- Paul Goedjen,
ISU roller hockey assistant captain
Shoes laced and wearing a crisp jersey, one emerges from the tunnel at Redbird Arena.
The other, shoes laced but jersey not as crisp, walks through the rough-looking service door to the side of a field house.
The stadium’s big screen flashes his name, jersey number, and position as he stands posed flexing in the background on the giant TV.
The other flops his bag down, cranes his neck toward the crowd of maybe 100, and gives the field house’s hardwood surface a kick. It’ll do.
One is here to compete, wearing school colors.
So is the other, same red and white.
Student-athlete: On a college campus, it’s a term you’re likely to encounter fairly often, or at least be familiar with. Ask the average college student to describe the prototypical student-athlete, and most will provide you with a description that is fairly ubiquitous. To most, a student-athlete is the physically imposing individual asleep in the back of the lecture hall, dressed in his team’s sweats, concerned far more with his next game than with the professor’s lecture.
Sure, he’s declared a major, but earning a degree isn’t his paramount goal, and he might as well just tell people he’s majoring in basketball, football, or whatever sport he’s on scholarship for. The student-athlete stereotype is one that is much more athlete than student.
This stereotype, like any, isn’t entirely fair. Many student-athletes on scholarship take their studies seriously and are focused on being a professional in something other than sports. Being an undergrad student, however, I notice more differences than similarities between myself and the varsity athletes I see around ISU.
For one, I’m not going to school for free, and many of them are. I spend a good chunk of my free time working a part-time job, while they’re practicing. Nobody phoned or visited me in an effort to recruit me to study journalism at ISU, although it might have been nice had they done so.
One more thing—they’re really good at sports, and I’m not.
But there are athletes around college campuses that go through school with an experience much more relatable to the average student. These athletes are without scholarships, un-recruited, often un-coached, and generally unrecognizable as college athletes at all. They don’t play in front of thousands. Some don’t even play in front of hundreds. They lack the skill, size, strength, athleticism, or some combination of all-of-the-above that would otherwise make them NCAA scholarship athletes. What many of them don’t lack, though, is the passion.
They are club athletes, and several hundred of them make up the 29 club sports teams at ISU. One such athlete is Paul Goedjen, 23, who is the assistant captain for the men’s roller hockey team.
“I see myself as more of a student, roller hockey is more of something I play on the side,” Goedjen says. “At the same time, there’s a little sense of school pride when I put the ISU jersey on. Mostly, it’s not [school pride] that makes it fun, it’s playing for your friends, your teammates.”
The roller hockey program enjoyed a respectable run of success this year, finishing second place in their conference and receiving a bid to the national championship tournament in Salt Lake City, Utah. The team took pride in qualifying for the tournament, as the last time ISU roller hockey received a bid was over ten years ago. They celebrated the culmination of a season of hard work, but the euphoria was brief. If they wanted to contend for the national title, they had a serious amount of planning to do.
“It was stressful, it puts a lot on you. Having to organize a trip across country for twelve guys is hard,” Goedjen says. “I understand that since we’re a club team, we have to figure stuff out ourselves, but financially, we really would’ve liked a little more help.”
ISU offered the roller hockey team some financial assistance: between $500 and $1,000 to help pay their way to Utah. That may appear to be a decent sum of money, but in relation to the university’s varsity teams, it is pennies. The annual budget for the men’s basketball team is $1.9 million dollars. Not to be outdone, the football team sports a budget of $2.7 million.
Even the lowest budget ISU teams, like gymnastics and tennis, have budgets over $350,000. Does $500-$1,000 still seem like a lot? Consider that the university’s funds would have only covered the tournament’s $700 entry fee, leaving the costs of a hotel, transportation, and food up to the roller hockey team to figure out.
When a varsity sports program at ISU qualifies for a championship, they go. The athletic department arranges transportation and lodging, while the players and coaches focus on preparation as they go on to represent ISU on a national stage. They can afford it.
There’s one obvious argument as to why varsity sports are well funded and club teams receive so little. People pay money to watch varsity teams play, whether that’s through buying tickets or sitting through commercials as the games are televised. Varsity college teams deserve six and seven-figure budgets, because they make money, right?
In the case of ISU, wrong. Not a single ISU varsity team makes any profit, according to the Title IX section of FindTheData.org, a reference-based online database that uses information from primary sources to make comparisons between sets of data.
Club sports are not moneymakers either, and every university dollar given to them is an investment with no return. Like any university, ISU is run on a budget, so money can’t just be thrown to any club team for a faraway tournament that may be as much a vacation as it is a competition.
For the roller hockey team, a group that hangs out together as often as they practice, the national tournament represented a valuable opportunity to take a trip together, visit places they hadn’t seen, and—above all—vie for the national championship. As they estimated and re-estimated the price of the trip, a lamentable conclusion became clear. They simply didn’t have the money to go.
“Being a senior and not having the opportunity to compete for the national championship is hard,” Goedjen says. “If we could get a little extra money, like a thousand dollars, we could be going. All the [varsity teams] here get so much money. If you take just a little away from them and give it to us, we’re able to go.”
The reality is as hard as the financial bottom line. If ISU gives extra money to the roller hockey team, every other club team, and every other student organization, for that matter, would be justified to ask for more money and say, “you gave it to them, why not give it to us?” Varsity college sports, profitable or not, are financial priorities at ISU and elsewhere.
The reality is varsity athletics get big money from universities, and they probably always will. Even at ISU, where teams’ operating costs outweigh what they bring in, varsity teams are part of the face of the university—its public image. Club teams, like the athletes that play for them, are largely unnoticed by the university as a whole. Whether it’s fair or foul, club athletes at ISU have to pay if they want to play the games they love.