UNC Pembroke and their athletic programs future

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Void word prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. Joined in studio by Dick Christie, the athletic director at North Carolina Pembroke. And when I first received word that you were going to be around, they said, you want to talk to Dick Christie? And I'm like, well, is that in relation to the NC State legend? And as it turns out, yes. I know you spent some time at State. So you were supremely disappointed when they said grandson, not the Dick Christie. No, definitely not disappointed.

No. Been a State fan my whole life. Grew up in the Philadelphia area, so we didn't get a lot of coverage. But I did my college work in North Carolina, a small school. And then did my graduate work at State. You were a golfer at Wingate. I was. I was a four-year golfer and then got to come into State and intern in the athletic department.

Just kind of inched my way up. But was always, always a Wolfpack fan. So getting a chance to work there and get behind the scenes, that was a great way to start a career in college athletics. It was definitely surreal as a fan.

Oh, no question. Seeing your grandfather's name all over the place. Yeah. So my freshman year in college, first year in North Carolina, Les Robinson was AD at NC State and they retired his football jersey. So that was really neat. So I got a chance to come in. He found out I was a sport management major and we talked that weekend. I said, hey, I'd love to help you get your career started.

When somebody in that role says something like that, you try not to lose that. So we kept in touch, just wrote a couple of letters here and there through my college career. And he made good on that promise. Literally when I started, he retired like a month later.

Lee Fowler came in. It just worked out for me. I was fortunate with the timing. You've been at UNC Pembroke now. This is year 11. Eleven seasons is crazy. It is how before I get into recent developments with the sports wagering bill, which I know impacts your school.

Yeah. How have the decade and a year, how has it progressed? Where are you today versus where were you when you took over? Yeah, I don't think anybody is fully prepared for what comes at you in the AD chair. So, you know, the cadence of it has gotten easier over the decade. But, you know, we've had a lot of things that go our way as well. We're in a conference that's a little bit better geographic fit two years in and the leadership is fantastic. We have an unbelievable chancellor, just visionary leader and loves athletics. That's a huge thing. I've found that these jobs are only as good as your president. So I've had a really good job based on who I get to work for.

So that's pretty cool. And it's definitely what's kept kept me at Pembroke because I feel like we're just kind of scratching the surface of what we're capable of under his leadership. But, you know, our teams, you know, we've been on it, we've been on a tear. So I think last weekend we won Women's Soccer Championship.

So that was our 10th championship in 13 months. So that's not that's not a usual that's a real occurrence. So, you know, I've told our staff, soak it in and, you know, enjoy the people that are around you because this doesn't happen. Oh, no, no, it's now this has to be that way.

You know how it goes. Once you start winning, you know, our hockey team here, they're playing badly at nine and seven. And people are like, what's wrong? Like, well, we're playing badly and we're nine and seven.

So they get 80 some games. Take our time. That's the bar.

But you so welcome. You know, welcome to the land of expectation. Yes. Yesterday's favors is tomorrow's expectation.

Dick Christie is the athletic director at UNC Pembroke. Let's get into the nuts and bolts of the sports wagering bill and how it impacts. And we haven't even started yet. We don't have the ability.

There's we don't have the mechanisms in place to actually do it, although we know that we're headed that way. But in order to get this done, get this through the state legislature, there were provisions where monies would be set aside and directed directly to schools that wouldn't otherwise have, you know, been able to reap the benefits. So how does the sports wagering bill benefit Pembroke and some other local, you know, smaller schools? But how does it benefit Pembroke? Yeah, it is to say it's a blessing and a lifeline is is no understatement.

I mean, we were really, really at a major crossroads when he got to covid. Oh, yeah, a lot of not to mention the financial impact of the testing and just attrition and furloughing employees and all that kind of thing. But when students started to take their education online and more online programs exploded, North Carolina is unique in how the UNC system was funded. You only could touch an athletic fee to to support athletics. And at a smaller school, that was lion's share of your revenue. Ninety two percent.

That's the average for D2. So it's hard to get to when it's restricted to to just one fee. You know, if you're in Missouri or somewhere else, you can be a public school. And those those presidents and chancellors have the latitude to use other colors of money to fund athletics as they see fit.

