The Sport of Selling UCI
Something strange happened at UC Irvine this year: The basketball team got good. Really good. A couple of professors there had won Nobel Prizes, and many of its academic programs are ranked among the best in the country. But basketball? Who did they think they were, UCLA?
Maybe.
The blossoming of UCI’s basketball squad into one of the top teams in the Big West conference was no coincidence. It was part of a plan Chancellor Ralph Cicerone launched shortly after his appointment three years ago, which included raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to send the team on a preseason tour of Canada, to improve training facilities and to keep athletes on campus during the summer. A quiescent student body has turned into a bunch of maniacally screaming fans at the games.
But Cicerone’s plan has a more important goal than putting an athletic weakling on a Charles Atlas program. He views sports as giving the university a higher national profile while providing students with more activities in a bleak campus social scene. And a better social life means an easier sell to the elite students the university wants to attract.
Cicerone isn’t finished, either. UC Irvine is spending millions to rebuild its baseball field in time to reintroduce the sport in January, and he hopes to raise the money to expand the centers for sports medicine and strength and conditioning.
Because college sports are more than just games, Cicerone isn’t the only one with this idea. Thirty miles east along the Riverside Freeway, UC Riverside Chancellor Ray Orbach has embarked on a similar path.
It’s no coincidence the two chancellors are alumni of schools known for their combination of athletics and academics. Cicerone’s from the University of Michigan and Orbach from UCLA. And it’s no coincidence they run the two latest UC campuses pointed toward the ranks of the nation’s elite universities.
“The chancellor felt if we’re going to be a fabulous academic environment, we need to do everything at the highest level,” said Riverside Athletic Director Stan Morrison, former basketball coach at USC. “If you’re going to the prom, you don’t wear flip-flops.”
Experts are divided on whether successful teams in marquee sports--like basketball and football--make it easier to raise money for academic programs and to attract smarter students.
“Do athletics make a difference on campus? Yes, they do,” said Stanley Ikenberry, president of the American Council on Education. “They’re a great community builder. Alumni, students and townspeople bond together and have a sense of identity through athletics they might not have had.”
But does it lead to more donations and more applications?
“There’s no evidence to support that,” he said. “Successful athletic programs do tend to generate more donations to athletic programs but not necessarily to the university itself.”
Raising the Profile With Winning Teams
Still, experts point to universities that have received a boost in their national profile from sports. The best examples, they say, are Georgetown and Duke, which already had reputations for strong academics. It wasn’t until their basketball teams became perennial winners, though, that they became national universities.
The most recent example is Gonzaga University, an obscure Jesuit school in Spokane, Wash. For the last three years, it has become the darling of the NCAA basketball tournament, upsetting better-known schools and garnering national coverage.
Dale Goodwin, Gonzaga’s public relations director, said fund-raising has almost doubled in the last three years and applications are at a record number, with 15 to 20 each year coming from such far-off states as Maine, Florida and Vermont, where the university has never recruited.
“The only thing we can put our finger on is basketball notoriety,” Goodwin said.
No one can deny the publicity that sports provide a university. A major sports program gets day after day of stories in the local newspapers and TV coverage, while the university’s scholars get next to nothing. Alumni maintain connections to their schools by following sports.
The explosion of cable sports networks means that even obscure sports are televised, more highlights are shown and schools are mentioned more often.
“It’s a basic kind of brand awareness,” said Robert Pringle, associate vice president, development, at Stanford University.
UCI has had its share of good teams through the years, usually in such minor sports as water polo and tennis.
Even its basketball program has produced stars, such as Scott Brooks, who played in the NBA, and two-time All American Kevin Magee.
But in the late ‘80s, the basketball team started on a downhill slide.
When the recession in the early ‘90s hit, budget cuts meant $500,000 shaved from UCI’s athletic programs. Baseball was dropped. Athletes transferred in droves.
UCI fell to the bottom 6% of NCAA Division I schools in the number of athletic scholarships it awarded.
By the 1996-97 season, the basketball team’s record was 1 win, 25 losses.
When Cicerone was appointed chancellor in 1998, he decided the campus culture needed a jolt. He knew from his years as a professor and dean that student life on campus was dull. There is no surrounding college town as at UC Berkeley, Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.) or UCLA (Westwood), where myriad cultural activities are available. So many students leave on weekends that UCI can be a ghost town.
