Whit Babcock Q&A, Part II: Athletic department revenues, future building projects and improvements to the fan experience

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AB: How are football ticket sales going right now?

WB: Very well. I haven’t gotten an update in a couple weeks, but with seven home games and Notre Dame and a slight price increase, it’s hitting our budget numbers and exceeding it. We feel good about it.

AB: In terms of revenues next year, you’ve explained the $3.3 million shortfall in the last fiscal year as an accounting result. You earmarked the $4 million guarantee from the Battle at Bristol to be moved over to cover an expected deficit in scholarship funding, only for fundraising for that to exceed expectations, and it was too late to move the money back. How are those revenues and expenditures looking in the future?

WB: For this fiscal year we’re currently in, it’ll really take until July to settle all the books, but it will be close this year, but we always expect and desire to operate in the black. And then it could be a couple, tight, lean years, but hopefully the network will get us out of it and some of the programming we’re putting in. But with campus and everything else, we have a 10-year budget plan that the president and CFO have helped us work on, so that’s too long of an answer to say it should be pretty lean and pretty tight. We always need to balance, and then hopefully we can spike back up as things get off the round with the network.

AB: Do you feel like you’re succeeding in finding new revenue sources?

WB: I hope so. I do. I guess you can always do more. I believe it was probably five, six, seven years ago, our budget was $60 million. Now it’ $90 [million]. So I’m pleased with the growth overall of our budget. But yeah, we’re spending it and reinvesting in our programs and we’d like to have a reserve. Jim [Weaver] was great at that. But there’s no board of directors here sitting there putting it in their back pocket. Whatever we make we put right back into the program, and we’ve pushed it pretty hard, but hopefully the results are speaking for themselves.

AB: You talk about that growth from $60 million to $90 million, a lot of other Power 5 schools have seen that too. You’re growing but you’re not really gaining relative to other schools in terms of revenue standing nationally. Is that just a fact you have to live with or is there something that can be done to close that gap?

WB: You’re right. Again, if you have a network influx of money, then everybody in the ACC gets it too, and the whole rising tide. I’m also very pleased with our Hokie Club numbers and our fundraising there. That’s up around $10 million in unrestricted money. So yeah, I’m pleased with the revenue generation. But I don’t know if we want to stay around 40th to 44th budget-wise in the country out of the Power 65. That’s a position we’d prefer not to be in. We don’t have to be in the top 10. I’d love it, but we sure want to be in the top half. And right now we’re in the bottom half nationally out of the Power 65 and we’re just on the bottom half of the ACC budget-wise. So we’re fine to overachieve, and we’ll beat them with what we have, but it would be a little bit easier if we could jump that up there.

AB: Does that have to be made up on the donations side?

WB: Not necessarily. But you had talked about all the stones you turned over for revenue, right? You might have concessions and tickets and for us, the biggest line item, so to speak, was our fundraising numbers, and we have made great strides there, and then the conference revenue sharing ultimately through the network. That’s the best kind of money: you just open the mail and it shows up.

AB: What about beer sales? Has that ever crossed your mind in Lane Stadium?

WB: A little. But we’ve dabbled in it with baseball as you know and in some interior premium spaces. First off, it would not be my decision alone, because I have bosses too. But secondly, I don’t think anyone will see beer vendors in Lane Stadium anytime soon.

AB: The Hokie Club took in a record $47.7 million in donations last year. A $15 million single gift for the Athlete Performance Center certainly helps that number, but it would have been a record high regardless. How pleased are you with that progress?

WB: The major gifts are great. We can build some things. But for us, the annual fundraising, the annual giving, the unrestricted money that you can spend on scholarships, etc., our scholarship bill is approaching $16 million a year, so even if we raise $40 million a year, but we only raise $10 [million] in unrestricted, then where’s the other $6 [million] come from for scholarships? So if you make a big gift to the new project up here like we got, we love it. It’s huge. But how are we going to generate that annual revenue to pay the scholarship bill in the unrestricted dollars? And that comes primarily from your priority seating program, smaller gifts, annual gifts, and that’s where the Drive for 25 kicks in. And our numbers are improving there. We will not have another 30 or 40 percent jump in our donor numbers, but I’m hoping we can bounce that back up as well. So it’s money, but it’s also participation.

