The Wolfpacker: An Independent Magazine Covering NC State Sports
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26 ■ THE WOLFPACKER Why should Wolfpack Club members consider increasing their contributions? To help keep our athletic program on the right path. The donations to the scholarship bill and the facilities we are building are essential to improving our trajectory that we have been on the last four or five years. A lot of good things are going on, and I am very confident that we are going to continue to be competitive in all of our sports across the board, but it takes money to fund these sports. One of the things that is very important to us is that we want every sport here to have the maximum scholarships allowed by the NCAA. That is the most important thing we can do. If you are playing another school in the league that has more scholarships than you do, they are one- up on you right away. We need to make sure that all of our sports are fully funded at the maximum level al- lowed by the NCAA. That cost of doing that continues to rise dramatically, and we have to stay on pace to keep that up. A lot of other schools are cutting scholarships, cutting sports pro- grams or not allowing cost of attendance or the meal legislation to be for all their athletes. We want to be able to be at the top of that in all areas. With our annual fundraising, along with our endowments, we have been able to fully fund each sport at the maximum scholar- ship level. The Wolfpack Club consistently maintains over 20,000 members, and the average an- nual contribution of Wolfpack Club mem- bers is $575. What does that say about the strength of the organization? Our strength is in our numbers, but we still need to get more numbers. I keep re- peating it, but if we could just get everybody to sign up one new member, just one person to join the Wolfpack Club, it would help us across the board in all 23 sports. Being able to maintain the level that we have shows the commitment and the passion of our donors and fans. How can Wolfpack Club members get more involved? The best thing that they can do to get in- volved is get a friend to join up, or get their children and students joined up. Another thing I would really like to emphasize is we have a lot of Wolfpack Club members who buy season tickets in football and basket- ball and sell some of those tickets to other people. That's fine to do that, but we would really like to get all those people that are buying tickets from members to get them to join the Wolfpack Club. I would hope that every season ticket holder who is selling tickets to other people would expect that person buying to join and become a member of the Wolfpack Club. Those people are taking ad- vantage of the membership without having to join the program. If any members want to get involved at the local level, there are Wolfpack Club chapters in all 100 counties in the state and most out of state areas. They can contact a member of our staff, and we will get them signed up as a Wolfpack Club rep so they can help us find new members, help us with local events and help with the caravans. The other thing they can do is partici- pate. Come to the caravans, go on some of our trips, participate in some of our out- ings. There are unlimited opportunities to get involved as a volunteer. It's just about what you are interested in, what are your strengths, what do you like to do. Come and be a part of it. We are a big family, and there is a place for everyone. Can you give us an update on the Wolf- pack Club's current capital campaign, Championship Commitment? It's part of a university-wide campaign for the entire campus. We are raising money for the Close-King Indoor Practice Facility, which has already opened. We are raising money for renovations of Reynolds Coli- seum, and we are raising money for the new basketball housing facility, the Case Commons. For all those projects, we have about $16 million in commitments thus far with quite a few naming opportunities out there that we are still waiting to hear back from people. There are still a lot of other naming rights available for people at all different price levels at all three. If anybody has any interest in this oppor- tunity we would love to talk to them. In the near future, we are going to be publishing a menu of the naming rights that are still available in all our facilities. There are quite a few, some of them are not expensive and some of them are, but there is something for anybody that wants to have their name on a State facility. Tell us about the Wolfpack Club's scholar- ship endowment program. We have about $25 million currently in our endowment, and we use earnings off that each year to help offset the scholarship bill. The money is invested jointly in all the different sports. We have endowed scholar- ships in every sport right now. We'd like to fully endow every sport. We got a long ways to go and will probably need another $100 million to do that. We have probably another $20 million in deferred gifts, so in total we have over $40 million commit- ted but about $25 million in hand. To endow scholarships, it's $125,000 for a sport and $250,000 for a position in a sport, and $500,000 gives you position plus you become a life member. That means you don't have to make an annual scholar- ship contribution each year — you are not required to do that any longer. That's a new level that we instituted recently. That's going to be a part of our campaign, too, to endow more scholarships. As we close the calendar-giving year, what are the biggest priorities these last two months? The biggest priorities are to finish this year strong and meet all of our fundrais- ing goals. We have a dollar goal for every county in North Carolina and a dollar goal for every state. Our staff divides it up. We have 17 dis- tricts in North Carolina and out-of-state ar- eas, and each is assigned to a staff person. We are trying to meet as many of those county goals as we can and hopefully finish strong with some major gifts to our cam- paigns. As we move into 2016, what are the Wolf- pack Club's top priorities? In the spring we will get the cost estimate for the bill for the 2016-17 year. That'll be the biggest priority along with major gifts and naming right gifts for our three projects. There may be new projects coming down the road, too. If there are, we'll be preparing for those as well. ■ Our job is to raise the money to provide scholarships regardless of the success of the teams, but it does make the message we are taking to our supporters a lot easier when our overall program is doing better both athletically and academically. ■ Wolfpack Club Executive Director Bobby Purcell