How Wichita State’s golf cuts reveal harsh new math in college sports
For generations, college golf did not have to win a profit-and-loss argument to justify its place in an athletic department.
That was never really the point.
Golf existed at Wichita State, as it has at schools across the country, to give athletes a chance to compete at the highest level available to them, earn a college degree and represent their university. It produced conference championships, NCAA appearances, All-Americans and, in the case of WSU men’s golf, one of the most decorated programs in the school’s athletic history.
But the math around college sports is rapidly changing.
The House v. NCAA settlement and the arrival of revenue sharing have pushed athletic departments into a new era, one where every scholarship, every plane ticket, every coaching salary and every sport must be weighed against a more demanding financial model. For a school like Wichita State, without football revenue or power-conference media money, the old argument for carrying non-revenue sports has become harder to sustain.
That is what made Tuesday’s decision so painful.
WSU did not eliminate men’s and women’s golf because anyone suddenly discovered golf was not a money-maker. It never was. The school eliminated golf because the cost of carrying non-revenue programs has become harder to absorb in a college sports economy demanding more money in more places than ever before.
In its most recent financial report, WSU assigned more than $1.1 million in expenses to its two golf programs. Together, they reported $313,236 in reported revenue, much of it from institutional support, and finished with a combined net operating deficit of nearly $800,000. Over the last decade, the two programs combined for $2.63 million in reported revenue, $9.10 million in expenses and a cumulative deficit of $6.46 million.
Those numbers do not make the decision painless. They explain why athletic director Kevin Saal felt he had to make it.
“There’s no single factor that drove this decision,” Saal said. “There are multiple considerations that were evaluated across all of our athletics programs. We made a determination based on long-term financial sustainability, available resources, facilities, planning and institutional priorities.
“I can assure you these decisions made today were made with great deliberation and what we believe is necessary for the long-term sustainability of Shocker athletics.”
A closer look at Wichita State’s golf revenue
On paper, WSU golf reported more than $2.6 million in revenue over the last decade, a figure that can make it sound like the programs were bringing in meaningful money on their own. That is not really what the reports show.
Most of golf’s reported revenue came from direct institutional support — money allocated from the university to help operate the programs. Contributions, the category that better reflects outside support, accounted for less than $440,000 over 10 years.
In plain English, golf’s revenue line was mostly money WSU was already putting into the sport, not money the sport was bringing back to the department.
The spending also was not concentrated in small, easy-to-trim places. The largest costs were the basic costs of sponsoring Division I programs: athletic aid, coaching compensation, travel, recruiting and equipment.
Scholarship aid alone cost more than all of golf’s reported revenue over the decade. Travel also became one of the clearest examples of the rising cost of sponsoring golf. WSU’s combined travel bill for the two programs climbed to $217,215 in 2025, the highest total in the 10-year window and a 60% increase from just three years earlier.
“The costs of doing business within athletics has increased significantly,” Saal said. “Travel has increased significantly with fuel charges and tariffs. So what we see is NCAA distributions that are diminishing and the cost of business is increasing.”
How much money will Wichita State save cutting golf?
This is where the story needs some nuance.
It is fair to say WSU reported more than $1.1 million in expenses tied to golf in 2025. It is also fair to say the programs combined for a reported net deficit of nearly $800,000 that year.
But it is not quite as simple as saying WSU will automatically save exactly $1.1 million by cutting golf.
WSU’s athletic department does not operate as 16 fully separate businesses. Some revenue is pooled. Some expenses are shared. Some costs are assigned to individual sports, while others live in broader department categories. Some costs disappear when a sport is cut, while others may remain and be absorbed elsewhere.
The decision also came just over three months after WSU eliminated the assistant coach positions for both golf programs, an earlier sign the department was already looking for ways to reduce the cost of sponsoring the sports.
That is why Saal pushed back on the idea of looking at one number in isolation.
