A youth-education program vital to many NCAA institutions is undergoing fiscal challenges that may change how schools administer the effort on their campuses.

For the first time in 37 years, the National Youth Sports Program’s bottom line was zero when the federal budget was approved in January. But thanks to allocated but unused NYSP-marked government money from previous years, that line now says $3 million.

That means NYSP, which had requested $20 million for this year, will operate this summer, but in an abbreviated form.

Rochelle M. Taylor, president of the National

Youth Sports Corporation, which administers NYSP, said the organization already is working on securing both government funding for 2007 NYSP and long-term private funding for the annual summer program that was held on 202 college campuses last year.

“The long-term vision is that we want to eventually know that the program is in good hands, with an endowment from which we can get funds every year,” she said.

Taylor said the money that will meet the program’s short-term needs this summer came from prior program revisions that resulted in greater cost efficiency and unspent grant funds returned from NYSP campuses in previous years. The resulting surplus, which NYSC typically would return to the government, was approved to operate NYSP this summer.

Because last year’s federal grant was $17.8 million, this year’s $3 million NYSP will look much different but retain the same goals. A total of 55 schools will receive grants of $40,000 each. Grants in previous years ranged from $50,000 to $100,000 per school, depending on program size.

Anticipating that budget reduction, Taylor’s office polled schools last fall about their interest in running a program with such reduced funding. She received 178 positive responses. NYSC Board Chair Daniel Boggan Jr. said that the board used a three-tiered approach to determine which schools received funding.

“We looked at the overall quality of the program first,” said the former NCAA senior vice president. “The people who had been delivering great programs had priority. We also looked at geography because it’s important that the program stay national. Third, we looked at the capacity of those programs to raise matching funds. We’ve always had good fund-raising at the local level.”

Taylor said that there wasn’t enough money to fund all the schools that met all three tiers, so the board further narrowed that list to 56, then notified those schools selected February 28.

The remaining institutions that applied must secure all necessary funds themselves to serve youth this summer.

This summer’s NYSP

Taylor said that historically, NYSP campuses raise an average of $3 for every $1 of government money received. That will stretch this year’s grants further, but the funded schools will still likely show cosmetic signs of slimming down. However, the core aspects that have made NYSP work in the past will remain.

“We are not eliminating the sports instruction or the educational components,” Taylor said. “Instead, we reduced the length of the program from five weeks to four, and we are funding institutions to enroll 200 participants per site. The minimum enrollment in the past was 250. Our largest program served 700 participants.”

The NYSC president said that most of the changes will involve equipment and apparel.

“We used to provide athletics equipment to the youth,” she said. “Some might ask why not use the equipment that the campuses have? Sometimes we do but for the most part we need youth-appropriate equipment. In the past, there always were some donations of this type but we typically had to buy more. Now those will have to come from local funds. We also used to give every child (77,924 participated last year) a T-shirt, which is important to kids living in poverty conditions, but this year, we won’t.”

One other adjustment will be replacing some in-person staff training programs, such as the annual workshop originally scheduled for last month in Washington, D.C., with conference calls.

Boggan said keeping NYSP going this year, even at a reduced level, is imperative to bolster lobbying efforts for 2007 funding and for making NYSP a more attractive, tangible sell to its potential corporate and foundation supporters.

“The programs we run won’t be as intense, but they will be a way of keeping the program alive and in people’s minds,” he said.

Budgeting saga

The Washington, D.C., lobbying effort for NYSP is being led by Dan Wexler of Capitol Associates, who contacted NYSC initially when he heard of the potential cut in funding. Wexler said while a number of factors contributed to a rough year with government money, one stood out.

“The biggest difference was that there was less money in the federal budget to go around, so there was a strong need to cut federal spending,” Wexler said. “There were a few other things that complicated it further, such as the war, and later in the year as they were finalizing the appropriations bills, funding for victims of hurricane Katrina.

“Initially, when the budget was released, they were looking to cut programs like NYSP. Given these other factors, restoring cuts for programs like NYSP was more difficult this time (than in past years).”

