Club/League Funding DPU-Lange-1 - DePaul Something that I would say can be considered one of the most important things to a club dodgeball team, but something that rarely gets discussed is funding. The only time this ever comes up is when someone makes a comment about how little funding and money their team has. I thought it might be beneficial if each team discussed how their club is funded, whether it is funded directly by the school, if you charge fees to your players, if each player is responsible for his or her own uniform+a few dodgeballs, etc. Everybody knows that even a sport such as dodgeball can get expensive, especially with traveling to play other schools. I'm curious as to how all teams deal with funding their play and their travel, so feel free to share. I also have an interesting topic to debate at the bottom of this thread, but first let me explain DePaul's process. All student organizations have access to funding from SAF-B, which stands for Student Activity Funding Board. You have to submit a proposal that explains exactly what you are requesting funding for, at least two separate quotes for that item, when you expect to purchase that item, etc. You then need to attend a hearing where you explain your proposal and they will approve you for a certain amount of funds based on your request. Then once you make those purchases, you have to submit a reimbursement request to SAF-B and furnish a receipt for that item, and then 3 weeks later(if you're lucky) they will directly deposit that amount of money into your club account. I have a few issues with this system, whereas I understand the school is covering their ass and making sure that clubs spend the money the way it was intended and have to give a receipt to prove it. However, when nationals rolls around, and hotels need to be booked, tournament fees paid, cars rented, etc. Usually all of those costs, over $2000 last year for DePaul, have to sit on the credit card of one or a few team captains until they get reimbursed. I think this is annoying, and also can be discriminatory, because you technically cannot make use of your funding unless you have that amount of money to put up front. An idea I was toying around with this year was that when we pick our nationals roster, each player is required to submit a $100 deposit. $100 x 20 player roster=$2,000. That way the team treasurer, or captain, can make arrangements for the team to travel to nationals, and not have a huge bill sitting on his or her credit card until the school reimburses them. Once the school goes through the reimbursement process, all of those players get some, if not all of their deposit back. Not only does this help out the captain by him or her not having to front the money, but it also guards against last minute drop outs. You tell your players that if they drop out they will not get their deposit back unless the team can find a replacement who can also put in a deposit. Which leads me to another topic of discussion which I will probably get a target on my head for bringing up. I know every team is poor and none of us have any money. In light of league expansion and legitimizing ourselves, has anyone thought about implementing a league fee? For example, if each team were required to pay a $100 league fee at the beginning of every season that would give the league a few thousand dollars. This money can be spent in a variety of ways. 1. It could be spent to pay actual referees for tournaments throughout the year. 2. It could be used to offset the cost of the national tournament at the end of the year, because it is very expensive to host a tournament of that size, so a few thousand extra dollars would be extremely helpful to the host school. Or 3. It could be used in a variety of other ways, which I have yet to give much thought to. If you look at some very established collegiate club leagues, many have league fees to help them operate. If we have dreams of the NCDA expanding nationally, eventually I believe some sort of league fee will need to be implemented. What are your thoughts? Spencer Jardine #77 - SVSU Here at SVSU we have a $10 fee we charge per player. Goes into the normal things we need like hotel, travel cost, new balls, and tournament fees. The rest is usually out of pocket. This year we are trying something new and going out into the community and raising money. That should help off set some of the put of pocket cost. As far as what I have spent on dodgeball out of pocket, every dollar has been worth it, and I have never heard someone on our team complain about the amount of money they spend on dodgeball. As far as a team fee? I would have to say no right now in my opionion. 1. Its unfair to teams whos only game is Nationals because they are so far away from other teams, so they end up only playing 4-5 games one weekend for a cost of $100 up front. What are we going to tell teams who dont pay? Your not in, dont bother showing up? Next thing we have is teams dropping out because they can go to Nationals. 2. Its hard enough for new teams to get players to begin with. Adding $100 on top of trying to recruit to people only adds to the burdens of trying to start a team. « Last Edit: 11-18-2010 at 1:50pm by Spencer Jardine #77 » DPU-Lange-1 - DePaul I'd have to agree with you on the league fee regarding teams that don't play much except for nationals along with newer teams. Do you just charge $10 fee to your players at the beginning of the season? I'm guessing that's not just your tournament roster? Or is it? At DePaul it is hard to charge a fee to our players because we have open practices that anybody can come to, so usually what we have done in the past is have each player going to nationals pay $30 to pay for a team dinner we have at nationals and to cover some of the gas for driving. Zigmister - DePaul I also want to bring it up, since we're talking about it... Facility Rental: DePaul allows Club Sports organizations - aka DePaul Dodgeball or Club Basketball, etc - to rent free court space at our school's fitness center or on the soccer field. So no facility rental for other teams when playing DePaul, which is pretty nice compared to some other schools. Funding Limit: Student Orgs at DePaul can only receive funding at a max of $3000 for travel, and $3000 for Lodging/individual event fees. League fees are technically separate, Equipment (dodgeballs) is separate, and SAF-B can only fund 1/3 of the total apparel cost. So the team pays 2/3rd of the jersey cost. Also Heisman, Carrie is allowing us to use her credit card to book the hotel if its covered by SAF - so we don't have to front that at least. We did this for the MSU invite. I can fill ya in when you get back. stokesj - GVSU We have members pay around $20 at the beginning of each semester. That allows people to play at every practice instead of the one open practice we have a week and it also gets them a club t-shirt. For us that $20 is basically enough to cover travel fees, tournament fees, equipment fees, etc. etc. We also hold these little mini-tournaments every now and then with a $10 per team fee to raise