“It’s a little superficial to just point at one individual number,” Saal said. “You have direct costs that are associated with that from personnel to scholarships to operations and recruiting. The direct costs are approximately $1 million. And then indirectly, there are also expenses associated with support staff and other support elements within our program. It is not a small figure we were investing in our golf programs.”
That is the cleanest way to explain the savings. WSU may not pocket every dollar listed in the sport-by-sport report as immediate cash savings, but cutting golf removes roughly $1 million in direct annual costs and a recurring deficit that had grown close to $800,000 in the most recent fiscal year.
Saal also cautioned against assuming the savings will simply be shifted to one specific sport.
“We’ve made no mistake about the fact that our men’s basketball program financially is the engine that fuels our athletics program,” Saal said. “It’s very dangerous to pull ‘Dollar A’ and put it in ‘Slot B’ because at the end of the day, we’re operating an annual athletics department budget.”
In other words, the golf cuts are less about freeing up money for one specific sport and more about making the entire department budget easier to manage.
A larger look at the finances for Wichita State athletics
The broader financial picture helps explain why the decision came now.
WSU athletics is not in financial free fall, but it is operating with a much thinner margin for error than it had just a few years ago, according to its audited financial reports.
In 2016, WSU athletics ended the year with $9.58 million in total net assets. By 2019, that cushion had climbed above $13 million. But by the end of fiscal 2024, the last year publicly reported, WSU’s total net position had fallen to $1.42 million.
That decline came from a mix of COVID disruption, rising costs and major severance obligations. In recent years, those severance costs have included former men’s basketball coaches Gregg Marshall and Isaac Brown, former baseball coach Eric Wedge and former athletic director Darron Boatright.
The result is an athletic department that stabilized in 2024, but with a much thinner margin for error. WSU reported a small operating surplus of $161,530 that year, but that is a narrow cushion on a department budget of nearly $34 million.
That is why two golf programs with more than $1.1 million in assigned annual expenses became vulnerable. A department with a $13 million cushion can more easily absorb recurring losses from Olympic sports. A department with a much smaller cushion, rising travel costs and new pressures across college athletics has a harder time doing so.
“Nothing is getting cheaper,” Saal said. “The ability to operate, to travel, to do all the things that we need to do to scholarship our student athletes to be competitive in both recruiting and retention, facilities, capital projects. All of those elements are critically important to our success.”
The hard financial conclusion for Wichita State sports
None of the numbers make the decision painless.
WSU eliminated a men’s golf program that dated to 1935 and a women’s golf program that dated to 1974. It cut opportunities for current athletes, future signees, coaches and alumni connected to two long-running programs.
Saal acknowledged that human cost.
“I’m genuinely sympathetic to the golf alumni, our coaches and our student athletes,” Saal said. “Eliminating opportunities is the last thing an AD wants to do. It’s not something that I’m proud of. These are not easy decisions.”
The move also leaves WSU with 14 varsity sports, the minimum required for Division I membership, meaning any future sport cut would have to be paired with adding another program or risk falling below NCAA requirements. Saal added that WSU does not “anticipate” any additional program changes.
“You have to manage the landscape as best you can,” Saal said. “I think there are 365 Division I AD’s in the country that would tell you it has been a challenge to align departments with the changing landscape. I want to make sure that we’re flexible enough in our approach that we can adapt as the environment requires us to adapt.”
But from a strictly financial perspective, the decision is not hard to follow.
WSU was paying more than $1 million a year to sponsor golf. The programs generated limited outside revenue. Their costs were tied mostly to unavoidable items like scholarships, coaches and travel. Their combined deficit approached $800,000 in the most recent fiscal year. And the department’s broader financial cushion had narrowed dramatically from where it stood before COVID, severance obligations and the newest wave of college sports costs reshaped the budget.
That is why the end of WSU golf is more than a story about two programs being cut.
The decision is a window into the new math facing athletic departments like Wichita State’s. History still carries weight. Opportunity still matters. But in this new financial model, neither is enough to protect a program when the numbers no longer work.
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