[Editor’s note: Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek announced on May 14 that the U of A tennis programs would be reinstated.]
Recently, a major SEC program did something that is not super common among Power 4 schools. It dropped a sport. Well, technically, two sports.
Arkansas announced that the school will discontinue their men’s and women’s tennis programs. Via its release:
“The landscape of college athletics continues to evolve, requiring us to make challenging choices as we balance competitive opportunities, resources and the long-term sustainability of our department. Ultimately, we concluded that we are unable to provide the level of support necessary for our tennis programs to consistently compete in the SEC and nationally at the standard our student-athletes, coaches, alumni and supporters deserve. We appreciate the efforts of Coach [Jay] Udwadia and Coach [Tucker] Clary, along with all of our current and former student-athletes.”
Before this news story is used to launch a sea of takes about the “state of college athletics” or whatever, let’s try to look at as much data as we can.
Arkansas reported spending $2,350,667 in total expenses for its men’s and women’s tennis programs in fiscal year 2025.
That is slightly less than reported in FY24 ($2,616,170). The data comes from the school’s FY25 NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System Report, an annual budget report that every Division I program files with the NCAA. I have a copy of that report, along with similar reports for more than 200 other DI institutions.
Based on the data we have in the Extra Points Library, that $2.3 million mark would put Arkansas at 31st among public schools in total tennis program spending, but in the hypercompetitive SEC, it would be second to last among public schools, just ahead of Missouri — and Missouri does not even have a men’s tennis team.
Of course, “total expenses” refers to lots of different categories. The number includes spending on team travel, recruiting expenses, coach salaries, administrative salaries, food, equipment, severance payments and more. So where was Arkansas behind the most?
Our data shows Arkansas was middle of the SEC pack in spending on athletic student aid ($701,030, or ninth), travel and many other operating expenses. Interestingly enough, Arkansas actually led the SEC in spending on athlete food for tennis.
The state was near the bottom in coaching salaries ($545,544, while the league average was slightly above $900,000), support staff/administrative spending ($19,794, while the league average was around $103,000) and recruiting ($54,516, compared to the league average of $103,157).
If the numbers are correct — and more on that later — it looks to me that while on the lower end, the operating budget at Arkansas was not so much lower than its peers that competition would be impossible.
But what about the revenues?
That is where things look a little unusual.
Arkansas reportedly had a paltry $3,284 in total revenues tied to the men’s and women’s tennis programs in FY25 and only $9,556 in FY24. Specifically, the school reported earning $2,000 from game guarantees, $1,200 in “other operating revenue,” and a whopping $164 from royalties, licensing and sponsorships. Combined, that is easily the lowest number in the SEC. The second-lowest program, Mississippi State, reported $118,944 in revenue.
For context, we have FY25 MFRS data for 184 college tennis programs right now. Arkansas would rank 180th in reported revenue, ahead of only Cal State Fullerton, Kennesaw State, Georgia Southern and Ball State. Central Arkansas reported $336,422 in revenue. Arkansas State reported $219,906.
If we just look at this like a profit-and-loss statement, it seems like cutting tennis would be an easy decision. Arkansas tennis barely produces any sort of revenue whatsoever and costs around $2.5-ish million a year to operate. Of course the school should get rid of it, right?
Well, not exactly.
First, we have got to talk about what revenue is.
On the MFRS report, the “total operating revenues” figure is a combination of many other line items. Those lines include not just the sort of income that you would typically associate with revenue (such as ticket sales, NCAA distributions, game guarantees, parking revenue, etc.) but also a few line items that nonindustry folks probably would not consider to be revenue at all.
For example, if a school uses student fees to subsidize the athletic department budget (common among most non-Power 4 public schools but not at Arkansas), those fees count as revenue for a sport. So do specific donations, as well as “direct institutional support” and “indirect institutional support revenue.” Those categories may not automatically mean cash, since spending on, say, security, utilities, accounting services, tuition waivers, etc., would typically fall into those buckets, but I think it is important to flag them, since they are not revenue in the sense that a corporate sponsorship or a ticket sale is revenue.
For Arkansas State, for example, that $219,906 in revenue comes overwhelmingly from student fees.
If we want to look at college tennis revenue figures without stuff like student fees, direct institutional support or interdepartment resource transfers, we need to create a table to look at earned revenues.
What we can learn from this exercise is that the overwhelming majority of college tennis programs do not sell any tickets at all. Selling tickets requires a facility that actually has enough seating capacity to make it worthwhile plus the ability to staff the venue to actually accept tickets. By our numbers, only 14 public schools generated any ticket revenue in FY25, and only one, Texas A&M, generated more than $20,000.
