Maryland’s Athletic Department--It’s a Struggle to Stay Out of the Red

Tom Fields won’t be hoisted for a victory ride if the University of Maryland’s football or basketball team ever wins a national championship, but with earnings of about $200,000 a year, he makes more than anyone else in the athletic department except Lefty Driesell, the basketball coach.

Never heard of Tom Fields? Well, in many ways, Fields, a 68-year-old retired Marine colonel, is the most valuable player of Maryland’s $10 million, 22-team, self-supporting program. In directing the Terrapins’ booster club, it is Fields who provides the muscle--and hustle--to bring in athletes and pay for their scholarships.

When Fields took over Maryland’s main booster club 16 years ago, membership totaled slightly less than 300 and contributions had dwindled to less than $30,000. “We had to raise money to be competitive,” Fields said, and he’s gotten the job done: Membership has swelled to almost 3,800 and he expects to close his books this week with $2.25 million in contributions and at least $350,000 in interest for the year.

He is rewarded accordingly: Fields’ $36,565 annual salary is supplemented by fund-raising commissions that this year will total about $175,000.

His fund raising--plus income from gate receipts, student fees and television rights fees--helps Maryland keep coaches like Driesell and Bobby Ross, and enables Athletic Director Dick Dull to pay for an athletic department with a staff of 192 employees.

Fields recalled a far different picture when he arrived. “They didn’t have a full-time fund-raiser,” he said. “They really didn’t have a professional fund-raising program. I knew I had a job to do. Most people in those days thought the ultimate goal at Maryland was to raise $250,000 per year.”

Fields accomplished that in 1973. Now, his ultimate goal is to build up a $20 million reserve so that scholarships can be financed from the interest alone. Right now, there is upwards of $3 million in the kitty. “I wish we had more, but . . . if you can keep a steady pace, look where you’re going to be in 10 years and 20 years down the road,” he said.

Fields hasn’t seen the pace slowing because of the cocaine-induced death of basketball star Len Bias last month and subsequent revelations that Bias, and four other team members, flunked out of school last semester. “If somebody’s mad, they’re not calling me,” Fields said.

At Maryland, Fields said, there is no tradition of influential alumni opening their checkbooks wide. “We’re unique,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of big donors. If a guy decides he’s going to give a million dollars and he graduated from the school of engineering, he’s going to give it to the school of engineering. There are very few (of our) people wealthy because of athletics.”

Among the biggest contributors is Fields himself, who two years ago became a lifetime member with a one-time $10,000 donation. “You spend so much time as a fund-raiser, talking people into giving, that you talk yourself into giving,” said Fields, an all-America cross country runner at Maryland in the early 1940s.

Money from the Terrapin Club is earmarked to go only for athletic scholarships and back into fund-raising. Since 1977, the club, in combination with a clutch of other donors, has paid for all athletic scholarships. This year, the club expects to pay out $1.7 million as its share of 95 full grants-in-aid in football, 30 in basketball and the equivalent of 161 1/2 for varsity athletes in the non-revenue sports such as volleyball, lacrosse and golf.

The other three major sources of income for Maryland’s athletic department are student fees, budgeted at slightly less than $2.4 million; net gate receipts, $2 million from football games and almost $500,000 from basketball; and the Atlantic Coast Conference’s distribution of television rights fees and NCAA tournament profits (a combined $2.1 million for Maryland’s share).

Nearly half of Maryland’s expected $8.3 million in operating expenses for the fiscal year that started last week will go into salaries. For the new fiscal year, football is budgeted to spend $1.55 million and basketball almost $783,000. But the university salary is only the beginning for the two revenue-producing coaches, Ross and Driesell, each of whom will make $85,800 in base pay.

Driesell’s income can exceed $300,000, including earnings from radio and television ($65,000), a shoe contract ($100,000), his summer camp and speaking fees, sources said.

“I don’t care about money,” said Driesell. “I mean, if my wife died tomorrow, I’d be in bad shape because I don’t know where my money (is). I don’t even know how much money I’ve got . . . I didn’t even know what my salary was until you just told me. . . . Some people coach to make money, I coach to coach.”

