LONG BEACH — Don’t know about you, but I’m finding everything happening with college sports these days confounding, conflicting, concerning – as much con as pro.
Hardly amateurism as we knew it, but performers should earn a piece of the profit when it’s their play attracting a paying audience in the first place. Also, though: I miss the Pac-12.
What a whirlwind it’s been, one that looks like it’s barreling toward our “non-revenue sports,” those endeavors that usually only move to the front of our collective consciousness in Olympic years and that are played by athletes whose presence on college campuses nonetheless feels important, culturally.
That’s what I was thinking about when I sat down for coffee recently with Jenny Hilt-Costello, a former college athlete who is big on hard work, who has learned to tolerate the ubiquity of the cell phone, and who now is retiring, at 53, following 30 successful years coaching the Long Beach State’s women’s tennis team.
I wondered what college athletics’ transformation looked like from her front-row seat, as she was putting the finishing touches on a coaching career in which her teams went 429-202, won 15 Big West titles, made 13 NCAA tournament appearances and got ranked as high as 18th nationally in 2006.
I wanted to know what she’d seen shift along the way, as she graduated all but one player; ran famously difficult, productive practices; and fundraised her tail off – leaving, she said, $150,000 in the tennis booster account.
Change is constant, our conversation reminded me, and no season the same – though Hilt-Costello’s primary motivation was: “Player development, seeing that kid who has the talent finally get to another level.”
That didn’t change. A lot else did.
It really is a whole new world since she was attending UCLA, a tennis star the same time Ed O’Bannon – who successfully sued the NCAA in 2014 for using his name and image in TV broadcasts and video games without compensation – was helping the men’s basketball team win a national title.
A brand-new ballgame, recruiting now vs. 20 years ago. Pre-WhatsApp and FaceTime, recruits used to rely on phone cards. Hilt-Costello used to have to wait a week for a video tape of them playing to arrive, and then, if it came from abroad, longer still for the folks in the the media relations office to convert it.
But back then, her mid-major program had a shot at beating out bigger name-brand schools like Wisconsin or Nebraska for recruits: “I’d send them pictures of Naples Island and say, ‘Hey, you’re going to be hanging out here instead of freezing your butt off in in the middle of the winter,’” Hilt-Costello said. “And because of that, we got some really good players. Players that we could develop, and we were a top-50 D1.”
Lately, though, she’s had no chance. Because, for everything Long Beach State has going for it – compelling majors, small class sizes, good tennis and, dude, the beach! – the bigger schools pay more.
Hilt-Costello said that it wasn’t until just this past year that she could offer, on top of six scholarships covering tuition, a cost-of-attendance stipend ($3,200 for the year, in her players’ case) like what their peers at other schools have been receiving for the past decade, even before name, image, likeness took hold.
In that time, Hilt-Costello became attuned to the questions in her first conversations with recruits – not her questions; theirs.
“The moment a recruit started with, ‘What are you giving me?’ I’d politely finish the call and then it would be like, that was it,” Hilt-Costello said. “Because, to me, their priorities aren’t in the right place … [and] this probably isn’t going to be a good experience because there are other places where you can and maximize your money …
“But if you’re coming and you want a great experience and you want to get better with your tennis and you want a quality degree when you finish after four years…” well, then you and Long Beach State might be a match.
Cecilia Costa fit perfectly – “I just feel more confident, like a completely different person since I went there,” she said from her home in Recife, Brazil – on a team with six other freshmen and one junior, all international students.
The global flavor is strong at Long Beach State, Hilt-Costello said, where coaches take advantage of fee waivers for international students in high academic standing that reduce the cost of their tuition to in-state. But that too will change, she said, as guidelines shift.
As it was, this year’s team – none of whom were NIL-eligible, by the way, precluded by work limitations of their F-1 student visas – sent her off with a full heart.
They bonded quickly and exceeded expectations, finishing 16-6 and reaching the Big West Championship, where they lost to No. 32-ranked Santa Barbara.
Rewind to when she was being recruited, and Costa said Hilt-Costello didn’t mention money in their first, 50-minute get-to-know-you conversation. She said she didn’t bring it up, either. (The new cost-of-attendance payment at Long Beach was a surprise after Costa arrived on campus.)
Instead they talked tennis for 20 minutes and about life the rest of the time. Costa decided that day she wanted to go to college at the Beach, though it took a few more calls before Hilt-Costello offered.
“It was a bit frustrating,” Costa said. “I got some other offers, and they would do it in the first call, but the only one I wanted was taking so long. At the same time, I knew she was actually selecting the best ones, so I got really happy when she did offer.”
Those other offers all came with financial incentives too, Costa said. But her priorities aligned with Hilt-Costello’s: She wanted a good college experience and, as an aspiring pro, she wanted most of all to improve her tennis.
And you know what? “It was way better than what I expected,” said Costa, who became the eighth player in program history to become Big West Freshman of the Year. “I improved so much, personally on court and off the court, and my coaches and my teammates, they helped me so much with that.”
That, Hilt-Costello said, “is more valuable than any of the hardware sitting in our office.”
I’m going to think of Costa every time I read another account like those of UTEP dropping women’s tennis, or Cal Poly pulling the plug on swimming and diving, Grand Canyon eliminating men’s volleyball or Loyola Marymount abandoning its rowing, women’s swimming, track and field and men’s cross country teams.
How many more teams will be cut? How many more opportunities will vanish, like those that already have, purportedly in anticipation of the forthcoming $2.8 billion NCAA settlement that will force athletic departments to weigh which sports make the most sense to support as they begin sharing as much as $20.5 million a year with athletes?
“It’s going to get more and more difficult for the mid-majors,” said Hilt-Costello, noting that the state has also proposed significant funding cuts – now some $143.8 million – to the California State University system that will further stretch its athletic departments.
“There’s just only so much money you can fundraise. There’s only so many people you can tap. And then where do you find new people to come in with the kind of money that I think mid-majors are going to need to survive in this environment? That’s where it gets scary, where you look at the tea leaves and you say, ‘There’s going to be cuts.’
“And I don’t see any really new innovative ideas … for where they’re going to bridge that gap.”
It’s sports, so we’re used to winners and losers. But this particular development does seem as though it will prove contrary to the best interests of many athletes and their sports, and all that stands to be gained from every unique season and those coaches like Hilt-Costello, who’ve made it their business to develop and push, to encourage and sometimes change players’ lives.
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