Our chancellors don't have that that latitude. This is really the first time that North Carolina has taken a step to diversify the revenues that could support athletics. So it is a monumental change and it's perfect timing. So we are really appreciative of the legislature and really appreciate the Board of Governors leadership for looking at the economic impact, thinking about it big picture. You know, there's obviously big impacts for us. But when you think statewide. You solidify the Panthers and the Hurricanes, right?

Like we as a state, you really didn't have a huge choice when you looked at where other states were were going. So to be able to find a synergy where these resources are going to impact economic benefit in a lot of small towns where athletics is is the only show in town like Pembroke, North Carolina. It's a it's a big deal. So for us, as much as we'd like to say it's it's new money right now, it's just replacing resources that we've we've lost since covid.

All right. So what is what ultimately will be coming your way? Depending on how you read it, there's either a million dollar yearly payment or it could be less depending or more. So what exactly are you expecting out of this legislation and when the bill and when when we are all allowed to go and lose money gambling to the legislature's credit again, this is going to be an amp up process, right? They're going to have to get the programs going. So there's not going to be an immediate revenue stream. So the legislature created a stopgap fund based on what they think sports betting will ultimately accrue. So there is a million dollar in funding going to the 10 institutions starting this year. And then as that upstart funding ends, the hope is that the sports betting revenue will then replace it or exceed it. Some some projections they've had are, you know, upwards of a million and a half dollars per school.

But but time only time will tell if that's where it goes. But this is a great first step to at least start thinking outside of the student fee for how do we make athletics work at the smaller schools and how what will that do? What would a million dollars do for Pembroke in terms of helping you pay salaries, maintain fields?

What what are we talking about for for UNCP? If you went all in with with every dime that we spend in the classes that our coaches teach and all these different things, at most were, you know, six million and change that we're investing in athletics. So if you get it, you know, a million dollars is a major shot in the arm for a budget that size. Unfortunately for us, if you look at our our fee revenues in 2019 before COVID, and you look at them now, we're 1.1 million down.

So right now, it's just trying to keep the lights on and keep doing what we are what we're doing and servicing now. Now in the future, if it can reach its potential, that's where we can start looking at, you know, expansion and nutrition expansion and athletic training expansion and mental health, all the things that are that are key needs right now that we've kind of had to put on the sideburner as a small institution. But you know, for the D ones, there's six D one schools that are in this legislation, you got the three non bowl subdivisions in Central, Western Carolina, and A&T writing of the three one triple A's with Wilmington, Greensboro and Asheville.

And for them, the transformation committee with D one, which I'm sure you've talked about before. My passion about ancestry comes from the fact that I was an only child who didn't have family, I see all my friends doing family outings and family this and I would spend weekends just lost in ancestry. My first one that I found was Liz, I was also an only child. And there were no big holiday gatherings where I got to know cousins or aunts.

It's because of ancestry, we've kind of become bi coastal besties. The holidays are meant to be shared with family start today during our holiday sale at ancestry calm. In August, they implemented mandatory minimums now for mental health counselor on staff, two extra years of health insurance, right. So for those schools, you know that the money's probably spent before they even get it. So it's really a key time. And I was super appreciative that that they saw the need and how how soon it was.

Everybody was on the brink. Yes. So you want to get this?

Do you want to get this started in February? Well, the stopgap funding is moving and the system is working on how that gets deployed. Right. But my point is that the real the sooner we get to this, yep, the sooner we get to everybody being able to do it, the more the industry can grow.

Because what we have seen over the course of the last several years, correct, is that the numbers that states who have had it for three or four years, the numbers today are dramatically higher than the numbers when it was first implemented. As people start kicking their corner bookmakers aside, I just said that that has nothing to do with anything. Dick Christie is the athletic director at UNC Pembroke here on the Adam Gold show.

Thank you very much for coming to the studio. By the way, I want to ask you a quick question about the rivalry. You've got the Two Rivers rivalry in football with Fayetteville, Fayetteville State. Yeah.

All right. I was trying to think what the two rivers are. I'm just going to guess.

I really don't know. Pee Dee and Santee? A good guess is because the Lumber River does dump into Pee Dee. Lumber River and Cape Fear. Oh, Cape Fear. Oh, Cape Fear is up here too. Yeah. Cape Fear runs right by Fayetteville State's campus.

We're right down by the Lumber. You've done well in that? We have. We were able to earn the trophy back this year, first year of our new football coach.

