Funding for religious organizations and intercollegiate club sports will come entirely from the chaplain’s office and the director of club sports starting next semester, replacing support from the Student Federation, which reflects a change that began years ago, according to administrators.
“Because the Student Federation’s budget comes from student fees, it’s important they try to use the funds so that a wide range of students are able to receive the monetary benefits,” said Diane Philipp, vice president of student affairs.
According to Rev. Adam Rick, the college’s chaplain, another reason for the change is rapid growth in both faith life and non-varsity sports activities on campus.
“The reason this shift has occurred is because with regards to student ministries on campus in the last 10 years, and with regards to the intercollegiate club sports in the last three years, there’s more need for support for these organizations,” Rick said. “They’re getting very complex and large and the college wants to make sure that their impact on campus life is sustained and supported.”
For religious organizations, the decision reflects a long-standing policy of the college, according to Philipp.
“When the college hired a chaplain, a budget was created to fund student ministry programs and the federation was to refer these groups to the chaplain’s office,” Philipp said. “When Fr. Rick was hired, he received an increase in the budget based on additional growth with student ministry programming.”
To accommodate the growing need for staff support, the college hired Rick as full-time chaplain in 2021 and hired Ryan Perkins as director of campus recreation and club sports in 2023.
“We have 10 intercollegiate club teams, right now, and of those teams we’ve had three go to postseason play this semester, one last semester, and one scheduled to go to regionals next semester,” Perkins said. “On the whole, intercollegiate sports is becoming increasingly competitive and with that comes a lot more expenses—the playoffs alone are really expensive.”
Part of the funding for intercollegiate teams already comes from fundraising, according to Perkins.
“Intercollegiate sports teams have always been able to very successfully fundraise most of their needs,” Perkins said. “There’s a big community of alumni and parents and other donors who help with the financial needs of the individual teams.”
Philipp said the college now funds postseason competition travel expenses for non-varsity sports.
“There was a lot of confusion in the past year over money, about why we can’t give funds to these places,” said Liam Giles, senior and president of Student Federation. “This is a change made years ago and we weren’t aware of it, so it came about with a miscommunication in the beginning, so a lot of it was asking questions and getting responses from the administration. The administration realized that these clubs were getting funds last year—like Catholic Society, for example—and that’s really because both Student Federation and Catholic Society did not pass that information down and it got lost. Hopefully, with this new policy, we’ll be on the same page.”
Initially, the Student Federation did not understand why they could no longer fund these organizations, according to Giles.
“The big thing we’ve learned from this is to make sure when clubs come asking for funding, we should always first direct them to their faculty adviser or especially if they have a staff contact,” Giles said.
The decision should also free up funding for the many other activities that Student Federation supports, Philipp said.
“The college’s yearly funding of student ministry programing and intercollegiate club teams gives the federation the ability to distribute additional student fees to all the other clubs, organizations and honoraries on campus and contribute to campus improvements that benefit all students if they have additional funds remaining at the end of the year,” Philipp said.
