MORGANTOWN — Having already overseen coaching changes and transitions in men’s and women’s basketball and the baseball programs, WVU athletic director Wren Baker announced a pivot to fundraising Wednesday.
“We’ve got to find a way to bring in more revenue,” Baker said. “We do not have a spending problem. If you compare us across the varieties of spending categories, we’re very efficient with the dollars that we have. We’ve got to eat, breathe, sleep and think how can we bring in more revenue?”
Baker’s first seven months on the job — he was hired last Nov. and began on Dec. 19 — saw him handle the coaching change from Bob Huggins to Josh Eilert in men’s basketball, as well as hiring Mark Kellogg as the women’s hoops coach and overseeing the transition from Randy Mazey to Steve Sabins in 2025 in baseball.
“There’s been some distractions,” he joked.
Now his attention is turning to fundraising, as well as future renovations to WVU’s athletic arenas.
Where will the money come from? Off the top of his head during a 40-minute press conference, Baker eyed everything from selling naming rights to WVU’s athletic stadiums to building more suits at Milan Puskar Stadium.
“When you look at our strengths here, the fan passion and loyalty is our biggest strength,” Baker said. “But one of our weaknesses is our ability to really monetize that loyalty.”
WVU’s reason for wanting to create more revenue is basically twofold, centering around facing increased expenses in an expanding Big 12 going westward and being able to compete in the larger conference.
“You go back and look historically when our teams across the board have been the most successful, I would venture to say we were probably around the average — if not a little higher — in the league in terms of budget,” Baker said. “We’re not there right now. We’ve got to find a way to do that.”
The story is in the financial numbers.
According to the school’s fiscal report submitted to the NCAA, WVU spent a total of $97,067,706 across all sports in the 2022 fiscal year, which included such things as coaching salaries, team travel and recruiting expenses.
In that same time frame, Texas spent more than $216 million.
In terms of increased travel, the Big 12 expanded into a third time zone by adding BYU this season. In 2024, Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah will be added to the mix, which could add thousands of more miles to WVU’s travel woes across its 14 sports that participate in the conference.
What’s the costs there? Since joining the Big 12 in 2012, WVU has spent an average of $7 million yearly on travel across all sports, with a high of $9.13 million in 2015.
In its final year in the Big East, WVU spent $5.095 million on travel. With added trips out West, it’s conceivable the school’s average travel budget could increase by one million.
“Our financial folks in the athletic department are starting to model some of that out just that we can understand it,” Baker said. “There’s a possibility — depending on how we schedule in certain sports — we can reduce costs.
“If we can lock in and play in divisions, we could potentially cut some costs. There’s also a lot of miles out there where it could go up, so we’ve got to really drill down on that, because it does affect us more than it does other teams who might be more centrally located in the league.”
Baker believes there is money out there waiting in terms of adding more suites to the football stadium and possibly adding suites to the Coliseum.
He was reminded of that recently during a meeting with boosters.
“I had two or three people ask me about buying a suite, but we don’t have any suites to sell,” Baker said, noting all available football suites were already sold out. “We have to figure that out, because not only is that a revenue problem for us now, but we really cut ourselves off from some prospects for the future.”
As for selling the naming rights to the football, basketball and baseball stadiums, Baker said the school has begun the process of looking into it.
“We’re exploring that with all of our venues,” Baker said. “We’ve had some third parties engaged just to do some evaluations on what that could bring.
“People get pretty attached to certain names on venues and I get that, but they also get attached to winning, right? Winning takes money. It’s something we’re definitely going to look at. If there’s an opportunity to monetize that, we’ve got to look really hard at it.”