AB: The Hokie Club membership total was down a little bit slightly from this time last year, at 12,849 as of May 16.

WB: It is, but I’m not sure where the year officially starts and stops and when we turn it off and go to the next year. But it would be minimal growth and maybe even a slight decline this year in the number of donors after going up from 10,000 to 13,000 last year.

AB: I assume if the donation total is greater, the number of people is less of a concern.

WB: Shoot, at the end of the day, the money is [more important]. But we’re certainly working hard to expand our base of support to make sure the Hokie Nation knows that the Hokie Club is not only for those that want season tickets. I mean, shoot, we’ve got 250,000 alumni and probably as many non-alumni that are fans. And if there are 500,000 people who love the Hokies and want to get involved, we think 13,000 is pretty low.

AB: What’s the next building project?

WB: You know about the [Athlete Performance Center] upstairs. And I think the next thing you would see in this next year to two window is an expansion and renovation of the football weight room. Football’s not the only sport to use it but the primary sport. And we’re close. That’ll be around a $5 million project, and I believe we’re around $3 million on that fundraising-wise. [note: Tech will be knocking out a wall and starting some of the project soon and is close to starting it in full force soon.] And then we’d like to, quite frankly in this next year or two, check all those boxes, and then roll into our next big university capital campaign, and that would have some bigger-ticket items on it, such as a Cassell Coliseum renovation, some work on Lane Stadium and then scholarships. So I feel like we’ve covered a lot of things for all of our sports, and then when we roll into the capital campaign, to simplify it to Lane Stadium, Cassell Coliseum and scholarships would be our big push, but we’re very pleased that we’ve been able to do things that have touched every single sport across the board, and then again the fourth-floor project up there will help every sport.

AB: What do you want to see in Cassell if you have a wish list of things you’d like to do?

WB: I would like to see it maintain the incredibly good homecourt advantage and feel of a basketball gym. I like that. I would also like to see it, however, have a few more comforts, amenities, revenue-generating seating, quite frankly. But how do we keep the best of Cassell that everybody loves but also bring it up to speed a little bit and set it up for the next 50 or 60 years. So I don’t know what that number is: $30, $40, $50 million, something like that. Depends on what we want to do. But we love Cassell. We don’t want to build a new arena. And we want to keep the best of it and make it more comfortable. And now we’re getting bigger crowds and it’s a little tough to walk through here.

AB: Did you get positive feedback on the seatbacks?

WB: We did. And to replace the other wooden seats up there, we certainly want to do that, but that’s an $800,000 expense to replace the other chairs up there. So we’d like to do that.

AB: What can you do in terms of premium seating?

WB: I don’t know if it’s suites. I don’t know if it’s a club level. But we’re looking at a lot of that. But we don’t want it to be too corporate or too stuffy, I guess. But our courtside seating — I’m sorry for the media — but that generated around a quarter of a million dollars a year for us, I think, maybe more. So I don’t know. It could be loge boxes, it could be suites, it could be a club level where people who sit there have access to our new area upstairs during games. So we’re just looking at it. We can’t get some of the revenue generating like Louisville does. But that’s OK.

AB: What about Lane? There have been some club level improvements recently, but the majority of fans don’t see any of that.

WB: This year, I don’t know that it’ll be something of a huge magnitude, but we’re really putting a focus on the east side of the stadium, on the east side fan experience. We have so many people over there. We’ve touched up a lot of areas. But how can we make the fan experience better especially for those on the east side? So hopefully they will see some improvements and things. But as far as that next big capital campaign, if there is a big renovation of Cassell, I think we would look at the potential to maybe add some more suites in football or do we take the glass off the indoor clubs on the west side and make them open air? That’s about $10 million to do that. We’re looking at could we put a club level on the east side, some chair-back seating. But in general, as an athletic director, I’m incredibly fortunate that the people before me really built a beautiful football stadium. It’s the right size. It’s a great experience. But you never want to go too long without investing in Lane and seeing what we could do there too. So I would say Cassell renovation and the Lane renovation, if you want to call it that, is probably a couple years away before we go full bore on it, but those are coming.

