URI Athletic Department loses money

The University of Rhode Island Athletic Department lost an approximate $25,000 due to the lack of attendance at the College Basketball Invitational (CBI), URI Athletic Director Thorr Bjorn said Wednesday.

The low turnout to the CBI game only resulted in lost funds for the university's Athletic Department, not the university's general budget.

According to the CBI website, each team participating in the event pays a fee, but at URI, the ticket sales did not recover that money.

Bjorn said the Athletics Department did not ask the university for additional money to pay to host the tournament, leaving the Athletic Department to cover the $30,000 in order to host the game. He added that the approximate $25,000 loss was due to a culmination of a lack of ticket sales and operational costs.

"Student [ticket] price[s], I believe, was $4," Bjorn said. "But we got a bunch of different people to buy student tickets so our students didn't have to pay for any of them."

Bjorn said the Athletic Department reached out to other organizations on campus in order to sell tickets to them.

"The bookstore, for example, [would] buy some tickets and [they] can give them away to students," Bjorn said.

Bjorn added that he believes the ticket prices for the general public sold for approximately $10 and $17. There were 1,115 tickets sold for the game.

This is the first year that the Rams have participated in the CBI. According to the CBI website, the CBI tournament started three years ago and is held annually for 16 teams that are invited, "based upon performance during their conference and non-conference schedules, as well as how well the team is playing at the end of the regular season."

The CBI tournament provides a bracket-style playoff competition for teams that are not selected into the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament. Bjorn said the playoff tournaments such as NCAA, National Invitation Tournament (NIT) and CBI reached out to schools in February and asked if they are interested in participating.

The CBI requires universities to pay to host the tournament because, according to its website, all of the tournament games are held on college campuses. The website also states that the tournament is held at one of the playing colleges' on-campus arenas in order "to minimize missed class time."

The money to host the tournament came from "additional resources that [the athletic department] brought in throughout the course of the year."

He added that the department's budgeting works in a way that allows them to generate additional funds using different methods. Among the methods they use to generate those funds include ticket revenues, sponsorship sales and fundraisers.

Bjorn said, the university provides the Athletic Department with approximately $7 million for their budget and then the Athletic Department generates another $2 million. The additional money, he said is gained from revenues which helps the department increase the budget.

"In the event, at the end of the fiscal year, we have some dollars left over [that] we didn't spend, that money would not carry over in the Athletic Department, that money would go back into the university," Bjorn said. "The university does a great job in funding our programs."

He also mentioned that, as an example, the unused revenue generated throughout the year by the basketball team from ticket sales, fundraisers and sponsorships is put in the overall budget and allocated across the other 18 sports.

Bjorn said he doesn't know why there was a low turnout at the basketball game. He said that he thinks toward the end of the year there is less of a motivation to compete. He added that because the tournament is new it's more difficult to have a large attendance.

Regarding the chance to return to the CBI tournament if invited, Bjorn said, "When it comes down to it, it has to make sense for us. You certainly don't ever want to be in that tournament, you want to play in the NCAA tournament [or] the NIT tournament."