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Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

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Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

Eeyore said:
In fact, football isn't profitable at more than about 20 schools in the country. Far from supporting the other sports, it's a net drain on revenue.
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I suspect that depends on how you measure it. Football draws the fans and has some "indirect-financial" benefits like bigger donors to the school in general, merchandise sales, consession stands sales, parking etc etc etc etc.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

wwhyte said:
Can you explain why? Not being sarcastic here -- I come from Ireland, where college sports are a less big thing; colleges provide facilities but don't fund such a wide range of sports, certainly not to the extent that goes on here, and I'm used to sporting opportunities being informal/out-of-college/club-based as opposed to formal/in-college.
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Another attempt from a logical school administration point of view...

In the US (and maybe Ireland), an alumni's relationship with his/her school is deep and is critical for the school's success. From a school administration point of view, literally anything that deepens and widens an alumni's identification and allegiance to his/her school is critical. So while it shows a schools commitment to its students and creates fan bonds with the community even if its just in the casual reading of sports scores...and this leads to big alumni donations and more future students.

Not directly on target...but TCF stadium was built in part with a $6 million single private contribution. And the Weisman Museum...while not central to education...is thriving and having cross benefits:

From an article: The Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis contains millions of dollars in paintings, sculptures and other works of art, and most of what it takes in each year is donated by artists and collectors. Museum Director Lyndel King said the Weisman accepts 200 to 300 donations annually, as do other groups at the University of Minnesota that take nonmonetary donations. King said some individual gifts have been valued at $15 million to $20 million. "But that's not the most important thing when we're looking at what to accept into a collection," she said. The university received 916 such "gifts in kind" from July 1, 2012, to June 30 of this year for a total value of about $2.5 million, said Frank Robertson, senior director of planned giving for the University of Minnesota Foundation, which serves as the middleman in accepting gifts from outside donors. Any gift must have a purpose for the facility or department to which it's donated, he said. If a gift meets these requirements, the donor might be able to take a tax deduction
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

<a target='_blank' title='ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting' href='http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/823/fy07.png/'><img src='http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/7703/fy07.png' border='0'/></a><br>

Merry Christmas!

To my fellow GWH fans and friends.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

5mn_Major said:
In the US (and maybe Ireland), an alumni's relationship with his/her school is deep and is critical for the school's success. From a school administration point of view, literally anything that deepens and widens an alumni's identification and allegiance to his/her school is critical. So while it shows a schools commitment to its students and creates fan bonds with the community even if its just in the casual reading of sports scores...and this leads to big alumni donations and more future students.
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The problem with this is that ultimately football, like all sports, is zero sum. If your school is going to win more games, then some other schools are going to have to win fewer. There is no way in which the aggregate winning percentage of college football teams, and thus the aggregate good feelings on the part of alumni, can ever be made greater than .500. So, while getting more alumni donations by winning more games can be used to justify an increase in spending at a single school, it can't be used to justify greater spending by all Division I schools. Some of them will find that they've come out as losers in this pursuit.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

CrazyDave said:
(Though I'm a bit miffed that they missed Mira Jalosuo on the list of last season's Gophers training for the Olympics.)
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Looks like that oversight was corrected in a later edition.

In any case, I bet the only other Minnesota team that was even remotely in the running was another women's team, the Minnesota Lynx. But as good as they were, they didn't come anywhere near winning 41 straight.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

Eeyore said:
The problem with this is that ultimately football, like all sports, is zero sum. If your school is going to win more games, then some other schools are going to have to win fewer. There is no way in which the aggregate winning percentage of college football teams, and thus the aggregate good feelings on the part of alumni, can ever be made greater than .500. So, while getting more alumni donations by winning more games can be used to justify an increase in spending at a single school, it can't be used to justify greater spending by all Division I schools. Some of them will find that they've come out as losers in this pursuit.
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True. But that's the way of the world. Invest or be left behind. If a school fails to compete for donations and participate in the resulting sports arms race...they will assuredly be losers and probably hugely so. In the case of the B1G, there is a growing BTN pie making it easier to be competitive. In fact, MN was fourth in the B1G in the 2013 aggregate all sports standings directors cup after Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State. In recent years, MN has not been a loser.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

