How Gears Turn at a Sports Factory

By WELCH SUGGS

They start early around here.

Even before the sun comes up, many of the young men and women who play varsitysports at Ohio State University are rolling into practice, into weight rooms, into study hall. Later, they will head off to their classes, only to return in the afternoon to the training room or for more practice, often going home only after nightfall.

"I get up at 6:30, go to study hall from 7:30 to 9, have class from 9:30 to 1:15, then have practice at 2," says A.J. Hawk, a freshman defensive back on the football team. "Then we lift after practice every day through Thursday." It's 7:30 at night in the football practice facility as he talks about his day.

Ohio State coaches clock in early, too, to lead their charges through morning workouts. Their days are often even longer, with a few hours in the office to work on schedules and other mundane details, more practice in the afternoon, and long nights of trying to sell recruits on dreams of championships drenched in Buckeye crimson and gray.

It takes a factory to run an athletics department like this one, the largest and most expensive college-sports program in the United States. A factory that runs nearly round the clock to push Buckeye sports closer to another goal, another victory, another step toward being the best. It's not just about football, although that's the biggest piston in this engine; it's about keeping every one of Ohio State's 37 teams up and running.

"We're very lucky," says Susan K. Henderson, the associate athletics director in charge of finance and one of the athletics department's 220 full-time employees.

"We have these rabid football fans who fill the stadium and give us money," she says. "They totally support the program. They pay for tickets. They join the Buckeye Club. And that's allowed us to do all this. But that means we have to have a good football team."

At this level of competition, college sports have evolved into a highly efficient and demanding machine. A program like this one requires a commitment from athletes to put their sports ahead of all else, even classes, no matter what administrators may tell them.

And it requires an avalanche of money, coming in and going out. Running any one of Ohio State's teams costs $500,000, minimum. And that doesn't count overhead like facility upkeep.

Running the whole athletics department will cost $79-million this year, and it will take in at least that much.

Operating this program comes at a terrific cost to everyone involved. Between sports and school, players are working two full-time jobs. And their academic achievement comes second to their on-field prowess, especially in the major sports, where grades and graduation rates lag well behind those of other students.

The university is still far better known for its athletics exploits than for anything that happens in its classrooms or labs, and that irks professors -- especially when the news is about a Buckeye athlete's academic struggles or brushes with the law. Faculty members are nervous, too, about the athletics department's vast physical empire.

"A successful program can be a source of pride for lots of folks, but the sheer magnitude of this athletic enterprise, and maybe any big-time athletic enterprise, always will present concerns for faculty," says Mark B. Ellis, a professor at Ohio State's Mansfield campus and chairman of the university system's athletics committee.

Athletics administrators acknowledge those concerns, but to Ferdinand A. Geiger, the athletics director, the mission is simple: Ohio State wants to be one of the best public universities in the country, and the best public universities in the country have the best athletics programs in the country.

"I do happen to think very large, but there isn't a top Division I athletics program that doesn't," says Mr. Geiger. "The way we're managing this program is consistent with our heritage."

A Long List

On a chilly October morning, it takes a solid five minutes just to recap how Ohio State's teams did over the weekend.

This is routine at the regular Monday-morning staff meeting of assistant and associate athletics directors in the Jerome C. Schottenstein Center, Ohio State's four-year-old arena for basketball and ice hockey.

To the football team, it's Penn State week, but there are 12 other squads in the middle of competition right now. The staff members know about the Buckeyes' come-from-behind football win at the University of Wisconsin this past Saturday, but they get a rundown on the rest of the teams that are competing. The women's ice-hockey team dropped a couple of close ones. The men's cross-country team finished eighth in a big meet. The women's lacrosse team had a tournament moved from George Mason University to Rutgers University because of the sniper terrorizing metropolitan Washington. And so on.

Mr. Geiger, who goes by Andy, is in Indianapolis today for a meeting of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I Management Council, so Archie Griffin, the legendary Buckeye running back who is now Ohio State's senior associate athletics director, is running the meeting. One of his assistants notes that Ohio Stadium had its first wedding over the weekend; the groom, an alumnus, had been a cheerleader. The happy couple had 50 bridesmaids, no less, storming out of the tunnel usually reserved for players.

Mr. Griffin chuckles. "We're big time now," he says.

That's understood as an understatement, given that the people in this room are preparing to play host to well over 100,000 fans this weekend. Ohio State is on the front pages of sports sections across the country today, and Mr. Griffin is assuredly the only athletics administrator in the United States with his own Bobblehead doll for sale.

