Money always talks, but this year it’s screaming at the top of its lungs. This 2003-2004 year, the Faculty of Physical Education and Health (FPEH) is making the management of intercollegiate team funds a priority.

“We have been forced to take a creative approach to running our program,” said director of athletics, Liz Hoffman. “In the mid-90’s, we faced millions of dollars of funding cutbacks…so we’ve really had to make changes.”

It was a couple of years ago that things, as Hoffman suggests, began to change. “We only really started getting serious endowments two years ago,” admits Frank Pindar, the FPEH manager of intercollegiate business. Prior to receiving the massive endowments that currently fund many varsity sports, teams ran off faculty money and their own fundraising. These income sources, notes Pindar, are generally non-receiptable and so do not demand faculty and team accountability.

“When a team is selling boxes of chocolates to fundraise, it can really do whatever it wants with that money. It does not generally have to answer back to the donors,” Pindar explains. “But once you start issuing receipts for thousand-dollar donations, that donor wants to know what’s happening with that money.”

And so, as endowments picked up, a new system of checks and balances was put in place. The new system is designed to ensure two things: that teams do not spend beyond their means, and that all team spending is completely transparent.

The first step is to isolate and monitor each team’s “four accounts.” Faculty funding, endowment interest, alumni donations, and team fundraising will each have separate accounts in order to track a team’s spending.

The second step is the spending plan that each team must create, get approved, and stick to. At the beginning of each season, coaches must submit a detailed spending plan for the upcoming season. “It can, and will, and has happened that teams predict they’ll raise more money than they do and so they end up overspending,” Pindar conceded, “but usually the numbers are not too big.”

For the most part, estimating costs is easy. For instance, the amount given by the faculty to each intercollegiate team remains the same, year after year. The FPEH funds transportation to league games for every team-and that’s about it. In fact, U of T is the only university in the province that does not provide meal money for its athletes.

Endowment interest and alumni donations are also easy to estimate. The big question mark is the fundraising account. Over the past several years, some teams have found it difficult to guess how successful their fundraising efforts will be. Any team that overspends owes its money back the following year. Meaning that any money raised over the course of the next fiscal year will go right to repaying the debt, before it can be spent elsewhere.

The faculty, however, insists that it has taken measures to remedy the problem. “We want to be part of solution,” says Hoffman, “and so we are really working hard to ensure that spending plans are realistic.” Now, every team’s spending plan must be signed off on by the coach, an athlete, an alumnus, an alumni development representative, and both Pindar and Hoffman.

“We will send the plans back if they are unrealistic,” Hoffman maintains, “and the most usual reason for a plan to be sent back is, in fact, an overly optimistic fundraising projection.”

The faculty has learned from previous years’ mistakes. Last year there was one year-end fund management review per team. This year, there will be three. The first is coming up in mid-November, followed by two more at the end of each fiscal quarter (every three months).

“It’s a bit of a headache in springtime when we have to draw the plan up, and I’d assume it’s a headache for administration every time there’s an expense,” women’s basketball coach Michele Belanger says, “but otherwise it’s a much more accountable system. We absolutely must stick to our spending plans. Absolutely.”

Belanger’s team is one of the most successful in terms of fundraising. It has already reached its endowment goals and has fundraised enough to cover travel to exhibition games and meal money while on the road. Other teams are not as successful, and some discourage fundraising altogether, preferring to charge athletes a participation fee.

Although the faculty, coaches, and administrators continue to hear charges that all teams get too much money, that some teams get too much while others get too little, and that none get enough, there seems to be no question that the system is undergoing changes. Problems are being addressed, and, at the very least, the intercollegiate team fund management system has become more accountable and more transparent.