Ross said he makes little above the $150,800 he earns in base pay and from his radio-television contract.

After Ross turned down the football coaching job at Missouri in December 1984, sources said Maryland offered a 10-year contract that included eventual ownership of the $325,000 six-level brick colonial home in which he lives. Ross declined, saying he was concerned about decaying facilities and bandbox (45,000-seat) Byrd Stadium, plus unclear admissions standards. After a job offer from Minnesota last fall, Ross got written guidelines on which athletes could be admitted as exceptions to the university’s standard requirements, a commitment to a modest renovation and expansion project for the stadium--and signed a four-year contract.

Does he regret losing the house? “Not really,” Ross said. “I’ve never made money a top priority.”

Yet both he and Driesell have clauses in their contracts specifying they each be given a new Cadillac courtesy car to drive each year. Chancellor John B. Slaughter drives a 1985 Chevrolet station wagon from the state motor pool.

Ross also will receive an annuity, financed at $15,000 a year by boosters, at the end of his fifth year. Women’s basketball coach Chris Weller will earn $42,768 next year, but she doesn’t begrudge Driesell his more affluent lifestyle.

“He’s under a lot more pressure than I am,” Weller said. “The amount of sacrifice that a public figure has to make in everything that they do, the almost mental anguish at times, I think is worse than financial consideration. And I think he is so responsible for so many things and so evaluated, almost unfairly, I don’t have that anywhere near the scale he does.”

Responsibilities and remunerations certainly are different on the academic side at Maryland. For example, Paul H. Mazzocchi, professor and chairman of the chemistry department, earns $82,221 annually. But does he have a $100,000 contract with, say, Dow Chemical? “You bet your bippies I don’t,” he said.

Last year, Mazzocchi did four days consulting work for the federal government at $100 a day, and he is allowed up to 30 days private consulting. He declined to say what he earned privately but said a Nobel Prize winner commands $1,500 a day consulting; even at that rate, the maximum would be $45,000.

“It’s a very different situation than what you get with a shoe contract, because it requires me to use my knowledge and work at it,” he said. “Nobody gives me money because I’m at the University of Maryland.”

Details of the coaches’ contracts make it sound strictly big time, big money and it is true that the athletic department’s operating budget has almost doubled since Dull arrived as athletic director five years ago. Still, staying out of the red remains a constant struggle.

Maryland produces less income--and therefore spends less--than many of its competitors. At West Virginia, for instance, the budget is $12.7 million, with $3.4 million in gate receipts, $1.15 million in student fees.

Not only does Maryland face competition for area fans from professional sports and horse racing, Byrd Stadium is small compared to those used by other aspirants for the national championship. Consequently Maryland is heavily dependent on student fees, which account for about 25% of its revenue, compared to a national average of 6% at football-playing Division I schools, according to the NCAA.

Student fees at Maryland are $81 per year, $51 higher than in 1975 when then-athletic director Jim Kehoe tried vigorously to get an increase--to support women’s athletics under then-recently implemented Title IX guidelines--and ended up fighting with others on campus who wanted to abolish the fees.

“In my day, when I tried to get a dollar, they would have had a riot, insurrection and revolution,” said Kehoe. “One of the most important things I did was the saving of the athletic fee because without the athletic fee, athletics at the University of Maryland could not survive.”

The athletic fee and revenue sharing from long-term conference television contracts in football and basketball provide the financial stability. Dull was heavily involved in negotiating the ACC’s five-year, $46 million basketball TV contract (with syndicator Jefferson-Raycom), the first year of which was just completed. “The most important thing I’ve done since being here, other than hiring Bobby Ross,” Dull said.

In addition to that contract (worth $8 million next season), the ACC has separate basketball deals with CBS and NBC, and football contracts with CBS and Jefferson-Raycom. The total package brings the league approximately $13.7 million a year, of which about $1.7 million goes to Maryland.

Television money helps offset Maryland’s annual struggle at the gate.