Whatever It Takes

As the meeting breaks up, most of the Schottenstein Center stands empty. A crew is beginning the process of setting up the floor of the arena (the Value City Arena, as it's properly known) for a men's hockey game Friday against Clarkson University. Just outside, between "the Schott" and the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, the women's lacrosse team is out for its morning practice, even though lacrosse is a spring sport. At Larkins Hall, swimming teams are wrapping up the first of their two daily practices, and three scared-looking freshmen are lined up with Tim Emright on the volleyball floor at St. John Arena, Ohio State's older gymnasium.

Mr. Emright is an assistant men's volleyball coach, and he is auditioning the three lanky youngsters as possible walk-on players.

The odds are against anybody's getting onto any Buckeye squad through a tryout. "We haven't had one in seven or eight years," Mr. Emright says cheerfully. "But I was a walk-on here who tried out, so I want to give everybody a chance."

At places like Ohio State, coaches evaluate and pursue recruits for years, and it's only getting crazier. Buckeye coaches are already looking at high-school sophomores and juniors, not to mention overseas recruits. Blue-chip players have no choice but to get used to a deluge of mail and constant telephone calls, e-mail messages, and all other forms of communication they get from college coaches.

"Recruiting, on the face of it, is kind of silly," says Jim Foster, the women's basketball coach. "If you put it in any other context, the lengths to which adults go to lure 17-year-olds" are crazy.

What do they talk about? Whatever it takes. "I've had more conversations about prom dresses," says Michael Scerbo, an assistant coach of women's lacrosse.

Endless Practicing

For the most part, athletes on teams like these have been competing at their sport year-round since junior high. Soccer players, for example, usually compete for a traveling club or two, an Olympic Development Program all-star team, and then perhaps their high-school team. When they get to Ohio State, they are put on a practice schedule and a strength program that rival the regimens of professional teams or high-level clubs in Europe.

The football year starts in the second week of January and does not end until after a bowl game in the following December or January.

"I don't think people outside of athletics have a full grasp of the time constraints for the kids," says Allan Johnson, the team's head strength coach. "People only see the finished product on the field. They think that once you hit the season, that's when you start working. But after the bowl game, you get a week off, and then you're at it again."

In January, players begin an eight-week cycle of weight lifting four days a week, not exceeding (in theory) the NCAA's limit of eight hours of practice time per week. They will work on building strength, conditioning, speed, agility, and flexibility, focusing with their coaches on particular areas of weakness. In mid-March, they begin spring football practice, which lasts six weeks, cutting back slightly on individual workouts in favor of team practices.

After a weeklong break, players begin a new round of conditioning in late May and don't let up all summer. Mr. Johnson's goal is to get players in the best possible shape by the middle of August, as preseason practice gets under way. After that, he has players on the travel squad work out just enough to maintain 85 percent of their speed and strength through the 14-week season.

That level of intensity isn't confined to football players. On a typical fall afternoon in French Field House, the women's hockey team is working out alongside the track team in one of the Buckeyes' four weight rooms. Rowers, meanwhile, pull deep-throated growls from ergometers in a cage of crew equipment, while three of their teammates complete a grueling circuit: heaving medicine balls at one another and doing situps on top of huge balancing balls, interspersed with 200-meter sprints.

Nosa Ehimwenman jogs up and jumps lightly onto a set of bleachers, wobbling as he complains about stiff calves. "We're in the preseason right now," says the long- and triple-jumper. "It's kind of gut busting, trying to get yourself back into shape."

Six days a week of practice and keeping up with schoolwork is a strain, admits Mr. Ehimwenman, a junior. But you get used to it after a few years, he says. "After practice, you're tired, but you gotta learn that if you don't study, you don't practice, and it's for your future," he says.

Mr. Johnson is concerned about the strain on players, but he doesn't apologize for it. "I think the body and mind can adapt to whatever they're asked to do," he says. "If it's to excel in the classroom and on the field -- the kids who really work hard, they take to it pretty well."

Academics Second?

That may be so, but Ohio State athletes have not always had the best reputation academically. They haven't posted the zero-percent graduation rates that dog some institutions, but academic advisers and other administrators still wince at the mention of Andy Katzenmoyer, a star linebacker who stayed eligible to play his senior year, in 1999, only by taking golf and AIDS-awareness classes in a summer session. His academic status played out in an excruciatingly public way in news reports, causing major embarrassment to Mr. Katzenmoyer and to the university.

Mr. Katzenmoyer, who played three seasons for the New England Patriots before being released this year, had said that he was at Ohio State to play football, not to attend class. That happened a decade after Robert Smith, a star tailback, quit the team, alleging that an assistant coach had demanded that he attend morning practice instead of his chemistry class.