When President George W. Bush first sent the budget to Congress in February 2005, NYSP was listed with an allocation of zero. But Taylor was not concerned. She said every president she can remember has done that. The bill then went to Congress, where the House of Representatives had been a historically strong NYSP supporter. In recent years, the chair of the appropriations committee had been Bill Young (R-Florida), a longtime NYSP proponent. This year, with a new chair at the helm, the House retained NYSP’s line at zero for the first time in the program’s history.

The Senate followed suit until Wexler helped rouse enough support to get that body to ask for $10 million. The matter then went to committee debate.

“If you asked me after the Senate said $10 million if NYSP would end up at zero, I would have said no,” Wexler said.

Taylor, however, said she was braced for a zero.

“We were hoping for the best and planning for the worst,” she said.

Congressional deliberations reflected the belief that NYSP was an important program that should continue, but there was an assumption on the Hill that NYSP would be able to operate in 2006 because the NCAA would provide the funding.

Not so, said Ron Stratten, NCAA vice president for education services, in an e-mail to Wexler to help him clarify the NCAA-NYSP relationship to Congress, which Wexler said he has done.

“The Association has been supportive of NYSP for more than three decades but it has always funded the majority of its direct costs with federal funds,” Stratten’s note to Wexler said. “Without those funds, the program will die.”

Federal roots

Ironically, the staff that administers NYSP, which had previously been housed in the NCAA national office, moved to Indianapolis’ Pan Am Plaza Building in 2000 when the NYSC was formed. The misperception that NYSP was an NCAA program was part of the reason.

“(NYSP) has always been a federal program,” Boggan said. “It is not an NYSC program and it’s not an NCAA program. The government just asked the NCAA to administer it, and now NYSC administers it.”

Boggan said that those moves confused some good people who embrace NYSP’s mission but don’t understand where it gets its operating budget. NYSP was born in 1969 when the White House announced that the federal government was committing $3 million to establish a sports program for economically disadvantaged youth. The NCAA, given its access to campus athletics facilities, was asked to administer the program.

“The government piloted this program for a good reason,” Taylor said. “This program hits youth when they need it most, when they don’t have the structure of school. It reduces deviant behavior during the summer. That was important in 1968 and it’s just as important now.”

Boggan said the NCAA/NYSP confusion may have been a too-convenient rationale for some to cut funding.

“For some folks in Congress, it’s a good excuse not to fund NYSP,” he said. “So, they say, if the NCAA is dropping out, we should call on them to fund it. But that’s not realistic based on the NCAA’s core mission. NYSP is much more attuned to the government’s mission than it is the NCAA’s.”

Local lobbying needed

NYSC continues to have Wexler working Washington, but Taylor knows that for the effort to be successful, NYSP schools need to let their government representatives know their feelings about the program. She had a conference call with the NYSC board and with leaders from NYSP schools February 16.

“We want to make sure parents and college presidents are well informed on the value of NYSP so that they can help us locally while we work in Washington,” she said. “We want them to talk about the effect of not having NYSP. We want to have a consistent strategy nationally and locally.”

Wexler echoed that call to arms.

“The most important message we can put out there is that if you have any interest in this program and you want it to continue, then let your representatives in Congress know about it,” Wexler said. “This is not a lot of money when you’re talking about the federal budget, but this amount goes a long way in NYSP. If we let this program die, as a nation, we’re letting kids down.”

The NYSC board started discussions about seeking a broader funding base 18 months ago. As a result, Taylor had numerous development-driven meetings with potential donors before learning of this year’s cuts and has had many since. The results have been promising.

“It’s been an eye-opening experience,” she said. “We’ve been very well received and we hope that will turn into contributions, but we don’t have any commitments yet. We’ve been encouraged to move forward with other funding requests.”

Taylor said a few selling points of NYSP have been especially effective. One is the exposure to the higher education atmosphere that NYSP provides. Another is the health-and-nutrition component of NYSP, which deals directly with the current youth-obesity issue. Additionally, NYSP attracts the diverse population that many corporations are trying to reach.

“The initial plan (before the cuts) was to get funds so we could have more schools participate, because we always had more schools apply than we could support and more youth who wanted to participate where we already had NYSP,” she said. “When we were zeroed out, we adjusted that plan.”

If successful, that initiative will reap long-term benefits for NYSP and by extension, the nation’s under-served youth, who will continue to receive “The Right Start” the program has provided for 37 years.