A series of setbacks stall North Carolina Central athletics

NORTH CAROLINA CENTRAL ATHLETICS

North Carolina Central football coach Trei Oliver contends the Eagles are "the best HBCU football program in college football. We're going to be better than last year. …I don't want to hear about the Celebration Bowl.""

The Fourth of July is near, but North Carolina Central football coach Trei Oliver got the fireworks started last week at Missy Lane’s Assembly Room in downtown Durham.

Oliver is part of the Eagles athletics tour that’s visiting several cities around the state to tout the department’s programs and shmooze with alumni and fans. Oliver was accompanied by women’s basketball coach Terrence Baxter and volleyball coach Jody Brown before a packed house.

It didn’t take long for the outspoken Oliver to give opponents bulletin board material. “We’re the top dog now. We have the best HBCU football program in college football,” he said. “We’re going to be better than last year. …I don’t want to hear about the Celebration Bowl.”

Howard dethroned the Eagles for the 2023 MEAC title to face SWAC champ Florida A&M in the Cricket Celebration Bowl, which the Rattlers won.

But while NCCU football and basketball will almost assuredly be in the running for conference titles, the athletic department as a whole has some major challenges to overcome.

Akua Matherson, NCCU chief finance officer and vice chancellor for administration and finance, reported at last week’s Board of Trustees meeting that the athletics department is running in the red, and we’re not talking pennies and nickels.

One of the culprits is a 10-year sponsorship deal between the department and Peak Sports, a multimarketing company based in Texas, that was hatched in 2020 under a previous administration. The sponsorship looked good on paper: Peak Sports would manage and sell all sponsorship inventory for the department from signage to digital content to sporting events. The Eagles would be guaranteed a specific amount.

But, as still relatively new athletic director Skip Perkins was soon to discover, there was more to the story.

The partnership guarantees Peak Sports 40% of all the corporate sponsorships it sells for NCCU athletics and – GET THIS – that NCCU sells on its own. So, whichever way the money flows in, Peak Sports gets a 40% cut. And there’s still seven years left on the contract.

“We have met with (legal) counsel multiple times to try to find a way to get out of this contract. The guy is not going to let us out,” Perkins said.

That guy is Peak Sports President Ryan Holloway. And let’s be real, why would he? He’s in a win-win situation.

The second culprit is a $500,000 settlement with Duke Health.

Student-athletes have two types of insurance policies, Matherson said. One is a policy the athletes carry themselves, and then the university carries a secondary policy on each student-athlete. A department employee is responsible for filing any necessary claims.

You know where I’m going, right? For several years – again under a previous administration – the person didn’t file the secondary insurance paperwork on the athletes, many of them from the defunct baseball program, which may I remind you again, never won a MEAC championship but had the third-highest number of scholarships behind football and men’s basketball.

“The gentleman in charge of sports medicine at the time did not file the secondary insurance,” Perkins said. “It is paperwork, but I guess he thought that was not part of his job. He’s no longer here.”

Matherson said the half-million-dollar settlement with Duke Health was a gift because the total amount “was much higher.”

The third culprit is travel expenses. Coaches were given travel cards for recruiting. Bad idea. Not because they did anything wrong, but ALL coaches have one-track minds: winning. They are not thinking, “Hmmm, am I getting close to my spending limit?”

“We had people continuing to charge without recognizing that there’s a budget,” Matherson said. “We pulled all that back and just reinstated the AD and associate AD to manage the cards.”
NCCU, like most athletic departments in the red, is in a Catch-22 situation. On the one hand, the bleeding must stop; but on the other, teams must still win, or alumni will stop giving, creating a deeper hole.

“The two biggest expenditures in athletics you cannot cut: scholarships and contractual obligations on coaching positions,” Matherson said. “A couple of (NCCU) contracts you’d have to buy out significantly to bring down what we’re spending.”

Departing NCCU Chancellor Johnson O. Akinleye was upbeat, however, and quite complimentary of Perkins and his staff over the past two years.

“You’re cleaning up some things that occurred and put us in a hole,” Akinleye said. “Clean those items up and put us on the right side. Last two years, the athletic program is making progress, but when you’re digging out of a hole, it takes time and it’s a process.”

Bonitta Best is sports editor at The Triangle Tribune in Durham.

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