The football team's graduation rate has been in the doldrums for the past several years: Thirty-six percent of players who entered Ohio State from 1992 to 1996 earned degrees within six years. That's well below the Division I-A average of 50 percent, but those rates are better than earlier generations of Buckeyes.

While 56 percent of both athletes and students at Ohio State graduated during that time period, the rates varied widely among sports, as is typical at most sports powerhouses. Only 25 percent of male basketball players earned degrees, while 54 percent of other male athletes did. Seventy-one percent of female athletes graduated, well above the all-women average of 59 percent.

"There's no question that if you're going to compete at the highest level, you're going to get some kids who are going to come in as marginal students," says David O. Frantz, a professor of English who serves as a liaison between the athletics department and the provost's office. He and Mr. Geiger now review the high-school transcripts of every athlete Ohio State recruits.

"They'd better be great athletes -- difference makers with a special talent, just as students are in dance or music," Mr. Frantz says. "We want to make sure that they're good people, and have the work ethic it's going to take."

Ohio State officials are happy to point out all the flaws in using graduation rates to measure academic success: Many of their athletes transfer not for academic reasons, but for athletic ones. And, typically, several Buckeyes leave early to turn pro. However, players are still behind in other measures: This year's freshman class of athletes had an average SAT score of 970 and an average ACT score of 22; football players averaged 1050 and 21.7, respectively. Freshmen at Ohio State had an average SAT of 1167 and average ACT of 25.2.

"Football and [men's] basketball players are not performing as well as the average student on campus," says Raymond Montomayor, a psychology professor. "I worry about them being admitted principally because they can play their sport. They come here, and are spending an enormous amount of time on their sport. I think this is a problem."

Ohio State officials say they have made academic support a priority. Academic profiles are rising, too. This year's entering class of freshman football players had a high-school grade-point average of 3.35, while the entering class of 2000 had only a 2.75 GPA. In the spring of 2002, athletes had a cumulative grade-point average of 2.93; football players averaged 2.76 and male basketball players 2.32. The student body's overall average was 2.92.

The university's new academic-support building, the Younkin Student Success Center, on the southern side of campus, is used by both athletes and other students and has a floor devoted to an athletes-only study hall, individual meeting rooms, and offices for the Student Athlete Support Services Office staff.

Work here starts early -- at 7:40 on weekday mornings, when freshmen on the football team make their way in. Sleepily.

"That's intentional," says Darin Meeker, one of the team's three academic counselors. "The first contact of their day is with academic people."

Some 400 athletes visit the Younkin Center daily. Seventy of them are freshmen in mentor programs. Kathleen N. Riffee, the associate athletics director in charge of academic services, says her mentors work with two sets of athletes: those with poor academic credentials and those who have done well in high school without learning how to work, those who say, "I never worked a day in my life."

"We're starting to experience the fruits of our labor," Ms. Riffee says, noting that terrible graduation rates two years ago were "a wake-up call." Only 18 percent of basketball players and 28 percent of football players finishing that year earned degrees.

The Buckeyes' success on the field is a mixed blessing for professors here, says Mr. Frantz. "Out there, away from Ohio State, too many people still think of the university as being excellent in athletics more than they think of the university being excellent academically," he says. "That's a huge dilemma, and I think it's going to be even more of a problem in the very near future," given the football team's success.

Mr. Montomayor points out another problem: "The type of student who comes to the university because he wants to be part of the Buckeye tradition, who comes here because of the games and the parties -- I'm not sure if that's the type of student we want. It isn't true of a large number, but there's enough of those students so that it does sort of set the tone on campus."

BMOC

Mr. Geiger, the athletics director, has been running athletics departments for 31 years, including stints at Brown University, Stanford University, and the University of Maryland at College Park. He's a big guy -- a rower in his college days -- and radiates enthusiasm. His coaches volunteer comments about how great an administrator he is. And he has overseen a transformation in Ohio State sports since his arrival, in 1994.

In 1995-96, the football team cost $2.9-million and generated $13.2-million, according to the university's Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act report that year. By this year, the cost had tripled and the revenue had doubled.

A review of the department's budget documents indicates that Ohio State has one of those rare athletics programs that isn't a financial drain on the university. In fact, the department pays the university roughly $12.5-million this year to cover overhead costs, income tax, and other expenses. Included in that amount is $8-million to cover the cost of 400 athletics scholarships.