To the extent that tennis programs directly generate revenue, it is most likely to show up via sports camps. Thirty-nine different programs reported sports camp-related revenue via tennis in FY25, 19 of them generating more than $20,000.
So yes, on paper, college tennis basically cannot become “profitable” because it lacks most of the traditional pathways (tickets, concessions, alcohol, television) to generate revenue. Other than camps, fundraising and corporate sponsorships, there are not many levers to pull, but there is one revenue stream that is not on the sheet that we do have to talk about — tuition.
For an institution that opts into the House settlement, the new roster limit for men’s and women’s tennis is 10 full-scholarship athletes per team, so a school could theoretically expand their scholarship spending from the pre-House settlement era (the limits used to be 4.5 scholarships for men and eight for women) or simply expand the roster and not expand scholarships.
The gap between roster size and scholarship spending is critical in understanding the math behind many Olympic sports but especially college tennis. College tennis rosters tend to skew heavily international, even at places like Arkansas. On the current men’s roster, only one athlete is from Arkansas, and only one other athlete is from the United States. The others are all international athletes.
The kind of athlete who is capable of playing DI college tennis is also typically the kind of athlete who is financially capable of paying full tuition. If a school might otherwise struggle to recruit those types of students, an athletic team could be “profitable” without ever selling a single ticket.
Full estimated room and board at Arkansas for a non-Arkansas resident is about $52,879.90 per year, so just four athletes a year across both teams, paying the complete full price would bring in more than $211,000 a year to the university in tuition. That is real revenue, but it does not show up on the MFRS report.
That is a major reason why schools such as Youngstown State, Western Carolina, Grambling and Longwood can afford tennis programs, even as Arkansas has decided it cannot. They are all calculating revenues and expenses differently.
Did Arkansas have to do away with its tennis program in order to stay competitive in other sports? I do not think so.
In FY25, as an athletic department, Arkansas generated about $195 million in total revenues and spent about $184 million. Getting rid of the tennis programs, on paper, does not even shave 2 percent off the total operating budget. It matters, but in the grand scheme of things, it does not matter that much. It also makes me think that even if Arkansas officials decided that they would need operating spending of $3.5 million in order to compete in the SEC, the school could have done that.
Just based on the spending reports, I would think Arkansas could have maybe done more to lessen the financial burden of the tennis programs on the general budget. There is no reported sports camp income and virtually nothing from donor contributions, sport-specific endowment revenues or corporate engagement. If tennis was really important to the UA community, either it was not showing it, or the school was not letting it.
But even if Arkansas were awesome at all that other stuff, tennis is not going to self-generate enough money to be athletic-revenue neutral. This is not a sport you operate if your goal is to profit from direct athletic revenue.
So if the school decided that funding a sport that is overwhelmingly played by foreign students does not fit the department’s long-term institutional goals, well, that could be defended. If the school decided that it would be better for fans and community members to instead reinvest that cash savings into the school’s golf and volleyball programs, I think that could be defended too. Marginal increases in the operating budgets of those sports may be more likely to lead to better competitive outcomes.
Sport sponsorship is, after all, partly about values. Those are going to be different from school to school.
I do not think there is much evidence to suggest that the school is slashing a program in the hopes that the (tiny) savings will materially improve football or basketball program outcomes, especially since the tennis savings cannot really be directly converted into football payroll. Arkansas is already fully funding its House payments, after all. If that actually is the plan, then I would say that is a dumb plan.
I do not automatically think that Arkansas reaching this decision means another 20 P4 programs are going to drop Olympic programs in the short term. Different schools have different Title IX compliance obligations, different risk and bad-press tolerances, different donor pressures, and different enrollment pressures. Schools can also almost as easily just slash scholarship and operational spending without actually dropping the sport, achieving similar results without bad press or as strong of a threat of lawsuits.
Did Arkansas absolutely have to drop its tennis program? No, I do not think so. Most schools do not have to drop any sports in order to balance the books. Arkansas wanted to do this. Whether it was justified in wanting to do that depends a lot on what leaders are hoping to accomplish.
If anything, this all shows that the math is complicated, and not everything that is important is easily captured on one chart.
Chicago-based Matt Brown is the creator of the sports analysis site Extra Points and the Extra Points daily newsletter, which covers the off-the-field issues in college sports. His analysis and research is available at extrapointsmb.com.