5mn_Major said:
True. But that's the way of the world. Invest or be left behind.
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No, it is not the way of the world; it is the way of the business world. Universities are not supposed to be businesses. If all universities are engaged in an arms race that collectively leaves them poorer, in ways that extend beyond profits, then this is a bad thing.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

Eeyore said:
Either you misread it or they've edited the article because Jalosuo is mentioned as an Olympian now.
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D2D said:
Looks like that oversight was corrected in a later edition.
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I commented on it on the Strib web site (about the same time I posted the link here), and it was noticed and corrected.
 
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Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

From the column of Charley Walters in the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

More than 42,000 tickets have been sold for the Gophers-Ohio State men's outdoor hockey game and the Gophers women's outdoor hockey game against Minnesota State Mankato on Jan. 17 at 50,000-capacity TCF Bank Stadium.
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Let's hope a good chunk of those ticket buyers show up for the Gopher vs. Maverick game. Fair chance for GWH to achieve their biggest single game audience perhaps?
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

brookyone said:
From the column of Charley Walters in the St. Paul Pioneer Press:



Let's hope a good chunk of those ticket buyers show up for the Gopher vs. Maverick game. Fair chance for GWH to achieve their biggest single game audience perhaps?
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I think it will all depend on the weather. As a longtime men's season ticket holder, I have great seats to the event, but if the temp is forecasted to be below zero :eek: I'm not going! But if it's fairly decent outside, I'll be there for both games and will (hopefully) help both teams set an all-time attendance record! :)
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Women's Hockey 2013-14 Season

5mn_Major said:
In the US (and maybe Ireland), an alumni's relationship with his/her school is deep and is critical for the school's success. From a school administration point of view, literally anything that deepens and widens an alumni's identification and allegiance to his/her school is critical. So while it shows a schools commitment to its students and creates fan bonds with the community even if its just in the casual reading of sports scores...and this leads to big alumni donations and more future students.
Click to expand...

The boat may have sailed on this discussion, but this is an interesting difference. In Ireland (and the UK), almost all universities are state-funded, and alumni donations / the endowment are a much smaller part of the overall budget. The older universities, which existed before state funding, have more of a tradition of engagement with alumni, and usually a more formal sporting tradition. So I agree that private universities probably have a lot to do with it, though I think there's also more of a culture of sports being central in the US (all I know about US high school I learned from John Hughes movies, so I may be wrong about this): you could never do a Friday Night Lights about Irish high school sports, for example, it just doesn't matter enough.

I don't know anything about the situation in Canada, which is often a midpoint between the US and the Europeans. Are universities state-funded? Is high school and college sports as big a thing there as in the US?
 
D2D said:
To brookone's post I would also add that many people - but maybe not enough people - bemoan the trend of the almighty dollar dictating the decision-making process to cut the various "non-revenue sports" at an increasing number of schools. Yes, at nearly all D1 institutions football and men's basketball bring in the bulk of the revenue's, which do in fact go to support all of the other "lesser" sports (lesser in terms of attendance and gate receipts). But at many of those schools, when one (or both) of those two "major" teams falter, attendance suffers and revenues decline. This, in turn, sometimes leads to decisions to put more money into those sports to turn them around and become more competitive. And, unfortunately in the process, those "investments" will sometimes result in certain sports being eliminated. And again - unfortunately - women's hockey is especially vulnerable, because it's more expensive than most, and attendance is such where at most schools that ticket sales revenue does not begin to cover its cost.
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Though we as hockey fans have also benefitted at the expense of other sports. Northeastern and BU dropped football to sustain in the case of the former, and add in the latter, while Syracuse dropped sports to ad its women's program.
 
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