits, and athletic departments could adopt these methods. For instance, the Savannah College of Art and Design mailed 10,000 Google Cardboards to prospective students. Other schools are taking more expensive VR headsets on the road to college fairs and events.
The challenges for smaller sports are not that much different than those faced by larger sports or programs–it’s just a matter of scale. In all cases, the interested parties are trying to market their offerings to a wider audience.
“Whether it’s a hotel operator, a major college football coach, or the swim coach at a Division 3 school in the middle of the U.S., they’re all hoping to make conversions (bring in recruits). For small schools, VR addresses the problem of name recognition. A flashy and creative virtual experience can be much more effective than yet another mailer from yet another school,” Tolka states.
As far as how should these coaches apply VR for their purposes, coaches should identify aspects of their program that are going to be the most marketable to potential recruits. Once they’ve identified what they want to create, it’s a matter of deciding how professional they want to make it. Through YouVisit, the final product can take nearly two months to finalize, as teams of videographers and editors can work together to create a seamless experience captured by specialized camera systems.
YouVisit provides users with the option of creating a completely professional experience that includes on-site shoot, production, and project management. By doing so, it enables them to create truly custom experiences. These VR tours can be coupled with a virtual guide that leads viewers and highlights key aspects of the program. If a coach wanted to, they could be inserted as the virtual tour guide throughout the entire VR recruiting video. YouVisit’s platform also provides analytical tools, allowing coaches to see where recruits are spending the most time within the VR experiences. Such feature is invaluable information that can help schools not only improve their virtual outreach, but also identify certain areas of their program that may need upgrading in order to make them more attractive to recruits, overall.
In fact, one adopter of YouVist that fits the profile of the smaller schools and sports, Travis Muncy, Head Men’s and Women’s Head Coach for Lincoln Memorial University, shares with SportTechie his experience with VR: “With international students, I would say only about five of them come for a visit. So, the other 95 percent just go on pictures, track records, and things like that. When you’re trying to describe some things like the dorm rooms… you can describe it, but they don’t get the visual image that we got from the virtual tour. We were able to show them the dorm rooms and the facilities on campus through the 360 degree tour.”
Muncy added: “We’re a DIII school, so for us, the resources are an especially big barrier for international students. We don’t have the budget to fly overseas to watch the British boys, or British girls, or the budget some of these D1 schools have, where they go over to Europe and travel for a week or two recruiting. We’re having to rely on recruiting services or contacts we have there, and then we don’t have the budget to fly them over, either. So, basically, what we’re doing is taking the visit to them, once we find the student-athletes.”
With more professional headsets, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, set for release in 2016, the technology, itself, is only going to get better. Tolka envisions more use of livestreaming virtual reality as a recruiting tool down the line, too, with schools trying to outdo each other, both on the recruiting front and playing field.
The virtual reality cost of recruiting across non-revenue-generating college sports is just starting…