That was exciting. We got Fayetteville State at home. Unfortunately, we had to reschedule because of potential hurricane impacts, but we still had a great crowd and a nail-biter of a game came back and won late in the fourth quarter.

What are crowds? Stadium seats, what, 4,000? Actual seating, we got about 4,500, but when we're good and we have a game time that doesn't conflict with State and Carolina, go with our fan base, that matters. We have plenty of double season ticket holders. We can push it up 6,000, 7,000, just depends.

My first- Fire Marshall turning the other way? It's standing room, so it's good. We're outside. But the first game I was in Pembroke, so 2013, they were doing very well in football. We were on national TV. Very first game out of the gate. We were the CBS Division II game of the week. Oh, wow. And we were playing Winston-Salem State on a Thursday night, and we probably had 8,500 people there.

Unfortunately, I hadn't seen a crowd like that since that first game, but we're working back towards it. Well, you started with a bang here. Yeah.

Can I get your thoughts? I'm curious. We spend a lot of time here, and mostly what I do is I point out the hypocrisy of big money college athletics and how all of these administrators, they're always talking about student athlete welfare and all of that, and we all know the deal. It's 100% about how we need more money.

And I understand it. I just wish they weren't pretending that it was something other than that, because there's no other reason for Southern Cal. And Rutgers to be in the same conference. There's no other reason for North Carolina and Stanford to be in the same conference.

One means a lot less money than the other. So what is your view of everything that we have seen? And I think it's gotten worse over the last five years than it was 10 or 15 years ago when the ACC expanded to Miami and those schools.

What's your view of that? It's just too much money at stake. If there were not so many egos in the room, if we were smart, we would have looked at football in its own sense a long time ago and figured out what makes sense with football and TV and how maybe they're in a different conference. Maybe they're called a league.

Maybe there's something different. It's not going to change the value on the TV side if we can structure it the right way and get the right metros in there. But you've got conference commissioners with a lot of control, and they're not going to want to give up that nugget. And with the way it's not under the NCAA's umbrella from a postseason standpoint, that didn't happen.

And now we're stuck dragging a volleyball team to Cal to play a conference game, and it is where we are. Well, because that has been floated around as where we may end up with football being separate from everything. And it's unfortunate that football and we'll just say men's basketball wouldn't be lumped together because they are too major. One makes the lion's share of the money for the NCAA. The other, the NCAA has nothing to do with, which is probably better is probably better anyway. But yeah, I do think we're headed to a time where football is completely separate. Also, football might look completely different five years from now than it does now.

Let me ask this. At least for those upper 40 schools or so, 50 schools. Yeah. I mean, what it may look like is like the Premier League. We may have three levels of maybe 15 or 16 schools in each and have promotion and relegation up and down the ladder. And maybe that's good for college football.

I don't know what the answer is. People will always be a fan of their school. Like Pembroke. No doubt. You're going to have fans. State's going to have fans. Carolina's going to have fans. Duke's going to have fan. I don't know. That's my little joke on Duke. Morgan's a Duke fan. So that one, that one cut.

Okay. Look, they had, they, they were legit, legitimately good. Like if, if Riley Leonard doesn't get hurt, if they stopped Sam Hartman on fourth and 16, like, I'm not even going to lie. They, they, they could be a top 10, top eight team right now. They, I thought they were that good defensively. We played them in basketball two weeks ago. I can tell you they're, they're that good.

Basketball is very good. All our fans were saying, are you excited? I was like, I have no good memories in this building. Why would I be excited to go to Cameron Indoor Stadium? But it had to be a great experience for guys.

For our kids. It was fantastic. I mean, you know, we, we were starstruck in the beginning and, and thank God Duke didn't go to their three quarter press. Cause we were down 40 in the blink of an eye, but second half we were actually going, we did really well in the second half.

They finally settled down. We got a little more aggressive, got in the lane. We had a true freshmen score 20 and Cameron that, I mean, when does that happen? So that kid's got a lifetime memory for him and bragging rights, but it was, it was a neat experience.

We were, we were really appreciative. They took the game. One other thing about the, the impact of all this cross country travel, Dick Christie, athletic director at UNC Pembroke is here. Do you have to play, this is going to sound weird, but in sports, not named football, do you have to play conference games? I mean, does Stanford in soccer, do they have to play in a conference game? Do they have to play Duke in Carolina and Virginia? I mean, they might play them anyway. Duke is actually going out to play Stanford in basketball with women's basketball on Sunday. That was just a non-conference game scheduled for a while ago, but do you have to, or can you just schedule locally and then, you know, we'll figure out a way to make the conference tournaments work at the end.