Said the Princeton Review college guide, “If suburban diversions excite you, there’s Irvine.”
Students said that because so many of them commute, it’s hard to meet people and the night life is quiet. “It’s not as exciting as other colleges like UCLA,” said senior Gabriel Gaytan. “Even the library closes relatively early.”
Cicerone is a sports man. He played basketball, football, baseball and golf as a high school student in western Pennsylvania and as an undergraduate at MIT. He once considered giving up academia to become a broadcaster for the San Diego Padres.
Within weeks of Cicerone becoming chancellor, he and Athletic Director Dan Guerrero turned for help to the Chief Executive Roundtable, a UCI support group of about 80 prominent Orange County business executives, including Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli of Broadcom, Richard Sim of the Irvine Co. and Charles Haggerty of Western Digital Corp. Members pay $12,500 annual dues. Cicerone told them that as UCI competed for better students, it needed to improve the quality of its social life.
“We’ve become more selective, and we have to compete,” Cicerone said. “We’re dealing with students who are being admitted to a lot of very good places that have even more to offer than we do.”
When the subject turned to athletics, Cicerone recalled, not all of the CEOs were eager to help. Nevertheless, the group has raised $100,000 for the basketball team each of the last three years with a halftime free-throw contest. The fund-raiser has included pledges for each basket Cicerone hits. He never told the CEOs he had once made 88 in a row in high school.
In 1999, the athletic program received its most important boost when students voted to tax themselves $33 per quarter, with most of the money going to the intercollegiate athletic program.
More Money, Grants and the Loyal CIA
UCI’s athletic budget jumped from $4 million in $6.8 million. UCLA spends nearly twice that on football alone. That’s one team Cicerone says UCI will never have. With 95 players on a squad, plus equipment, coaches and scholarships, it’s too expensive.
The referendum paid for the university to add women’s track, water polo, women’s golf and baseball. It also provides $1.5 million a year for scholarships, allowing UCI to offer the maximum number of grants the NCAA allows in each sport. That plus the CEO money paid for the 10-day Canadian trip and a summer season for the basketball team for training.
At the same time, UCI’s expanded athletic marketing department went to work getting students involved. Duke has the Cameron Crazies, the frenzied students who paint their faces and chests, wear fright wigs and wait in line for hours to buy tickets.
UCI’s marketers joined with the student government to form the CIA, Completely Insane Anteaters, giving them yellow shirts--the school colors are blue and gold--and encouraging their antics. The athletic department placed a student in the crowd early in the season to instigate the students, and they quickly caught on. They screamed, they spelled out the names of the UCI stars on their chests, letter by letter. They stood the entire game.
“If you had told me it would be like that, I’d say no way at UC Irvine,” said marketing director Blake Sasaki.
What helps attendance most is a winning team, and that’s what the school got: a team that went 25-5, won the regular-season conference championship and was invited to the National Invitational Tournament. There was record noise along with record attendance in the 5,000-seat Bren Center. Once the Big West Conference season started, attendance averaged 3,484 people, an increase of nearly 80% over the year before. Cheering at nearly all the games was Ralph Cicerone.
There is talk of expanding Bren Center, where the Anteaters play their home games, to a capacity of 8,500, if seismic and engineering standards permit.
If the standards allow expansion, the questions become “How much will it cost and when should we start making movement?” Cicerone said. “If the answer is no, it would imply a different arena.”
With a growing program comes the potential pitfalls of recruiting violations that have befallen so many schools.
“A lot depends on who the stewards are, who the president and coaches are,” said Richard Lapchick, director of the Center for the Study of Sport and Society at Northeastern University in Boston.
Cicerone acknowledged the potential problems, and said he worries. “We’re going to be subjected to temptations. There will be pressure to win every game.”
The next time he and athletic director Guerrero meet with the CEO Roundtable, they’ll warn them about their relationships with athletes.
Next up for Cicerone and Guerrero is the baseball team, which begins play in January. The $10-million stadium is being rebuilt in several stages to make it one of the best college fields in the country. The first stage, costing $3.5 million, should be completed by November.
So far, the athletic plan seems to be working. “Now everybody goes [to the basketball games],” said junior Azita Morandmand. “It’s packed. We can barely get in. There’s a sense of pride that wasn’t there before.”