money for the club. Typically people that sign up for that are frats, other club sports, or random kids that just want to play. We then give away a prize to the team that gets first and second place. As far as requesting money, I leave that up to my treasurers... Screw bureaucracy, I'd rather just deal with making rosters and running practice. WKU-Perrone-76 - WKU At WKU we receive funding from our sports club department and the student government. The club pays for the jerseys, official fees, and entry fees to nationals. The club recently paid for half of hotels when we went to WIU for their round robin as well. We require our players to buy their team shorts and one ball each ($20 total), but the players get to keep the shorts. The jerseys are property of the WKU sports club department and have to be turned at the end of every year, but we get them back in the fall. Since our players have NO money and everything else is paid for out of pocket we're actually doing some fundraisers this year. We are planning an open tournament for the WKU and Bowling Green, KY community. Each person pays $5 to participate, people are organized into teams of 6, each team plays three best-two-out-of-three games, the 16 teams with the best record go on to a single elimination bracket, then the winning team gets a prize of some sort. Our other fundraiser (you guys are going to love this) is a sexy calendar featuring the dodgeball players that we will sell around campus for $5 or $10. It's going to be possibly the most ridiculous thing ever, but it will be fun haha. We're hoping to raise a lot of money with this silly idea. Yea we've paid for everything out of our pockets when it comes to traveling and gas and tournament entry fees. We've had to save all of our funding that we were allotted by the school for Nationals, since it's going to cost just shy of $5000 to run Nationals this year and we're only getting $3750 from team entry fees. I've spent well over $100 out of my own pocket on balls alone this season, we've popped so many haha. Zigmister - DePaul 30 balls at the office world.com link is $86.70 w/ free shipping, i just bought them. It sucks because their red, but eh. We also got these funded from our school, but thats besides the point. DePaul on Dues: DePaul doesn't use dues because it is against our ethic. We have a commitment to non-commitment. We instead charge Trip Fees, which are based on whatever we have to cover after we apply for funding. And most of the time, we get most everything funded, so that trip fee ends up paying for family dinner. It's a "raw deal" if we make one player pay a fee just to play, when one player can come one time or come a hundred times. Then we limit of 20 people of the 60 regular people that play, and 40 people are paying for these 20 people to go play? that sucks. That's no fun for the 40 people stuck behind. That's just the way DePaul Dodgeball happens to function. Against League Fees: I'd also be against charging a team league fees, if the teams don't need what your including. NCDA logo balls would be nice, but DePaul will never need whistles, cards, or stopwatches. We can rent these for free. And you can print for free in certain areas at DePaul. On Bomis' League Kit: I'd also try to include a referee striped shirt in there, for the first batch. Stopwatches: Unless you got a huge ass order, i'd be fine with just one or zero. This should technically either be one or three - 3 for two Timekeepers and the Head Referee, or one for the Referee and the Timekeepers use a regular wrist watch. ---- I'll work from the 32 hypothetical situation here: Starting Incorporation Fee April 2016 Say, by the arbitrary season of 2016, we get 32 teams regularly doing their s***. The NCDA can charge a larger tournament fee at the S*** Gets Real April 2016 in order cover the costs of incorporation and possibly front the money for these batch orders. Only the teams playing at Nationals would pay this, which are the teams considered to have enough Cojones to get their act together and make it there in April. DePaul tangent: I will hope DePaul makes it there even if we don't get the wins in the point system since 1) we will have the money to spend and 2) we've been playing dodgeball since 2000, before the movie even came out. We totally would be the ones that would pull the tradition card. Having a point system and making us drop out is not going to make DePaul any better - its just going to force us to drop out of league play and go back to playing our style of dodgeball at our regular dodgeball nights. /tangent Anyway, these April teams would probably have the most stake in further legitimizing the NCDA. Starting a League Fee - Sept 2018 This event fee would function like a League fee, you could label it as such, but it most of it would be used the next year (2017) to incorporate the League. At the April 2017 event, you charge a smaller fee to add a little bit of money to the pool. Then at the beginning of the 2017-2018 season, you can start charging the serious/veteran teams a league fee. League Fees and Start Up Kits: New teams shouldn't have to be charged just to have NCDA membership - most of the time the're just going to drop it or switch to NADA or whatever that amateur league is. If they even want to compete with other schools. You could charge a league fee for the schools that have established clubs/organizations and have been around a while. Or you could put a year limit on when you start charging that fee - maybe 2 or 3 years as an established club. Separate the League Fee from the equipment cost make it a starter package and market it to new teams. Everything you need to get started, cheaper than you can find it anywhere else. Balls: The NCDA should probably start selling balls - in the future. Once the league gets enough in its coffers, go ahead and make that batch order of a 1000 logo balls. But it should take a few years to fundraise/save up. Not put the giant cost on one year's fee. NCDA buying bulk: There's something to be said with buying in bulk, and that's something the NCDA could have the power to do, but that cost is probably going to fall on the teams and I don't want people to pay to play dodgeball. Make it as cheap as possible. 5 Hours of dodgeball in April + Cheaper cost = more fun. I love math. And magnets. It's f'ing science. ---- Summary, once 32 teams roll along: NCDA Team Start-up Kit: $100 - whistles, balls, cards, etc. League Fees per established team: $100 April Tournament Fee: $100 I'd be down for explicitly labeling what each thing gets you: Open Budgeting. What the hell is there to hide. ---- We should have more teams talk about how their team gets funding though, as per the original subject. It would probably help fuel the League fee subject. This is my five year plan whahahaha! I had to label some paragraphs since this is long as s***. BUT I WILL NEVR APOLOGIZE FOR WORDS KFitz - Kent State Kent doesn't have dues, and doesn't really get any form of funding, it's all out of pocket. Murphy7 - SVSU / Delta Aside from nationals, every trip we take comes out of our own pocket.