Rising travel, food costs straining college athletic budgets

College athletic programs are reacting to soaring inflation the same way as everyone else — they’re looking for ways big and small to save money.

In the Power Five, home of college sports’ biggest budgets and most considerable resources, schools are working with boosters and other partners to try to bridge the financial gap. Working down the line to smaller institutions, where budgets and resources are smaller, creativity is a must.

For schools of all sizes, travel and food are the most challenging issues.

Nebraska, with 24 sports programs and an athletic budget of $168 million this year, hopes to work with its beef and chicken vendors to find more cost-effective ways to order food for the training table. It’s also lining up more nonprofit groups to work concession stands to reduce labor costs.

The school expects the cost of doing business to be about $3 million more than it would be if the U.S. inflation rate hadn’t risen to more than 8%.

Arizona, which has a $101.6 million budget and 21 sports, projects costs could increase by $4 million, according to Derek van der Merwe, an assistant vice president and chief operating officer for administration and athletics at the Pac-12 school.

“You have to work real closely with all your teams to take a look at what changes you can make to absorb that cost within your operating budgets, or you have to look at other opportunities to increase revenues to offset those costs,” van der Merwe said. “The post-pandemic economy and insecurity is around a lot of the budgets we have to manage and makes it challenging because we don’t know what to anticipate.”

Those Power Five schools, though, have deep-pocketed boosters they can often rely on in times of need, an insurance policy for budgetary concerns.

At Mary Baldwin University, a private school with about 1,000 undergraduate students in Staunton, Virginia, it’s a far different story. The school competes in Division III in the USA South Athletic Conference, and most of its members are in North Carolina, anywhere from 3½ to 6 hours away.

Besides the cost of travel, there are overnight stays and food expenses.

The Fighting Squirrels do not field a football team, having only started admitting men in 2017, but added baseball and men’s basketball last year. The new programs began just as the athletic budget, cut 20% during the pandemic, was restored to its previous level before those additions, athletic director Tom Byrnes said.

“So we’re doing things here on…