That's, that's a great point. I mean, I think you still want the structure of the conference so that the kids have something to shoot for, and you have standings, you have things that keep people interested through the, through the regular season. So, and you know, coaches are always going to lobby for an equal schedule around Robin, where they get to see everybody to quote crown a true champion.

Interestingly at our level, we've actually, we're the first league in D2. We're using KPI to rank our teams out of the regular season for the same reason that you're mentioning. I mean, our schools can't afford to travel a long distance. We've, we've needed to grow our geographic footprint to get the right schools in the mix and to find a way to get enough football schools.

Right. So we've now broken into three divisions. We play heavily in our division and only lightly in the others. And since the schedules are unbalanced, our seating is based on a KPI algorithm that is only a league play. So we just started that this year. It's been a great addition because it protects our best teams.

It puts the top seeds at the top. So they have the best chance to be an at-large team, but you know, for your teams, we have a division right now of five. We hope it'll grow to six and each and all three, but they got a chance to win a division championship. So for those five teams, you know, until late in the season, you're in the mix.

You got something to play for because it's only those division games that'll count towards that piece of the championship. So I think that part, it keeps students engaged. It helps retention, helps coaches who jobs may be on the line that, you know, I'm in the mix until late. I have a chance to make conference tournament until late. So I do think you want to have that structure. Now for the top, top end of D one, we talked about going to Stanford, a lot of them were doing a West coast swing anyway, in a non-conference.

So if they just bag that it could be cost neutral for the most part. It doesn't necessarily have to be this giant expense and having to go over there and play that one or two games. All right. Final thing, Dick Christie, uh, I appreciate you coming up here. Um, tell, tell us something that people don't know about Pembroke or just the D two level. Ancestry makes the perfect gift to give people because it literally blew my mind. It's literally like you're giving them something that they would have no knowledge of, which is very important because for us to basically be able to find our missing family or to see my indigenous heritage confirmed inside there, it's one gift, but it's so many different things.

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Find Zicam in your local cold and flu aisle. I think people don't realize that, um, athletics at this level actually makes business sense for the university, right? So it like take football for instance, right?

Everybody says everybody spends so much money on football and football is expensive. But for us, those kids being on campus actually brings more money. And if you count room and board, if you count dining, if you count what they spend in Pembroke, D2 is all partial scholarships. So for us, when you recruit a kid, it's very much a handshake agreement. They've got something at stake. A lot of them are having to work with the family or take out loans or use their Pell Grant.

And we have something at stake. So there's a little bit more accountability on both sides. And those students typically outperform the other students academically. So if we didn't have athletics, we lose three, four hundred of some of the best students that we have in the classroom.

It affects the academic environment, affects a lot of things. So people don't usually realize that you just have that automatic stigma of big time athletics. And it's it's one hundred eighty degrees from that. And that's that's what's kept me there.

It's it's very easy to to see what the value that you're bringing and what you're doing for the kids. And so many of the the bigger schools use the threat of cutting sports when actually the sports you're probably cutting are probably costing you money when you cut them. And that's that's been the case. You know, unfortunately, across the system, there's probably 20 sports that and we're we're guilty of as well. I mean, people probably tried to put 20 in the last six years. And the legislative environment and the legal environment right now, it's just not it's a nonstarter.

So you got to find a way to fund it in a way that that makes sense. Chris, the athletic director at UNC Pembroke, I thank you very much. It's good helmet. Very cool. I appreciate your time. Yeah.

Appreciate it. This was our last game, American Indian Heritage Day. This was actually featured on Sports Center. Look at that. And a partnership with Lumbee Tribe.

What kind of what what kind of financial arrangement do you have to make or is it just is it you're you're honoring them and they understand it? So the town of Pembroke is actually a corporate partner of ours. And the tribe is based in the town. So through through their game day sponsorship, we were given approval from the tribe to use that first time we've put it on the helmet and, you know, gear up on Sports Center feature that which was great. They had the full uniform kit and we got a lot of a lot of great traction that, you know, D2 usually doesn't get that exposure. So it's neat for our kids to be able to see that. Thanks for coming in.

Thanks a bunch. OK, round two. Name something that's not boring.

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