The Buckeyes also generate enough income to service the debt on the many buildings they have opened over the last few years -- debt that would stagger almost all other athletics departments. Debt service on Ohio Stadium, the Schottenstein Center, and other projects in the complex will total a cool $20-million this year.

That's nearly as much as the total budget for the average Division I-A athletics program ($23.2-million in 2001, according to an NCAA study). The money all comes from luxury-box rentals, surcharges on tickets, "seat license" fees, and club seats in the stadium and the arena.

All of that money eventually boils down to a simple ambition: to give Buckeye teams everything it takes to win. In the classroom, yes, but most important, on the field. Mr. Geiger's goals are to get the football team to the Rose Bowl and for the entire sports program to take the Sears Directors Cup, which goes to the program that wins the most championships.

People on the campus outside of athletics are not entirely comfortable with the Buckeyes' rapid expansion, particularly in light of cuts in statewide appropriations. The university placed a moratorium on new athletics buildings in 2000, following the completion of stadium renovations and the construction of the Schottenstein Center.

"The thing that still sticks in the craw of most faculty is the amount of money that went into facilities," says Mr. Frantz, the English professor. "No matter how often you explain that the money was raised privately, through seat licensing, and so forth, faculty say, ëSee, if we'd done a better cultivation of donors, we might have been able to get the money to go to the library instead of the foot ball stadium' or whatever. ... Very few faculty understand that the athletic program is completely self-supporting."

Game Day

Virtually all of the hard work -- the recruiting and coaching and training and fund raising -- happens behind the scenes. The only thing most people see is the hive of activity that takes place on game day, and really only on one team's game day.

This weekend, the women's volleyball team has matches against the Universities of Iowa and Minnesota. The women's hockey team plays Minnesota twice, and the men's hockey team takes on Clarkson University back to back. There are men's soccer games Friday and Sunday. The swimming team opens its season Friday.

But there is no mistaking the main event, on Saturday. By 5 a.m., all of the campus parking employees are out in force, towing any car left in one of the "pay" lots. RV's pull up from all over, and shopping centers a mile away from Ohio Stadium advertise parking for "only" $10. Game day at Ohio State rivals that of any university in the country. A 1926 photograph of a game against the University of Michigan shows 90,000 people packing the horseshoe.

But the stadium has none of the old-beer smell or the weather stains of age, thanks to the renovation just completed last year.

In addition to making the seats and walkways more comfortable (and compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act), a section of club seats with bright-red chair backs has been added at the 50-yard line. A double row of suites runs the length of the stadium between the first and second tiers of seats, and an expansive press box and more suites sit above that on the west side.

Professor Montomayor, himself an alumnus of another sports behemoth, the University of Texas at Austin, recalls that when he was interviewing for his job, in the mid-1980s, the graduate students showing him around made a point of taking him by the "Horseshoe," as it's known.

"The stadium, with that big entrance, is almost cathedral-like -- you get a sense of a European church," he says. "And it is sacred ground to many people. I've never seen a place where athletics are as important as they are here."

Today, emotion and enthusiasm are running high. Pennsylvania State University, with an athletics department nearly as large and nearly as costly, is in town for a game that will have major consequences for both teams' aspirations for a Big Ten championship. For Ohio State, a possible berth in a national-title game is at stake.

With two losses this season, Penn State is all but out of the running. The Buckeyes, though, are undefeated and ranked fourth in the country. Reporters from across the country are here, as is ABC Sports' top football crew for a national broadcast.

"This town is desperate for a winner," says Steve Snapp, Ohio State's sports-information director, in his 29th year here. "If we lose, you'll never see a more crestfallen place."

With 105,103 fans in the stands, an enormous flag is raised and, with almost-military precision, "The Best Damn Band in the Land" marches to form a script "Ohio." Then comes the kickoff.

Unfortunately, the pregame festivities are the climax of the contest. Big Ten football often consists of grind-'em-out defensive battles, and when Ohio State's star running back, Maurice Clarett, leaves with a shoulder injury after four carries, the Buckeyes and the Nittany Lions are left to bash each other around. Thanks to a single spectacular play, an interception run back for a touchdown by the two-way star Chris Gamble, the Buckeyes prevail by a score of 13-7.

As night falls and the lights begin to flicker off, this counts as a good day for Ohio State's athletics department. However, it's only another step. The football staff and players will be back in the Woody Hayes Center tomorrow to look at film of the game, receive treatment for injuries, and go through a light practice to prepare for the next game. The men's hockey team will take on Clarkson again, while the men's soccer team plays Western Illinois University.

The factory never shuts down.

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Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education