*This is part one of a two-part article exploring recent budget issues in club sports.

Last semester, Whitman College’s Nordic and Alpine ski team temporarily lost their endowment funding, creating consequences that rippled out to other funded club sports. Along with ASWC taking over the funding of the club sports budget from the Athletics Department and new Title Ix regulations, club sports captains are navigating a new budgetary landscape to bring their teams to competition.

Three of the four Alpine ski captains, Helena Salathe, Annick Adams, and Brandon Neifert, met with The Wire to detail their experiences. 

“What we heard initially at the very beginning of this [school] year, was that our endowment was being taken away, so we were getting provided with new funds. Then we got an email from one of the captains of the frisbee team, and they said ‘our funding is going to you,’” Alpine Captain, Annick Adams said. 

This commenced an entire semester of meetings between the Alpine ski team captains, the College’s CFO, Jeff Hamrick, and Athletics department staff Kim Chandler, Sarah Bell and Gabe Portolese. Bell denied The Wire’s request for comment. Hamrick has not responded to The Wire’s request for comment by the time of publication. 

 “We had at least three meetings a week… we just kept going back in and explaining our situation. Then there wouldn’t be any actual action being taken. They would just say, ‘you need to fill out this sheet’ … there were times when we had done everything we could have done, but they were still like ‘okay, well, figure it out,” Adams said. 

Neifert described the workload of finalizing their budget in the wake of the endowment reallocation as five hours per week the entirety of Fall semester.

 “We were really curious about the cause of the budget cuts as well as where specifically our endowment was going and that is the point when we started kind of getting really unclear answers,” Adams said. Because of the endowment’s temporary reallocation, the Alpine ski team did not receive their finalized budget until well into Fall semester, once some of their deadlines had already passed.

“I honestly was just pissed off the entire semester, because I felt like we were receiving no support, we were kept in the dark by Whitman, and not being told things up front. I felt like things were always changing, like the floor was being pulled out from under us,” Salathe said.

On top of the budgeting shifts, the club sports were adjusting to new Title IX regulations dictating that on Whitman sponsored trips, there has to be one bed per athlete. According to the Alpine ski captains, there were also insurance regulations banning the booking of Airbnb’s. So, club sports captains are now in a position where they have to book a hotel room with one bed per athlete, which is considerably more expensive than previous arrangements where athletes would get Airbnbs and sleep on couches, bring sleeping bags, and share beds if they were comfortable. 

“The College Travel Policies no longer permit the use of Airbnb or VRBO’s on campus.  This is for all groups and all community members, including athletics and club sports. The change was effective July 1st, 2024 and as a result, it had a significant impact on finances and budgets for club sports teams,” Head of the Athletics Department, Kim Chandler said. “In addition, the one per per [sic.] bed policy, which has been in place in athletics for almost 10 years now was put into travel code for any and all travel for students.  This includes athletics, club sports, travel for academic events, presentations at conferences, etc.  It was put in place as a best practice for Title IX policy for the college.  The policy is a  best practice standard that we need to support, but it did impose significant financial implications to the way that club sports teams had been used to traveling and lodging.”

The Wire will provide more coverage on this in part two of this investigation.

Because of the budget finalizing delays, the Alpine ski team had to reduce their training camp, and the Nordic ski team confirmed that their main training trip to West Yellowstone was cancelled because of their budget cuts.

The Alpine and Nordic ski teams are funded in their entirety by an endowment called the Burton Family Ski Endowment. Alpine ski captains were told that the Burton family ski endowment was being repurposed to fund the club sports coordinator’s salary. 

The club sports coordinator, Gabe Portolese, said that this reallocation of endowment funding created tensions. 

“That decision was made before I was hired. As far as I understood, the endowment money that would have funded their team[s] this year was going to be used for my salary… I’m happy that it was reverted,” Portolese said. 

 The Burton Family Ski endowment is funded by a large gift that was donated to the college called the Nancy and Paul Burton Unitrust. The Wire was unable to confirm the exact date when this Unitrust was donated to the college, however according to an email the Alpine captains shared with The Wire, the college designated the Unitrust funds in 2012. The email, titled “Burton Ski team – quasi endowment” was forwarded to the captains by Hamrick. The following quotes are from a screenshot included within the email. The origin and nature of this document is unclear.

“Per BOTT [Board of Trustees] designation, 11/09/12, at term maturity of the Burton CRUT [Charitable Remainder Unitrust] #215, the proceeds shall be used to establish the following three endowments,” the email reads.

The first endowment, which is 50% of the Unitrust’s proceeds, was designated for the Penrose Library. The next 40% was designated “to create the Burton Family Ski Endowment and 10% to create the Burton Family Lacrosse Endowment, both to provide supplemental support for travel, equipment and other expenses respectively for Whitman’s ski and lacrosse teams,” the email reads. 

Interestingly, on page 15 of a 2019-2020 Club Sports Handbook, under “Travel Finances,” there are two endowment accounts said to fund the ski teams. 

“For the Ski teams, the Burton & Stensen endowment accounts will act as their travel funds for the items listed above.” The Wire is unable to find information about the Stensen endowment account.

The email notes that the proceeds are to be designated after the unitrust has “matured.” According to Whitman’s webpage about the Nancy and Paul Burton Unitrust, 

“Paul and Nancy created a unitrust that will operate for a period of 15 years. The unitrust pays a fixed percentage of the value of the trust, as valued annually, to their four children in equal shares… Over 15 years, the trust is expected to distribute more income to the children than the amount of the assets originally placed in the unitrust… After the 15 year period, the unitrust will terminate and the assets remaining in the trust will pass to the college.”

If the Board of Trustees was designating the proceeds of the unitrust in 2012, that means it had already finished its 15 year period of operations. So, the Nancy and Paul Burton Unitrust was donated, at the latest, in 1997. The Wire is unable to confirm whether the proceeds of the Unitrust were designated as soon as the unitrust reached maturity.

According to Whitman’s webpage on endowments, a minimum of $50,000 must be donated in order for a donor to create a named endowment. Moreover, the club sports’ budgets are currently in the tens of thousands, up to around $30,000, and the club sports are provided with new funding each year. The Board of Trustees created the Burton Family ski endowment thirteen years ago, at the time of publication. 

The Wire is unable to confirm why the endowment could not fund both the ski teams’ budgets and the club sports coordinator position at the same time.

“I think there was confusion with the endowment money taken away, because then the two ski teams had to take away from the club sports’ pool of money,” Portolese said. When the Alpine and Nordic ski teams’ endowments were reallocated, they had to be funded by the club sports’ pool of money, which Portolese says is “a little over $100,000.” Essentially, when the endowment funds were reallocated, the two ski teams’ budgets were then transferred to the $100,000 pool of money that funds multiple other club sports. Because two more sports were being funded out of the $100,000 budget, everyone’s budgets had to be reduced, including the two ski teams’ budgets. 

Most other collegiate alpine ski clubs expect students to pay out of pocket for their registration fees, hotel expenses, food expenses, travel expenses, and gear.

“It’s such a privilege to have funding from the school that basically funds the entire season for us,” Salathe said. “Skiing is a very exclusive sport because it’s so expensive, and I think we need to try to reduce that inaccessibility and make it more inclusive to everybody, no matter the background that they come from… I feel like they were just completely going against everything that club sports is supposed to stand for.”

 “I think that at least some clarity and… any sort of support of them being like, okay, the budget cuts are really difficult. We are able to help explain to you how you can get around this. I don’t know, just anything,” Adams said.