AB: Are you continuing to make changes to the fan experience? I know it’s a battle these days to keep attendance level, let alone trying to increase it.

WB: I hope so. We’ve made great strides there. And I really rely on our external leadership team to come up with that. But we do fan surveys and focus groups and study what our peers do. There are a lot of best practices in the ACC. So yeah, I’m pleased with it. I think we’ve made some great strides, and now they’re going to be incremental. But every year, we want to improve that, and if anybody reading this has any ideas, they can call us, send us an email or tweet at us.

AB: What’s the thing you hear the most from fans about improving the stadium experience?

WB: Not too much in Lane Stadium. I’ll tell you, if we lose a game, I get more complaints. I think what we hear … pricing, we don’t hear that too much. Wi-Fi, I think that needs to be better, but at the same time, part of the reason we got to the game is if we’re entertained, we put our phone down. And when people say that millennials as fans are always on their phone, I think if they’re entertained or engaged, they don’t look at it. I think in a way, people enjoy not being attached to it. So I don’t know that connectivity is the be all, end all. It can improve, but if you’re really into the game … some of the science has shown that the connectivity might not be as big a deal. Concession pricing, we have looked at that and have variety. I don’t know. Some of the new places that are going low on concessions pricing, I’d really like to study that. But in general, no, people are much more complimentary of Lane Stadium. There’s no one theme that comes up a whole lot.

AB: What about the “Let’s Go, Hokies” chant replacing the Hokie Pokie?

WB: [Laughs] We’re going to try that again this year like we did last year. And I think we got the hang of it last year as we went along with the year. And as I said last year, we did not get rid of the Hokie Pokie. We just moved it off of that time slot. And we have a new band director coming in, and maybe he or she will help us figure that out. So we don’t want to do away with it. It was just around three minutes at the start of the fourth quarter, and we felt like we could bring a little juice into it. So we felt like we could get that where people were pleased with it. I think toward the end of the year. Pierson Prioleau and some others did a good job with it.

AB: Is the baseball stadium everything you hoped it would be now that it’s completed? (Or close to completed.)

WB: There’s landscaping and other things. Very, very pleased with it. And I have not seen our attendance numbers, but I’d be shocked if they weren’t up. And it seems like people really enjoy coming to it. And our baseball is getting better. Still got a ways to go. But it’s nice to see people come out. And I think that was a case of if you build it they will come. And then next year, the one area that didn’t get finished this year, the landscaping and then also a picnic area down the right-field line that we hope to use for group sales and outings and birthday parties and some of that stuff. So we’re going to keep it a collegiate looking place, but we’re going to mix in some of the minor league stuff.

AB: Anything else that I haven’t asked about that you’d like to mention?

WB: Oh, the control rooms [for the ACC Network] will be in the south end zone, but when you drive up Beamer Way and you look at the main entrance of Lane, under the press box, if you look through there from the road, you’ll be able to see the literal set of the ACC Network and it’ll be lit up. So that space on the first floor of Lane, which we don’t use too much, we’ll move some of the memorabilia to the sides and you’ll see a studio that’ll be lit up really nice too.

And on the ticketing side of things, what we’re working hard at too is to make it much easier for people to turn tickets in, email them to people, primarily for basketball but also football, where we’re trying to make it much easier for fans to give their tickets to other people and for the non-used tickets to be used.

But as far as something big that we’re working on, I say it a lot, but continued momentum to the top of the ACC across the board. And I think we’ve moved it forward as a group each of the last four years and I believe we’re just hitting our stride. So I wouldn’t say that there’s any one project, but it’s more morale, momentum, culture, everyone knowing their role. But it’s fragile. We take a lot of pride in that. That’s the biggest thing in my mind, probably.