Here's a bunch of stuff I wanted to write about my trip to Coastal Carolina but couldn't fit in the last newsletter

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

I had the good fortune of spending a lot of time at Coastal Carolina last week. I toured the campus and chatted with the university president, baseball coach, athletic director, communications personnel, athletes, and fans.

I wanted to keep Monday’s newsletter focused specifically on building winning baseball programs in the post-NIL/Portal/Super TV Contract era, but I picked up a few other interesting nuggets that I think this audience would be very interested in.

Before the news cycle sweeps me into different topics, or before my children scribble all over my reporter notebooks, let me try to share some of those nuggets with you:

Geography and demographics matter a lot, both on and off the field:

Let’s start with how Coastal Carolina University gets the funding they need to run a competitive athletic department…and…you know…school.

Securing funding from state governments is a challenge for most public universities right now, especially regional public schools. Even beyond higher education becoming increasingly politicized, many states simply don’t have a lot of budget flexibility with discretionary spending. If a state constitution locks in what needs to be spent on prisons, health care, K12 education, and more…there aren’t many places left to cut if revenues are down…so higher education often ends up being where lawmakers look.

Other schools could plug state funding gaps by hitting up alumni, and while Coastal does do this, it’s a little bit harder for them, since the school is so dang new. Coastal Carolina didn’t become independent of the University of South Carolina system until the early 1990s, and it didn’t exist at all until the early 1950s. You don’t have that many rich families who have built up ties to the university over generations if the university hasn’t been around that long.

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