Athletic Board Meeting February 22nd

As I updated in the last Shared Gov. Meeting, our last Athletic Board meeting was about a week and a half ago. It was a brief meeting that was really only organized to approve the 2008-2009 Budget. We met for about an hour and a half and covered two main topics.  The specifics of these topics are as followed:

1. Compliance Report

The Compliance division of athletics gave a brief presentation on some presentation guidelines for recruiting athletes. They discussed how the NCAA Manual is structured and how there are a countless number of rules within the manual. They also discussed how there are multiple interpretations of these rules and how it is the compliance division's work to decipher these rules and serve as a resource for these guidelines. Also they must know the NCAA rules to protect the institution and uphold its integrity. With this in mind, they recently looked into the rule on Computer Recruiting Presentations because they wanted to make sure that the university was recruiting within these guidelines. The part of the rule that they needed to contact the NCAA office for interpretation for was that they could only use "presentation software" to recruit student athletes. After discussing it with the NCAA, they came to the conclusion that "presentation software" is strictly Power Point presentations. No other type of software, including any video/audio component and/or any personalized software (with a prospective student-athlete's name, picture or likeness). Overall this is a little overview on what compliance does and how it effects the Athletic Department here at UW.

2. Approval of the Budget

The main reason for the meeting was to approve the budget, and obviously, it was approved. It was an 89.1 million dollar budget that passed for the 2008-2009 business year. $83.6 million of it was directly tied to athletics, $3 million was budgeted for the University Ridge Golf Course, and $2.5 million was budgeted for camps & clinics to add up to the total for the Athletics Budget. The very favorable and key points to note about this budget is that there will be no raise in ticket prices for Football, Men's Basketball, Men's Hockey, or any other sport at this university. That continues to put us in the lower third of the Big Ten in ticket prices and is a very honorable thing for the Athletic Department to do, considering the success of our program. 

Overall that is what took place at the last Athletic Board Meeting and I will continue to update you with more information as it comes. If you have any questions or concerns, my email is hulick@wisc.edu.