How New College turned housing dollars into fund for athletics

At a time when New College of Florida faces a longstanding student housing shortage, the school is planning to shift $2.5 million from its housing fund to build a baseball field.

The move stems from a landmark National Collegiate Athletic Association settlement this summer that allows universities to pay student athletes.

After the NCAA settlement in June cleared the way for schools to begin sharing revenue directly with college athletes, universities across the country faced a new financial challenge: how to pay for it. In response, the Florida Board of Governors moved to temporarily allow universities to transfer “auxiliary” funds — money generated by student fees for operations like campus bookstores, dining and housing — into athletics. 

The rule change was designed to give schools with major athletic programs like the University of Florida, the University of South Florida and Florida State more flexibility to cover those new costs and remain nationally competitive in recruiting and retaining athletes.

Now, New College is invoking the rule change to divert money from its auxiliary housing fund to break ground on a baseball field as it seeks to build its athletics program. 

The move reflects New College’s push to foreground athletics in its student offerings, launching a push to recruit student athletes and creating new sports teams. At the same time, the school has sought to reshape itself as a conservative institution, cutting diversity and inclusion programming and removing gender studies from its curriculum.

It also comes as the school faces an ongoing housing shortage after a 2023 mold outbreak in New College’s historic I.M. Pei dormitories forced students into hotels, dorms on the nearby University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus and even briefly, portable trailers. 

The funding transfer follows an influx in support from the state legislature for New College, including $10 million in appropriations in 2024 for the school to address its housing issues. New College officials have said the transfer would not directly pull from legislative appropriations or affect the college’s bonding capacity and ability to build dorms in the future.

During a December Board of Trustees meeting, student trustee Kyla Baldonado opposed the transfer, saying any amount of funding that could be used for housing should be held in reserves. 

“It’s a bit confusing to me that we’re choosing to move money to this ball field when there’s still a housing crisis,” Baldonado said. 

NCAA settlement opens door to funding for New College’s nascent athletics program

Florida has long restricted public universities from using taxpayer dollars and auxiliary funding to pay for athletics, which are supposed to be self-supported.

But after the June NCAA settlement, the Florida Board of Governors issued an emergency rule allowing colleges and universities in Florida to allocate up to $22.5 million in auxiliary funding per institution annually to support athletic programs in the interest of remaining competitive with other major state schools. The rule will be in place until 2028.

Former Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. described the situation as an “arms race” for athletic funding, with large state schools moving to share the revenue generated by high-grossing sports like football with student athletes.

During a Board of Trustees meeting last summer, Corcoran pointed to the rule change as a boon to tiny New College, too.

“They gave authorization for auxiliary money to be used for athletics,” said Corcoran during the Aug. 27 meeting. Larger state schools will be using those funds “for NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) contracts. What we would be using it for is just building facilities.” 

New College Housing woes continue

The loss of housing funds comes as New College continues to face a dire shortage of dorms. Some students remain in hotels or living on the USF-Sarasota Manatee campus, and efforts to address the housing crisis have at times proven rocky.

In 2024, New College invested $3 million in temporary housing units — a row of modular trailers on short wooden stilts with sparse, industrial interiors. When presented with a permit request before the 2024 fall semester, a FSU building inspector whose department handled construction and facilities permitting for New College, denied it. 

“I didn’t just raise concerns, I rejected the permit altogether — that’s not a common thing to do,” said Dwayne Mahony, the building inspector who processed the request, in an interview with Suncoast Searchlight. 

In a June 2024 email to a New College facilities management representative that Suncoast Searchlight reviewed, Mahony warned of “Sarasota’s high design wind speed” and wrote that it would be challenging to obtain a permit for the modular dorms due to “the requirement for wind borne debris impact ratings on windows and doors.”

In the same email, Mahony wrote that he was “hours from retiring” from FSU. According to Miller, the New College spokesman, the college received a signed Certificate of Occupancy from FSU for the modular units in September.

The trailers lasted just weeks before hurricanes Helene and Milton slammed Sarasota. 

Citing damage from the storms, the school shuttered the modular dormitories, moved students out and filed claims for reimbursement through Florida’s Division of Risk Management. 

The school ultimately received $2.8 million, the depreciated value of the modular dorms, according to Miller, New College’s Vice President of Communications.

In a Dec. 17 Board of Trustees meeting, Corcoran pushed back on the notion that transferring dollars from the school’s housing reserve into athletics could impact its ability to provide sufficient dormitories for students on campus. 

“It has zero impact on timing or the capacity that we intend to build for housing,” Corcoran said.

Despite lack of federal approval, NCF plows ahead on baseball field

The $2.5 million transfer comes a year after developer Carlos Beruff donated $1 million to the school to create a baseball field called the Beruff Family Field of Dreams at the corner of U.S. 41 and University Parkway. 

In a press release, the school pitched the field as a project that would “provide a permanent home for the team and serve as a place where academic and athletic pursuits are celebrated side by side.” 

But the project stalled after the Federal Aviation Authority blocked the college from building on land adjacent to the field that it leases from the Sarasota Bradenton International Airport.

Although New College owns most of the property where the future baseball field would be located, edges of it sit on land that the school leases from the airport. 

New College sought to buy those 31 acres from the airport in 2024 for $11.5 million — but the FAA rebuffed the proposal then, calling further college development there an inappropriate use of land near the airport.

According to reporting by WUSF, the FAA has said New College and the Sarasota Manatee Airport Authority must hash out a new lease before the school breaks ground. Alternatively, the school and airport authority could revive its petition for FAA approval of a land swap. 

With a new presidential administration in office, it might work this time, Corcoran suggested during the Dec. 17 Board of Trustees meeting.

“The FAA raised some issues and that was in the prior federal administration and those issues were very, honestly, specious,” Corcoran said. “We currently are doing the same thing over again because with the change of administration came a change of ‘let’s see in essence what you can put together in round two.’”

This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.